Sketches improve communication between consultant and client, and can reveal inconsistencies or errors in concepts.  Renditions can be elaborate, time-consuming drawings, or fast, back of the napkin sketches - whichever helps you see more clearly where we are going, whatever is more comfortable for you.

Pick a period of time, a country, a culture, a book, a movie, a photo out of an airline magazine, a song, a collection of words, a shread of cloth.  Anything can be a point of departure to create a space.  A mood board amplifies the original concept, and helps define what the client likes and what they do not like.

The floorplan is a map to the evolution of your interior.  While walls can be moved, this is rarely the most cost effective solution.  It is important to understand how spaces are used and what are patterns of movement through the spaces.  This will allow proposing multiple uses for a single space.  Measured plans also help with verifying if new furniture will fit.

If you need to add or switch out items in your interior, I can guide you or accompany you to providers, from flea markets to high-end stores, but you negotiate directly with providers; I am never involved nor do I recieve any commission or markup.  This applies also to suggested contractors and semstresses.

I have trusted contractors in constuction and other trades with whom I will put you in contact (contractor, carpenter, iron-monger, seamstress, upholsterer, etc.). They too charge you directly without my intermediation in pricing and fees.  I do guarantee the final product and oversee their work.

Our first hour meeting is to review you needs and what you are looking to do.  This is without charge.  If I believe that I have solutions that can work for you, we will discuss the approach: formal (sketches, mood boards, plans, budgets, etc.) or informal (using what you have, editing, curating, exploring to acquire new things).

I charge 75 dollars per hour: for transit, consultation, and work that I do independently for your project.  Use as much or as little time as you need; go as slow or as fast as you wish.

DC interiors do not have to hone to any one place or time.  It is a cosmopolitan city and anything goes.  The more startling, the better. Refreshing.  Bracing. A personal folly.  A Belle Epoque high class brothel in a small 19th Century bread factory worker's house.  Why not?  A Chinese opium bed and embroidered hangings in a midcentury ranch, a la Mame. Of course! A harvest table of wood with a half century in the weather, placed in a steel and chrome highrise dining room.  What else? You don't have to want it forever; you just have to want it for now.  Now that's not to say that these complex interiors will come together overnight, like a "whole hog suite" from a mail order catalogue.  These interesting interiors will start with some of the major structure, some keynote additions, and will organically evolve with the occupants through a process of discovery and growth. Just know that for this consultant, "staging" is a stripped down style used to sell a house, one that is too transient and impermanent and contrived for living.

Space is a premium in DC, even (to a degree) for the super wealthy.  But nothing is more disappointing than a small space filled with tiny unremarkable furniture and miniture objects (except perhaps an enormous space filled with only oversized ambitions).  The consultant will start with a review of how clients live, how is a space used daily and how the same space is used once a month. We will conjole the home to yield up underutilized spaces (a loft over a stairwell, cabinets under an unused kitchen bar).  We will also explore how spaces and furniture can have multiple and unconventional uses.  And then we will take your big ideas and  set forth a few big elements for the space - some which you may have to acquire and some of which you may already have  (like from your college days, an unused wooden scull, adapted for a focal point of a livingroom).

The consultant was in US Foreign Service.  He set up 10 homes in 8 countries over 30 years.  He knows too well the despair of returning to DC interiors with full diplomatic apartments of household goods, plus several generations of personal effects in storage. Particular attention will be given to collections acquired abroad, to curate, edit and use these to their best advantage: furniture, textiles, fine art, folkart, Guatemalan sling-shots, Bolivian colonial silver, Indonesian shaddow puppets, carved wooden tent poles from Mali.

It is rare that even the exiled refugee wants  a new living space with everything new and nothing from a previous life - or anyone else's previous life.  Now that is not to say that everyone wants to live in a museum of period antiques, or in a precise replica of a Japanese tea house (some do of course). A contemporary space often benefits from the weight of one significant antique piece (I am remembering the 2022s modernist Brazilian Foreign Ministry and a single mamoth colonial credenza), or an intimate space which benefits from a piece or two from the client's grandmother's house (or someone else's grandmother's house).  This consultant will steer clients to rethink and reuse much of what they have, and to scour flea markets, antique shops, second-hand stores, auctions.  It is amazing today what appears in these venues at a fraction of what new items cost, and with superior materials and craftsmanship.  Too much of today's interiors end up on sidewalks, disolving in the rain.