You probably already know what you like.

Before one of our meetings, a client went back through hundreds of images he'd saved on social media over the previous five years. He narrowed them down to 30 he still loved. His wife looked through those 30 and agreed with almost all of them. A minor miracle in itself.

But here's what neither of them had noticed: nearly every image had stone in it.

"It was weird how the stone kept coming up," he told us.

Five years of saving images, and there it was. A pretty clear preference hiding in plain sight.

You don't need to arrive knowing what you want. We start with what you've saved, what you already own, and what you keep coming back to.

Liking something and knowing where it belongs are two different things

The goal isn't to talk someone out of what they love or squeeze their preferences into a neatly labeled style. It's to figure out which elements belong together, which ones make sense for the architecture, and where to exercise a little restraint.

You can love something in a photograph and still not want to live with it in your house.

Sometimes it's not the material. It's how you use it.

They loved the look of stone but were worried it would feel too heavy and traditional.

We didn't need to eliminate the stone. We needed to change how it read.

An over-grouted application felt like the ticket to satisfy several different things at once. By carrying the mortar over portions of the stone face, you soften the contrast and reduce some of the deep shadow lines between the stones.

In the same house, a checkerboard floor was feeling a little too traditional for the butler's pantry. Again, the answer wasn't to abandon the idea. We proposed two subtle tones of limestone rather than a high-contrast light-and-dark combination, a softer take on the same pattern.

We can agree that you love stone without agreeing on which stone belongs in your house.

And believe me, there are a lot of stones.

Your house gets a say, too

Personal taste matters. So does the house. Both proposals above kept what this client loved and changed how it reads in this house.

We don't have a signature look. We have opinions, though.

If you look through our projects, you won't find one specific style repeated over and over.

That's intentional.

We're not trying to make your home look like ours. We're trying to make it feel like yours, with the benefit of our experience, perspective, and occasional very strong opinions about grout.

Your taste is yours. Our job is to help you make good decisions with it, and that means we'll tell you what we think.

Sometimes we'll agree immediately. Sometimes we'll show you a different way to get the feeling you're after. And sometimes we'll tell you that the thing you love is probably not the right thing for this particular house. Nicely, of course.

The point is that you don't need to come to us with a fully formed design direction. You don't even need to know what to call your style.

The clue might be something you already own. Or it might be 30 saved photos of stone you hadn't noticed.

Either way, we can work with that.