Questions, answered plainly

No. Many of the homes we plan are rentals. Everything in the method works without touching a wall or breaking a lease: measuring, paper plans, low-tack painter's tape that lifts clean, and written guides. The tape test was chosen partly because it leaves no trace behind.

Your room, measured and drawn to scale on paper. Then every furniture footprint taped full size on the floor in low-tack painter's tape, and the room walked for real days: morning coffee, laundry, guests, the route to the closet. The tape moves until the paths work. Only then does the furniture follow the plan, and the guide records the arrangement that survived the walking.

A single room is usually measured and taped within the first week, then lived in for a few days while the paths get tested, and the written guide follows shortly after. Plan on two to three weeks from first walkthrough to finished document. Whole-home plans run room by room, in the order you actually use the rooms.

In person, the practice serves the Denver metro. Further out, guides can still be produced at a distance: you take the measurements and photos following written instructions, the plan gets drawn and checked here, and you run the tape test yourself with the same checks. The guide arrives in the same form either way.

Louise Yenni. One person measures, draws, tapes and writes, so the person who answers your email is the person who stood in your room. The practice is deliberately small; when the calendar is full, it says so rather than passing the work on.

Three things: clear the floor paths so the room can be measured along the skirting, gather any building plans or leases that mention fixed fittings, and write down the one thing that happens in the room every single day. That daily event is what the plan gets built around.

Especially then. Small rooms are where scale, zone and flow decisions are worth the most, because every centimeter is negotiated whether you negotiate it or not. A guide does the negotiating on paper first, so the mistakes happen in pencil instead of with a sofa in a doorway.

Neither. The practice plans with the room you have: its walls, its windows, its light. If your question turns out to need building work, the guide will say so plainly and stop there. Furniture gets checked for scale and footprint against the room's numbers; the choosing stays yours, which is how it should be.

A written room guide: the checks in the order you run them, the tested scaled plan, the storage zones with one rule per shelf, the daylight map and the evening lighting layers, with the reasoning behind each decision. It is a document you keep and re-run whenever the room or the furniture changes.

Send a message from the contact page, email [email protected], or call +1 (702) 555-0117 Monday to Friday, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Mountain Time. Name the room and what goes wrong in it; the reply will tell you the first check to run and what to note down.