What we take out first
Before a single thing is chosen, a room has to be emptied of the decisions that were never really made.
Every room we are asked to work on arrives full. Not cluttered, necessarily — full of decisions that were made quickly, years ago, and never revisited.
Start with subtraction
Before anything is specified, we empty the room on paper. Every object is listed, and each one has to justify why it stays. Most cannot. The ones that can are usually the oldest things in the house.
What survives the edit
Three categories, reliably: what is used daily, what is genuinely loved, and what the architecture itself provides. Everything else is negotiable, and most of it leaves.