By Silvia Roldan
“I have good taste.” It’s the line we hear most from clients before a project begins. Spoken with confidence, sometimes with a smile, as if taste alone is a magic wand that can design a home.
Here’s the truth: it’s not.
Scrolling through Pinterest, saving images on Instagram, “We saw this on The Block”… let’s be honest: when you review everything you’ve saved, pinned, or watched, none of it has any meaning. There’s no story, no connection.
You might have dozens of mood boards, a folder full of screenshots, and enough inspiration saved to wallpaper a small country, but that alone doesn’t make you a designer. It makes you someone with good taste. And yes, taste alone isn’t enough, but it is a brilliant start if you know how to make it work.
We’ve all seen it: the friend who insists the powder room needs to be wallpapered because, well, it looked amazing on Instagram. Or the person who commits to a colour they fell in love with, only to realise it doesn’t quite live up to the dream beyond the sample pot. These aren’t mistakes, they’re simply the result of relying solely on taste.
So what do you do if you do have good taste but can’t execute it? That’s exactly where an interior designer comes in. We take your inspiration and translate it into a considered, holistic design. We bring the technical knowledge, the foresight and experience to make it work in the real world.
We translate your scrapbook into strategy. We ensure doors, drawers, appliances, and furniture all fit and function perfectly. We make rooms flow, light work, and materials age gracefully. We take your images and turn them into a home that’s both beautiful and effortless to live in. Without that, even the most stunning ideas can fall flat, feel disjointed, or worse, cost you time, money and sanity.
A designer’s role is to orchestrate all these elements, so they coexist effortlessly. We foresee problems before they happen, resolve challenges you didn’t even know existed, and create a home that is as intuitive as it is beautiful.
Working with a designer doesn’t just make a home look beautiful, it makes it live beautifully. You won’t spend hours agonising over decisions or second-guessing layouts. You won’t settle for pretty surfaces that don’t function. You’ll get a home that feels complete, considered, and utterly yours, without the stress, the compromise, or the costly mistakes that come from trying to do it all yourself.
So yes, maybe you have impeccable taste. But is taste all that’s required? The people who understand this, the ones who value their time, their budget, and their sanity, they pick up the phone.
Good taste gets you a pretty picture. A designer will turn it into a home.
–Silvia Roldan is director & principal designer of Melbourbne-based Studio Esar.
