Crushing on My Clients / October 16, 2018 by Lyn Peterson

I have the best clients. Smart, resourceful, and curious. Of course, I’m happy to guide, edit and inspire the design, but I also love when a customer steers her own course. The best relationships are symbiotic. We educate one another. My clients teach me how we live today—how we want to live, how we need to live.

Here, what a few of the most interesting and innovative Motif customers are up to of late.

Molly, who lives in a happy Dutch Colonial near Chatsworth, wants to revisit her dining room lighting and chair situation, which has an air of early married life. When we first broached the subject a year or so ago, Holly was recovering from a massive kitchen reno and addition. She had decision-making fatigue and just couldn’t resolve whether to go Sputnik contemporary or farmhouse industrial. After paging through a curated selection of options and tear sheets, we have made our choices, a mix of the two. Her new fabric-clad chairs and classic, clean, contemporary chandelier should be in place well before Thanksgiving.

Going Small / October 3, 2018 by Lyn Peterson

Drive down any street and you’ll see a trend I am not a fan of—charming smaller homes being torn down willy-nilly, replaced with places that positively sprawl. While the McMansion phase is waning, especially in Westchester where building departments reign in developers, the average American new build home is still nearly three times the size of a home built in the ‘50s. And in my opinion—as someone who has just traded a rather large manse for a much, much smaller one—bigger is not always better. When I meet new clients considering buying an oversized behemoth, I caution them. Will a grand home, where the kids go off and isolate themselves in their own spaces, make you happier? Do you realize you not only have to pay for it now, but always—in rooms you don’t “always” (or almost ever) use? And what of the stuff? I’ve found that just as work expands to fill the allotted time, stuff expands to fill space. A lotta space means a lotta stuff.