MY CLIENT, MYSELF

In her new column, Rita Konig tackles modern design dilemmas, both practical and philosophical. Up next: the pleasure, and pain, of decorating for the decorator you know.

- By RITA KONIG

I Recently finished the extension and full renovation of my London apartment and home. Working for oneself is a mixed bag. It’s really excit-ing at first, but then it suffers the cobbler-with-no-shoes effect: The time allocated to work on it kept being deleted from the diary in favor of clients more important than myself—basically anyone.

Designers’ own houses are almost always the best looking and the ones that magazines scramble to photograph, and I think that is because there are no visual compromises. Otherwise the most successful houses are, in my experience, the ones that have had the most harmonious collaboration between designer and client—and that is a delicate balance of trust, inter-action, and mutual respect and under-standing. But for a decorator, doing one’s own place can miss the back-and-forth that a client brings; at moments it can feel quite lonely. The only people you have that push and pull with are your own team, and they aren’t always comfortable contradicting you.