The Material Weight of ‘Maybe’

The serrated edge of a “Mocha Espresso” laminate chip is digging into the soft meat of my palm as I lean over the drafting table, and the sharp sting is honestly a relief compared to the mental fog currently suffocating my brain. I have 55 variations of grey wood veneer fanned out across my workspace like a deck of cards for a game that nobody actually wants to play. My vision is blurring. Each square is a marketing promise of a “modern, sophisticated aesthetic,” but looking at the whole spread, they just look like different stages of a healing bruise. I’m currently stuck between “Storm Cloud” and “Overcast Afternoon,” and if you asked me to explain the difference, I’d probably just start screaming at the ceiling.

It doesn’t help that some guy in a bloated silver SUV-almost exactly the color of this “Brushed Nickel” sample-stole my parking spot this morning. He didn’t even look back. He just slid into the space I’d been waiting for with my blinker on for 5 minutes, leaving me to circle the block for 15 minutes like a vulture over a plastic desert. So, if my critique of the design industry feels a bit sharp right now, you can blame the guy in the 2015 crossover who apparently thinks his time is worth more than mine.

The Toxic Residue of Indecision

I called Ruby D.R. earlier today. She’s a hazmat disposal coordinator I met a few years back when a project site accidentally uncovered a cache of 1975-era lead paint behind a drywall partition. Ruby doesn’t see the beauty in architecture; she sees the messy byproduct of human indecision. She sees the stuff that gets rejected, the stuff that poisons the soil, and the stuff that makes people go crazy in windowless offices. Ruby treats interior design samples like toxic waste because, in a way, they are. They are the physical residue of a culture that has mistaken an abundance of choice for actual freedom. For every 15 square feet of finished wall, there’s likely 5 pounds of discarded samples, plastic wrappers, and shipping foam that Ruby eventually has to figure out how to bury in a hole in the ground.

The industry operates on the persistent lie that more is better. We’ve been conditioned to think that if we don’t have 105 choices for a cabinet handle or 85 different textures of acoustic felt, we’re being cheated out of a custom experience. But the human brain isn’t built to process that level of granular variation. After looking at the 35th version of “Warm White,” the neural pathways responsible for discernment just quit. They go on strike. This is why we end up with the same boring, safe, beige interiors in every corporate lobby from here to Zurich. We’re so exhausted by the process of choosing that we default to whatever feels the least risky. We seek the safety of the herd because the sheer volume of options makes the risk of a “wrong” choice feel like a personal failure. We’ve traded bold vision for a spreadsheet of minor differences, and the result is a world of aesthetic mediocrity that everyone hates but nobody knows how to stop.

The Curator vs. The Catalog

I remember a project about 5 years ago where the client insisted on seeing 75 different types of marble for a single fireplace surround. By the time we reached the 45th slab, she was crying. Literally weeping in the middle of a stone yard in New Jersey. She didn’t want the marble anymore; she wanted the burden of the choice to go away. She wanted someone to tell her what was good, what would last, and what wouldn’t make her feel like an idiot in 15 months. But as designers, we’ve been taught to be “service-oriented,” which we’ve misinterpreted as “offering an infinite menu of garbage.” We show up with our heavy bags full of stone and wood and fabric, dumping the weight of our own professional insecurity onto the client’s lap. We say, “Here, you choose,” because we’re too afraid to stand behind a single, curated vision.

This is where the paradigm needs to shift. We don’t need more options; we need better ones. We need a return to the era of the curator, the expert who has already done the exhausting work of filtering out the noise before it ever reaches the final decision-maker. When you strip away the 95 options that are just “okay,” you’re left with the 5 that are actually great. That’s where real design happens. It happens in the narrow space between “too much” and “just enough.” Every time I look at my desk and see that mountain of laminate, I realize I’m not looking at a palette; I’m looking at a graveyard of wasted time. Each sample represents a tree that was cut, a chemical that was mixed, and a truck that was driven, only to end up in one of Ruby D.R.’s hazmat bins because it was 5 percent too yellow.

Finding a partner that understands this curation is like finding an oxygen tank in a room full of smoke. Instead of burying a project under a mountain of 105 identical textures,

Slat Solution

provides a path forward that respects the designer’s time and the client’s sanity. They understand that the goal isn’t to provide every possible iteration of a wood slat, but to provide the ones that actually work in a real-world environment. When the selection is refined, the decision-making process becomes an act of creation rather than an act of survival. You aren’t just picking the least-offensive grey; you’re picking the texture that completes the story of the space.

The Silver SUV Aesthetic

I think back to the guy who stole my parking spot. His car was a perfect, unremarkable mid-tone silver. It was a color chosen by a committee to appeal to the widest possible demographic while offending the fewest number of people. It was a “safe” choice. And that’s exactly what happens to our buildings when we drown in samples. We end up with the architectural equivalent of a silver SUV-functional, yes, but entirely devoid of soul or personality. We are so busy comparing the 25 different ways a surface can reflect light that we forget to ask if the surface should even be there in the first place. We’ve become obsessed with the “how” and have completely lost sight of the “why.”

Ruby D.R. told me a story last week about a high-end hotel renovation that went through 15 rounds of sample approvals for the hallway carpet. They flew in swatches from 5 different countries. They spent $5575 just on shipping costs for pieces of wool that were ultimately destined for a landfill. In the end, the owner got so frustrated that he picked the first one he saw in the original catalog from 2 years prior. Every hour spent agonizing over those samples was a total waste of human life. Ruby had to come in at the end and haul away 65 crates of rejected carpet tiles. She said the weight of it nearly broke the liftgate on her truck. That’s the physical weight of indecision. That’s the cost of having too many choices.

The Path Forward: Single, Solitary Decisions

If we want to save our industry-and our sanity-we have to start saying no to the sample madness. We have to trust in expertise again. We have to believe that a few well-chosen, high-quality materials are worth more than a thousand mediocre ones. I’m tired of being a librarian for plastic chips. I want to be a designer again. I want to look at a wall and see a finished thought, not a compromise born of exhaustion.

The Power of Three

I’m going to take these 55 shades of grey and I’m going to put them in a box. I might even call Ruby to come pick them up. Then, I’m going to clear my desk, take a deep breath, and make a single, solitary decision based on intuition rather than comparison. And then, maybe I’ll go find that silver SUV and leave a very pointed note on the windshield. It won’t solve the paradox of choice, but it might make me feel 5 percent better about the state of the world.