The apartment has entered the phase where color and finish materials are being experimented with and selected. The shape of the thing—its guts and functionality are a done deal, the territory ahead is all about taste. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to reveal a little about my process when feeling my way through this tricky terrain. First of all, I am no collaborator. Why I ended up being pulled into the Theatre,
the most collaborative of performing arts, I have no idea. Consequently, I enjoy the totalitarian aspects of my designer/contractor/builder/client persona. Occasionally, however, you get a bit stuck in the echo chamber of your own (magnificent) creativity, and so you may, gingerly, reach out to some trusted soul for a modicum of input. Let’s imagine one would begin a dialogue with, oh I don’t know…your wife. What’s that saying about the barn door and the horse? Anyway, my methodology (which is completely unconscious at the time) is to vocalize my conundrum, my hesitancy, share some show and tell elements (color chips or tile samples) that I am wrestling with and end with a feeling of resignation, as in, “These things are difficult but I will work through them.”
When the foreign ideas start hitting your cranium it hurts. At first blush they seem absurd, undoable, and poisonous to the entire scheme I have so carefully laid out. I deal with them harshly. “That’ll never work!”, “Over my dead body!”, or “You’ve got to be kidding me?!”. Sometimes this tack ends the conversation, sometimes it engenders a little blow back, like “Why did you ask me if you didn’t want to hear my opinion?” To which I have yet to find an adequate response.
A day or two later I am almost always visited with a vision. More often than not it bears a striking resemblance to what was being described to me during that earlier conversation, but there is something slightly more attractive about it. It’s taken on the character of an idea that was mine originally, but forgotten, and then re-remembered because of the kindhearted insistence of my wife. It grows and gains momentum and before you know it, I am online looking at samples and colors quite different from those I had been concentrating on a few days earlier.
I’m no collaborator. But a good idea is a good idea even if it was mine, but then I forgot it was mine, but then I remembered it was mine after you told me it was mine all along.
I have a little throw pillow embroidered with the saying, “I’m not bossy. I just have better ideas” Need I say more?
