Feedback is powerful. Done right, it can transform a room almost instantly. Done wrong, it can derail your whole project. Too often, the beginner will walk a guest through a space and return a week later and say “no one seems to like it.” The guest said the room should be more colorful, the guest’s friend thought it should be calmer and the guest’s mother insisted the room just doesn’t work. None of this is wrong, and all of this is irrelevant, but without more specifics on what kind of feedback you were actually looking for. The best way to learn is to take design advice and use it. A room doesn’t need to be approved in every way. It simply needs to be more sure of itself.
First, you need to have a good idea of what the space you want to be. It should include both a feeling and a functional goal. For example, “I want this space to feel like a warm welcoming room that is comfortable for relaxing and spending long lazy mornings on Sunday, reading or sipping coffee on,” or “I want the room to feel very crisp and professional in its layout, with a place in this space to do focused work.” Take some good photos of the room before you ask anyone for their opinion. Take photos from the doorway, from seated eye level, and from the spot where the room is used most often. Include one wide view and one close view of a surface or corner that feels unresolved.
When you do ask for an opinion, don’t ask if you think that the space works, ask a more specific question. Does the eye land on a focal point or is it drawn somewhere in the room at random? Does the size of the rug support the scale of the furniture? Do all the colors work together? Don’t ask a question that has no specific parameters; it will likely get the most specific answer from your guests.
A lot of times people will say something like “the room just looks odd.” Usually, when the issue is a furniture placement or something like that, if you can change just a few of those elements without changing the overall look of the room, there might be a solution that will fix it. However, if the issue is something more fundamental than just the way the furniture is arranged, then it might take more drastic measures to achieve your end goal.
Sometimes people will say that a specific piece of art “doesn’t work in the room.” This usually means that the specific piece of art is in the wrong location or the wrong orientation for the piece to be effective. You can easily change the location or the orientation of the piece. However, if the piece is truly out of place in the room as a whole, then you may have to look for a different piece to put in that spot.
If you don’t have anyone that will be honest with you about your design, then there are a few things that you can do yourself to try to get an outside perspective. Spend five minutes looking at your room photos and writing down three things that feel certain and three things that feel doubtful. Spend the next five minutes pretending you are reviewing someone else’s room. Be blunt but concrete. Spend the final five minutes choosing one doubtful area and changing only that part in the room itself.
When your guest gives their feedback, break it down into three categories: comments about function, comments about composition, and comments about taste. When someone tells you that they don’t like something, it might be because it isn’t what they think you intended for it to be, it might be because it simply doesn’t work with the rest of the room, or it might be because the piece is just not to their taste. When you are looking at the feedback you receive, keep those three things in mind. Don’t take someone saying that a particular color scheme doesn’t appeal to them as a suggestion to change the entire color palette for the room unless it seems like the room would look better with a different color scheme, or unless they think that the color scheme will work with something else in the room. You might feel like you’re being pressured to make changes when someone is just giving their feedback as a matter of personal preference. If everyone in the room likes something, it probably works; if everyone doesn’t like it, there might be something in the room that is just not working. Don’t let one person’s opinion dictate the look of an entire room.
You can use this same technique on yourself as well. Spend a few minutes looking at your own photos and writing down what you think could be improved. Then, spend a few minutes looking at the room in front of you. Make a few changes based on the things you wrote down. Then, take a few photos and compare them to the ones you started with. Make any necessary adjustments based on the new photos. The process doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be done. Sometimes when you look at photos, it’s easy to miss certain issues, but when you are standing right in front of the room, you’re less likely to make the same mistake.