When It Comes to Scale, Precision is Better Than More

*Part III of the seven part series: What Spending a Decade Inside Our Design Firm Taught Our CFO 

Most homeowners like me will remodel at least one room of their home at some point in their lives. Often the remodels I did on my own fell flat. And while they weren’t terrible, I was never certain why they didn’t quite match the vision in my head. Working the past ten years with Jen at Thirteen and Crowne taught me one reason for this: I failed to properly apply the design principle of scale. Once I really learned to see the room through the lens of scale, it changed how I looked at everything. 

Similar to a master chef measuring the amount of each spice in a signature dish exactly, down to the gram, a professional designer’s recipe for the perfect space requires granular application of individual properties of scale. Each component of the room is assessed in relation to every other component.  

On Instagram I often see influencers promoting larger as better. Instead, being more precise will save the design. One slightly thicker architectural feature, a lampshade change on a light fixture, or even a slightly thinner frame on a painting impacts a space more effectively than a dozen haphazard size upgrades. But even this explanation is not really what I am trying to emphasize, because proportion is not judged item by item. It is judged through the specifics of the relationships between each feature.

For example, Jen showed me one recent set of design plans where the level of specificity was top tier. I saw that she had specified the girth of an antique dining table’s legs, she had noted the span of the window mullions, the size of the crown molding in relation to the ceiling height, and even the length and width - and direction - of the individual boards in a hardwood floor. The attention to these details, the precision all baked together, resulted in a majestic design that delighted the customer.

After learning all of this, I gradually began to realize why an office remodel I attempted on my own hadn’t worked. The base of the floor lamp I had chosen was undersized; the woolen rug I was so proud of was too small; my beloved bookshelves crowded the window moldings; my desk - the focal point of my remodel, which was the biggest desk I had ever owned - turned out to be too small for the room. A remodeled room can contain beautiful furniture, expensive finish work, and impressive art, yet still feel wrong if the scale of any one of those things was not considered in context together with the others. It’s the precise use of scale that makes the difference.