A few months ago, I came across a kitchen reveal on LinkedIn. It looked professionally installed, beautifully finished, functional, but completely wrong. Not in the technical design or aesthetics, but in the way it felt.

That's the part of design that many people ignore the most, and it's exactly what I want to dig into today.
Here's what we'll cover:

Let’s dive in!

Some months ago, an interior designer posted a kitchen reveal on LinkedIn. The video opened with a confident walkthrough, displaying gloss navy-blue cabinetry and white granite counters, with everything spotless and precisely fitted.

The cabinetry work and overall aesthetic were genuinely impressive. You could see that the designer took time to create a high-quality, modern kitchen.

But the client's brief, as the designer claimed in the video, had been clear: functional and cosy.

And as the camera panned across the fluorescent tube lighting, the stark white walls, and the high-gloss reflective surfaces, one thing became obvious. The design had delivered on function and aesthetics, but failed in the experiential aspect; the cosy.

It was stark and clinical. The kind of kitchen you'd expect in an upscale rental. Sharp and efficient. Cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.

The designer had delivered a technically excellent result. The kitchen worked, and it looked polished. But the experience, that is, the warm, lived-in feeling the client had asked for, was missing.

That gap between what a space looks like and what it feels like is where many design projects underdeliver.

We tend to judge interior design by how it photographs. Clean lines, good symmetry, a palette that makes sense; if it looks right in a picture, we assume it's right in person.

But a photograph can't tell you how a room feels at 7 am when you're making breakfast. It can't capture how the overhead lighting flattens the space, or the way gloss surfaces bounce the white light, until everything feels a little too alert for a Sunday morning.

"Looking good" is the lowest possible standard for a space you actually live in. Let’s go back to the example above. The kitchen was attractive and desirable, based on the comments under the video. However, a room can be beautiful and still be exhausting.

It can be spotless and still feel like it belongs to someone else because it doesn’t align with the spatial experience you want. Great design is about aligning function and aesthetics with spatial experience.

When a client says they want a cosy kitchen, a warm living room, or a relaxing bedroom, as examples, they're not describing a material or a finish. They're describing an experience; the sense of ease they want to feel when they walk into that room.

Turning that feeling into design choices is one of the hardest parts of the job. It means thinking past the cabinetry style into light temperature, texture contrast, how surfaces feel underfoot, and how a room's proportions and colour affect your mood when you enter.

In that LinkedIn kitchen, “cosy” was a lifestyle cue, meaning the client planned to spend a lot of time there. What they got instead was a space optimised for appearances and function, and not for the life they actually wanted to experience in it.

Spaces can frustrate us when they don’t reflect our lifestyles. A room may look good and draw compliments, yet still leave us with a lingering dissatisfaction.

That feeling is what disconnected design produces. When a space doesn't match how you live — your rhythms, habits, the sensory experience you need to feel at ease — it creates friction.

It’s a low-grade, easy-to-dismiss feeling that’s always present underneath.

This is what bad design feels like. Not ugly or broken, just unsatisfactory, incomplete, and slightly outside you, rather than built around you.

If your space looks good but doesn’t feel like yours, I can help you change that.

The Design Transformation Experience is a one-on-one consultation built for homeowners and renters who want high-quality interiors without the guesswork.

For $850, you'll walk away with a clear, strategic design direction and the long-term confidence to make smart decisions about your space.

▶ The Importance of Interpreting a Client Brief: Marylou Sobel Interior Design - A designer reflecting on how she measures success by the emotional response that the design evokes

▶ Design for the Senses: Hygge & Cwtch Design Studio - Covers exactly why aligning the visual of a room to your emotional needs is key

▶ Working With a Designer: Expectations: Capella Kincheloe - Makes the case that the main reason interior design relationships sour is because of unfulfilled expectations

After a decade at Balenciaga, Georgian designer Demna made one of fashion's most unexpected lateral moves when he was announced as Gucci's new creative director in March 2025.

Gucci's leadership had reached out to Demna with a proposal to make the brand "cool and relevant" again.

This is a creative direction he implemented at Balenciaga, where he blended alternative ideas of beauty with streetwear, irony, celebrity, and political commentary to transform the storied Parisian house into a pop cultural juggernaut.

Demna responded by diving deep into the Italian house's archives, which date back to 1921, immediately drawn to what he found there. The appointment felt both surprising and inevitable — two brands under the same Kering umbrella, but worlds apart in identity.

His debut runway show, Primavera, landed on February 27th in Milan's Palazzo delle Scintille, a hall built in 1923, and it was everything fashion had been holding its breath for.

The venue was filled with replicas of statues from the Uffizi Museum in Florence, where Guccio Gucci founded the label over a century ago, a deliberate nod to heritage without being weighed down by it.

But the line that will stay with the design world long after the show came from Demna himself, written ahead of the show: "I don't want it to be intellectual, but I want Gucci to be a feeling. Gucci must become an adjective."

For a designer who has spent his career making people feel something, whether it’s discomfort, desire, recognition, or provocation, that statement was less a creative brief and more a quiet declaration of intent.