About the practice
A planning studio for real, compact homes
Mallory Yenni is a home planning practice in Denver, Colorado. We write room guides and run layout tests for real homes, especially small ones: measure, tape the floor, walk the paths, plan the light and give every object a place.
How the studio thinks
Plans, not mood boards
A mood board tells you how a room could look. A plan tells you how a room works on a Wednesday evening with the laundry out and two people crossing paths in a galley kitchen. This studio only makes the second thing.
The practice started with a simple observation: most rooms that feel wrong are not badly decorated. They are badly measured. The sofa blocks the closet. The lamp sits where the reading does not. The shelves hold everything except the things used daily. Those problems are not solved by taste; they are solved by numbers, a paper plan and a roll of painter's tape.
So every engagement here begins the same way. The room gets measured as built. The plan gets drawn to scale. The footprints get taped on the floor and walked for real days. Only then does anything get written down as a recommendation, and only then does furniture move.
Louise Yenni
Louise runs the practice. She measures, draws, tapes and writes every guide, and she is the person who answers when you call or write. One set of hands from the first question to the finished plan keeps the advice honest: nothing gets recommended that has not been walked around at least once.
What you practise with us
Five habits, kept in every guide
These are written the way they get handed over: as things you can run yourself, in order, in the room you are standing in.
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You measure the room before you talk about it
Real numbers, taken along the floor and again at shoulder height, because old Denver buildings are rarely square. Everything downstream trusts only these numbers.
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You test the arrangement at full size
Painter's tape puts every footprint on the floor before anything heavy moves. A path you can walk is evidence; a plan you can admire is not.
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You keep the paths clear first
The routes you take a dozen times a day get drawn before the furniture does. Storage and style fill whatever the paths leave behind.
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You plan around the light you have
Daylight gets logged hour by hour, and evening lighting gets layered around the actual windows. Then the desk, the chair and the lamps fall into place almost by themselves.
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You give every object a place
Each category of belonging gets a decided zone and a rule. Order that survives the week is designed in advance, not attempted on a Saturday.
Finishing touches, last
The plants come after the plan
Objects, textures and greenery finish a room that already works. A plant on a planned shelf marks a corner; a plant on an unplanned one joins the pile. That order is the whole philosophy of this studio, and it is why the guides end with the small things rather than starting with them.
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Structure first
Dimensions, zones and paths are settled before a single decorative object is discussed.
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Then the soft layers
Light, texture and objects get placed into a frame that already holds, and get noted in the guide's last pages.
Where we work
Denver rooms, planned in person
The studio plans homes across the Denver metro: apartments in low brick blocks, bungalows with one closet, duplexes where the dining room is also the office. Local light, local buildings, local quirks like rooms that are three centimeters out of square along one wall.
The office sits at 1175 N Albion Street, and most layout tests happen in your room, on your floor, with your furniture. If you are outside the metro, guides can still be produced at a distance from your own measurements and photos; the tape test then runs with you holding the tape, following the same written checks.
The first appointment
The tape measure is the first appointment
Send the room that is not working and what happens in it. Louise replies with the first check to run and what to note down before you call back.