One answer, not five.

I showed a client one tile last week. Not three, not five. One.

They loved it, and that was it. No hesitation, no asking to see another option.

That's not luck. That's the whole point.

I used to think my job was to hand people options and let them choose. Most designers still work this way, and I understand why. It feels generous. It feels collaborative. It feels safer, for the designer and the client both, because if it goes wrong later, well, you picked it.

Here's the problem with that. A mood board full of options isn't a gift. It's homework. You've hired someone specifically so you don't have to sit with forty tile samples under bad fluorescent lighting deciding whether warm greige is actually just beige with a marketing degree. And yet the industry has convinced everyone that more choice equals more value.

It doesn't. It equals more decision fatigue, dressed up as service.

I stopped presenting options a while ago now, after I watched a genuinely lovely client come slowly undone over whether to choose between two whites that were, to any normal human eye, exactly the same white. Nobody needed that. Least of all them.

What they needed was someone to have already had that argument with themselves, on their behalf, using actual expertise instead of a coin toss. So now that's what I do. I sit with a room, and a client, and a brief, until I know exactly what the space wants. Then I bring one answer. Not a shortlist. Not a "just to give you a sense of range." One considered, resolved, ready-to-build answer.

People sometimes ask if that's a bit much, a bit my way or the highway. Fair question. But I'd argue the opposite is true. Giving someone five almost-identical options isn't flexibility, it's a way of calmly outsourcing the hard part of the job back to the person who hired you to do it.

A good architect doesn't hand you three versions of a load-bearing wall. They tell you where it goes, and why, and then they get on with building a house that won't fall down. Interior design deserves the same conviction. The stakes are different, nobody's structurally at risk if you pick the wrong tapware, but the exhaustion is real, and so is the relief when someone else has already done the deciding well.

So if you ever find yourself sitting across from me with one tile sample instead of five, that's not me being precious. That's me doing the job properly, and sparing you the fluorescent lighting.