With A Client Like This, Who Needs Enemies?
Why is it that people go out of their way to seek out your services – and pay for them – only to treat you with such distain when you offer the advice they are paying for?
Well, after this little episode with Annika, I still don’t know the answer. She called me when she saw one of my ads offering a discount consultation, and she sent her twins off to a babysitter so she could give me her undivided attention.
The bad karma emerged before I even got there – I called to say I might be 10 minutes late because of heavy traffic. But there was such a long pregnant pause that I thought I had caught her with her mouth full – either that or she had forgotten we had an appointment. Nope – my (10 minute?!) tardiness had simply sent her into a snit.
It keeps going downhill once she opens the front door – and a waft of musty mildew odor floats out the door. I’ve been in too many homes in our hot, humid summers not to recognize the smell of moisture, so I point it out to her and ask her if she’s got a dehumidifier.
Clearly, that was the wrong question. Annika revealed all the ice of her native Scandinavia as her eyes widened and she asked me right back – “Why would you ask such a question?”
(Uh, I dunno, lady. Maybe because YOUR HOUSE STINKS?!)
We never seemed to get past that opening exchange, yet I was stuck there for two hours. Read more…
The Separation of Church and State
It’s not unusual for me to meet with clients when one spouse or significant other has not arrived by the time I get there. This was one of those times – a Saturday morning when I pull up to this big, welcoming Arts and Crafts house in one of my favorite neighborhoods.
My appointment is for an initial consultation with a couple who wants my guidance in blending the décor of their new, contemporary addition with older, original house. Andrea explains that her partner was working that morning and is on his way home.
While we wait, we chat in this gorgeous great room (which does need my help…), and as I look around, I’m struck by all the Judaica that decorates walls and shelving there, and through most of the house – stuff I haven’t seen since I was a little girl running through my grandparents’ house, which was full of artifacts from the “old country.”
By the time Gary finally walks through the door in a suit and tie – on a Saturday – I privately jump to the conclusion that I’m dealing with a man of God, who has just come home from leading services at the temple. Read more…
The Check is in the Mail
Design is about so much more than hanging window treatments and choosing colors. That’s why so many interior designers are in business – it’s the way we make those choices, how we interact with our clients, our sensibilities and approach to how a room should come together that sets us each apart. It’s our personal vision that defines and makes each of us unique in our profession.
We are all different, clients are all different, and clients generally choose a designer who comes closest to “getting” them.
Well, I certainly “got” Libby Baker, and for years, I didn’t even know it. She called one day and spent 20 minutes telling me how long she had followed my work, read my columns, watched my interview segments on TV, ogled at the rooms I had decorated for show houses.
She was finally ready to hire me to decorate her own house, and she couldn’t be more excited. And nor could I! She was living proof that my investment in those expensive show house rooms, the free newspaper columns I wrote, the free advice I doled out on TV, was all worth it.
Fat Cat: The End
Are you getting tired of the Dohertys? Believe me, after the marathon decorating spree to finish their house by Christmas, I was wrung out myself. But I still needed to get paid. There was a design fee at stake.
Soon after New Year’s, I wanted to do something special for them, if for no other reason than to put them in a good mood to pay my final project fee. And what better way to make someone feel happy about the $600,000 they’ve just spent redecorating their entire home, than to have it published?
Fat Cat, Part IV: The Christmas Party
Time marches on as Susie and I design our way through her huge house, but Chauncey is losing patience. After all the monumental art is installed (see previous post), we move our way through furniture and window treatments.
And we arrive at one of the bigger challenges: the floors. Where the hell do you find rugs in the size that she needs – most of all, in blue and taupe? Well, you don’t try and find them – you have them made.
Cha ching!
But I’ve got to earn that cash. It’s a towering task to come up with four or five designs – all in the same colors, but all totally different – and in humongous sizes. I found it to be a real design challenge – and Chauncey found it to be a real check-writing challenge. But despite all his frowns and humph!’s, there was always something else to do, and we did it.
Fat Cat, Part III
What Does Art Mean to You?
That question was the subject of an essay assigned in my entry-level art survey class a million years ago. I’ve never forgotten it, because art generally means so little to me that I was inspired to write my paper instead on people named Art: Art Garfunkel, Art Linkletter … you get the idea.
I’ve never been one to haunt art galleries, dangling a wine glass while conversing in hushed tones about color and composition. I know what I like, it’s always a gut reaction, and that’s about it.
But as you might have been able to tell from the first two installments of my Fat Cat series, Susie Doherty changed my perspective on pretty much everything.
We left off with her assigning me the next room in her house – the gigantic, two-story living room – the most expensive project to date after the son’s room and the guest room, and one where Susie is bent on rubbing her obnoxious husband’s nose in the amount of money she’ll spend on it.
My First Fat-Cat Client, Part II
“Open the checkbook!”
Now that I got the gig with the son’s room, it’s time to execute – and plot my moves to score more rooms in that great big under-decorated house.
I drive out to meet with Susie and turn that wonderful son’s design plan into a reality, but little did I know the design constraints I would face in this endeavor.
First, I always had to come to her – way out in the countryside. For some reason, she refused to leave her house to shop in the design showrooms with me. That meant I had to go alone to all those showrooms, load up on bags and bags of samples, and cart them all out to the house.
It’s like she had a phobia of leaving her house. And it was probably best that she not leave, anyway: She always appeared as if she had rolled out of bed and put on the first thing she could find – before she put on her glasses.
What’s more, we always ended up sitting out on the front stoop to talk because she’s a smoker, and she wasn’t “allowed” to smoke inside. I felt like one of those office workers you always see, standing outside, arms folded tight in all kinds of weather – huddled over their cigarettes. Besides, that cold, hard stoop was doing a number on my hemorrhoids.
But here was the most challenging parameter of all: She would only consider two colorways for all of the furnishings, be it carpet, paint or fabric: blue and taupe. Beyond the son’s room, that rule would stay true for the entire house. Blue and taupe. Everywhere. Woe be to me if I tried (and I did, people! I did!) to infuse any other color into the mix. She would weed it right out and toss it aside without a word.
Susie explained to me that blue and taupe colors evoked a feeling for her of being somewhere else – where, she never explained, but I found it very interesting that we spent so much time and money trying to turn her home into a place that was anywhere but home.
My First Fat-Cat Client, Part I
As a designer, you never really feel like you’ve “arrived” until you get that first client who’s ready to spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars with you – in every room of the house. All the other design work you do – one room here, a curtain there – is just preparation until that big, magazine-worthy project comes across your desk.
I was still in that state of arrested development about 10 years ago, when I first met Susie Doherty. I had no idea when she first called that she would be the one – not only my first budget-busting client, but a transformational one in so many ways.
She had read a design column in the local free paper where I was quoted, and she called to tell me she needed help with her son’s room. She gave me an address way out of town, which I didn’t recognize. So I got in the car to go meet her, with no idea what kind of neighborhood I was driving to.
Another one-room wonder, I think to myself.
But then I pull into the drive – a long, winding, tree-lined drive that leads to this ginormous contemporary house, full of windows, looking out toward a lush wooded landscape out back.
Like any hungry designer would, I had a little drool coming out of my mouth as I parked the car. My heart raced even more when Susie opened the door – to a house that was utterly plain, colorless, and underdone. It looked as if these owners had just moved in.
Oh, the things I could do with this house!
I’m Back!
So sorry I’ve been away for a while — I’ve been deeply involved in a design project I’ll tell you about someday — but now I’m back with more stories, which will resume in (roughly) weekly installments. I’ve been enjoying all your comments, so please read on!
Signed,
The Management
A Surprise in the Basement
Typically when I get e-mail inquiries from potential clients, they contain lengthy descriptions of their houses and design needs, going on and on about how they don’t like on old sofa, or their living room is empty, or they need help choosing paint.
This one was surprising in its brevity. “I need help with my house,” was all it said. I responded, and she called back right away to set up an appointment for the next week. Straightforward, efficient – this woman was all business.
Helen’s name sounded so familiar to me, and I wasn’t sure why. I’m constantly reading articles in newspapers, magazines, online, so it all becomes a blur – but I knew I had seen that name somewhere before. So I Googled her.
It came up immediately – she was a senior staffer at a prominent federal government agency. Now I understood – Helen must work 15 hours a day, so she doesn’t have a lot of time to think about her house, much less chat about it all day.
My hunch was correct: I arrived to a house in total disarray – shoes all over the front entry, old, worn-out furniture placed wherever the movers put it down when she had moved in a little over a year before, art just leaning against the walls. We sat in her kitchen, where the table was strewn with catalogs and newspapers.
