Your taste exists; you just haven't met it yet.

There's a moment that happens in almost every first consultation I do.

We're sitting together and I ask the client to tell me about the home they want. There's a pause, then a slightly apologetic smile. Then the sentence I've heard more times than I can count:

"I don't really know what I like".

They say it like a confession, like they've failed a test before the class even started.

I used to think this was a problem. Early in my career I'd try to fill the silence quickly, pull out reference images, offer them a menu of styles to choose from. Scandinavian? Mediterranean? Mid-century? Pick one and we'll start there.

It took me years to understand that I had it completely backwards.

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The client who doesn't know is the best client I have

Here's what I've learned: the people who arrive with a clear brief: the Pinterest board, the saved Instagram folder, the magazine pages they've been collecting for years; often end up with a home that looks exactly like everyone else's home. They've been so busy collecting other people's taste that they never had the chance to find their own.

The client who says "I don't know what I like" hasn't failed at anything, they've just been honest about something most people never admit: that taste isn't something you're born knowing. It's something you discover. Usually by accident, usually slowly and almost always with a little help.

My job, in those cases, isn't to design a home for them. It's to help them find out who they are and then design around that.

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The questions I stopped asking

For a long time the first question I asked every client was some version of "what style do you like?" It seemed logical.

The problem is that most people answer that question with words they've borrowed. Modern but warm. Classic but not stuffy. Minimal but with personality. These are real feelings but they're expressed in the language of design trends not in the language of who that person actually is. And designing from borrowed language produces borrowed rooms.

So I stopped asking about style entirely.

Instead I ask things like:

What's the last image that made you stop scrolling? Not a room, necessarily - anything. A photograph, a painting, a meal, a landscape. The images that catch our attention involuntarily tell us things about ourselves that we'd never think to say out loud.

Tell me about a place where you've felt completely at ease. Not a beautiful place, a comfortable one. The difference is everything. Some people describe a grandmother's house full of objects and warmth and slight chaos. Others describe a hotel room in Tokyo, utterly empty, utterly quiet. Both are valid. Both tell me something essential.

What do you dislike? This one I ask carefully, but I always ask it. What people reject viscerally: the cold, the cluttered, the too-formal, the too-casual; is often more revealing than what they think they love.

None of these are design questions, they're questions about a life. And the answers are always, without exception, enough to start.

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What I'm actually doing when I show you images

Once I have a sense of who I'm working with (not their style preferences), their actual sensibility- I start showing images. Not to have them choose but to watch them react.

There's a difference between "I like this" and the small intake of breath that happens when something lands. I'm looking for the second one: the slight lean forward. The pause before they say anything. The "I don't even know why but..." that precedes an honest reaction.

Those involuntary responses are where taste actually lives. Not in the considered opinion but in the gut response before the opinion has time to form.

I'll show someone fifty images in a session. By the end I'm not looking at a list of what they liked. I'm looking at a pattern, something that keeps repeating: a texture, a warmth, a quality of light, a relationship between objects. That pattern is their aesthetic. They've had it the whole time, they just couldn't see it until we mapped it.

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The moment the art finds them

This is where my work as an art consultant becomes, for me, the most interesting part of the whole process.

Furniture is chosen, to some extent, logically. You need something to sit on. You need a table. The function creates a frame and you work within it. But art is chosen on pure feeling and that makes it the truest mirror of who a person is.

I never tell a client what art they should have. I find pieces that I believe are right for them based on everything I've learned about how they see the world and I put them in front of them. Not dozens of options, usually just one or two. The right one or close to it.

When it's right, they know immediately. Not always with enthusiasm, sometimes with something quieter. A stillness. The sense of recognition you feel when you meet someone who thinks the way you think.

I had a client recently who had told me, repeatedly, that she wasn't really an "art person". She'd never owned a piece of original art, she didn't trust her own eye. In her mind, art was for other people, people who knew things she didn't.

I found a painting for her. A small work, figurative, painted in the kind of muted palette that I'd seen show up in the images that made her pause: in photographs, in textiles, in the colors she wore. I brought it to the installation day and placed it in the room without saying anything about it.

She walked in, looked around, and then stopped in front of it for a long time.

"This is so me" she said; "how did you know?"

I didn't tell her that she'd told me herself, over months of conversation and image reactions and small involuntary moments of recognition. That felt like the wrong thing to say in that moment.

But it's true. The taste was always hers, I just helped her meet it.

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What this means if you're starting from scratch

If you're about to furnish an empty home or thinking about it and you feel that familiar anxiety about not knowing your own style, I want to offer you a reframe.

You don't need to know your style before you start. You need to pay attention to what moves you. Not what you think should move you, not what moves people whose homes you admire but what actually, physically, stops you in your tracks.

Start collecting those moments: a color in a restaurant, a lamp in a hotel lobby or a fabric in a shop you walked past. Don't try to analyze them or fit them into a category, just collect them and trust that someone, eventually, will help you see the pattern.

That's what I do, that's what the whole process is built on.

Your taste exists, it's been there the whole time, showing up in small ways you probably haven't been taught to notice.

You just haven't met it yet.