The Most Important Interior Design Advice I Give Every Client

Every client comes to the first meeting ready to talk about materials, colors, maybe a Pinterest board they've been building for months. I always redirect the conversation before we get there, to one question: what do you want someone to feel in the first ten seconds of walking into this space?

Not what you want it to look like. What you want them to feel.

Why I Start Here, Every Time

I didn't come into this industry through design school — my background is finance, marketing, product management. I spent years building systems before I ever specified a material, and that background changed how I think about a physical space. A system doesn't start with what it looks like. It starts with what it needs to do, and for whom.

An interior is the same. It's not decoration sitting on top of a business — it's a system that either supports how your brand operates or quietly works against it. And the fastest way to know whether a design decision is right isn't "does this look good" — it's "does this create the feeling my customer needs to have, at the moment they need to have it."

What Happens When You Skip This Step

I've seen it happen the other way plenty of times, usually with businesses that didn't design this way on purpose — they just started with what looked good, one decision at a time. A gorgeous lighting fixture here, a trending material there, a layout copied from somewhere else that photographed well. Each individual choice can be defensible. The result is often a space that doesn't add up to a single, clear feeling. It looks fine in photos and feels like nothing in particular when you're actually standing in it.

That's the real cost of skipping this question. Not that the space looks bad — often it doesn't. It's that the space doesn't do any work for the business. It's not building trust, it's not signaling positioning, it's not making someone want to stay ten more minutes or come back next week. It's just there.

How the Feeling Becomes a Brief

Once a client can actually answer the feeling question — calm and unhurried, or energetic and social, or premium and considered, or warm and familiar — everything else in the process gets easier, because now there's a filter for every decision that follows.

A material either supports that feeling or it doesn't. A layout either reinforces it or works against it. Color, lighting, acoustics, even where the host stand is positioned — all of it gets evaluated against the same standard, instead of each element being judged on its own, in isolation, disconnected from what the space is actually supposed to do.

This is also, honestly, where the color combinations I love — the ones I pull from a painting, a fashion look, a brand I admire — actually earn their place in a project. They're not there because I personally like them. They're there because they create the specific feeling the brief calls for. If they don't, they don't belong, no matter how much I love them on their own.

Why This Advice Applies to Every Category

I've given this same advice on F&B projects, retail stores, clinics, offices, wellness spaces — the category changes, but the question doesn't. A clinic needs someone to feel safe and cared for within seconds of walking in. A bar needs someone to feel like they've stepped into somewhere worth staying. An office needs people to feel like the work that happens there matters. The feeling is different every time. The discipline of starting there, before a single material gets chosen, isn't.

The Bottom Line

If there's one thing I'd want every business owner to walk away with before starting a design project, it's this: don't start with what you want the space to look like. Start with what you want someone to feel the moment they're standing in it. Everything else — the materials, the layout, the color, the lighting — is just the answer to that question, worked out in physical form.

Avina Kantaatmadja is the founder of Kita Design Co. (PT Kita Desain Bersama), a Jakarta-based commercial interior design and build studio working across F&B, retail, clinics, wellness, offices, and sports & fitness spaces.