INTRODUCING MR. CALL: FOUNDERS LETTER!
I am at my desk in San Francisco. The one in the kitchen, in front of the window.
A handsome man — dressed in that Japanese city-boy way I am always trying to pull off and never quite can — is trying to lift a dresser out of the back seat of his car and carry it up to his house. His daughter, maybe two years old, in a pink dress with bows in her hair, is standing on the sidewalk. He tells her not to move as he angles the dresser out of the door. She does not move. She watches him the way small children watch their parents do hard, ordinary things.
I want to go help. By the time I get there, the scene will have ended.
It makes me think differently about furniture. About the small, daily, practical work of building a home — and about how often the person doing that work is doing it alone, on a sidewalk, with no one to hold the other end of the dresser.
Here I am at my desk, trying to come up with some complicated, mechanical way to say something simple. I want to help. None of the versions work. Just like the man on the street, there is a distance — a plate of glass — between me and the thing I am trying to do.
I hope this website is the hand extended through the glass.
What I have to offer is personal experience and hard-won knowledge. A glimpse into the life I have led over the past twenty-five years working in interior design. I have spent those years helping people with extraordinary resources answer the same question almost everyone faces at one point or another: what in God's name am I going to do with this room.
When you have the money, the answer is easier. You hire the best people. They bring their experience, their eye, their sources, and the problems go away. For a price. Everyone else is left to figure it out piece by piece — at a showroom, on a Saturday, with a salesperson who is kind but cannot tell you the foam density.
I have made a lot of mistakes with furniture. I have also learned what matters. I know what is worth the money and what is not. I have learned to trust my eye, and I have learned that a room does not have to be expensive to feel like a home. Some of the best rooms I have ever stood in cost very little. Some of the worst cost a great deal.
I want to share what I have learned. Not because I have all the answers. Because I have made enough mistakes to see the patterns, and because I know what it feels like to live with almost. I know what it feels like to get it right too. The difference between the two is not budget. It is information, and a little bit of patience, and the willingness to ask the question one more time before you sign the order.
Make your home good. Spend on what matters. Do not waste years on the wrong sofa. Trust yourself more than the showroom asks you to. Get the advice first, not the bill later.
This is that advice.
Let's begin.
