Interior design and art curation are not the same thing.

That sounds obvious, until you’re standing in a beautifully designed room that somehow doesn’t feel finished. The furniture is right. The palette is considered. The proportions are resolved. And yet the space still feels… undecided. Usually, it’s the art.

After fifteen years working as both a gallerist and an art advisor, I’ve walked into dozens of homes where the story is the same: the design work was done with real expertise and care, and the art was left for last, then chosen quickly, often by someone who wasn’t quite equipped to make true curatorial decisions.

It’s one of the most common (and most fixable) problems I see in high end residential projects. It almost always comes from one misunderstanding: assuming interior design and art curation are interchangeable skill sets. They simply are not.

What an interior designer does

A talented interior designer understands space, proportion, function, and material. They know how rooms flow, how light behaves at different hours, and how furniture scale changes the experience of a room. They understand finishes and fabrication, construction timelines and contractor relationships. They can take a shell and turn it into a home.

This is a sophisticated discipline. The best designers are also genuinely visually intelligent, strong aesthetic point of view, high-level execution. But interior design training is not art training. And sourcing art for a room is not the same as understanding art. I find designers learn to treat art the way they treat any other design element: something that needs to work within the space, the right scale, the right palette, the right visual weight. These are real considerations. But they’re the beginning of curation, not the full picture.

What an art curator does

A curator approaches art differently, not as a component that needs to behave inside the design, but as the thing that gives the design its soul. Curation requires fluency in an artist’s practice and trajectory: where a specific work sits inside a larger body of work, why it matters, and whether it has actual staying power versus being merely decorative.

It also requires relationships - artists, galleries, private collections - that open doors to work you will not find through standard sourcing channels. And it requires a different kind of eye. Not does this work in this room? but what does this work bring to the room that nothing else could? Not does it match the palette? but does it change the temperature of the space in a way that justifies its presence? Those are different questions. They produce different results.

Where the gap shows up

I’ve seen it consistently over the years. A designer with an excellent eye for interiors may source art the way they source everything else, through trade showrooms, online platforms, accessible galleries, whatever is available within the project timeline. The result is often work that coordinates with the room rather than work that defines it.

Coordinated art looks right without doing anything. It fills a wall without anchoring the room. It matches the palette without introducing depth or tension. It can start to feel like expensive wallpaper.

Work that’s been genuinely curated does something else entirely. It changes the room. It gives it a point of view. It makes you ask, who lives here? and then answers the question immediately.

The difference isn’t budget. I’ve seen projects with enormous resources fall flat because the curatorial decisions were made without fluency. And I’ve seen modest collections feel extraordinary because each piece was chosen with real understanding of what it contributes.

For paid subscribers: how to know which expertise your project actually needs and the specific questions I recommend asking any designer who claims to also curate art.

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Steven Gambrel is a master in layering interior design in a way that feels like a considered collection of the most interesting person in the world. No two projects alike and almost impossible to replicate make for a truly unique experience, a space worth living in

Why it’s so tempting

Buying a room all at once is efficient. The decisions are made for you. Everything “goes.” The space looks finished almost immediately, which, when you’re moving in or finally addressing a room that’s been nagging at you, feels like relief. That eventually short lived relief is also the trap.

A room built from one collection can look cohesive. It can also read flat. Without tension between old and new, without pieces that arrived at different moments for different reasons, you lose the layers that make a home feel expensive: contrast, patina, and point of view. What’s left is coordination.

On the left is a catalog page in Serena and Lily on the right, a room by interior designer Tamsin Johnson. One feels like a showroom the other brimming with personality, texture and depth. One looks good on the page, the other is meant for living.

What’s actually missing

The homes that stay with me, the ones I remember after I leave, almost never come together in a single trip to a single source. They reveal themselves.

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Not to a crowd. Not to a waiting audience. Not to anything that would justify the preparation or the presence or the particular care I take in selecting what I’m goign to share. I show up to a phone screen and a gallery full of beautiful things and the quiet conviction that this matters, even when the evidence suggests otherwise.

This ritual is three we…

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Summer at the gallery isn’t a seasonal shift in the way spring, fall, and winter are. It’s a lifestyle change. Newport turns the volume up as soon as the weather breaks - blue-sky days with puffy white clouds, boats leaving their slips, the familiar faces returning like a refrain. The city slips into something quieter and more indulgent. We all agree, without saying it, to live on island time for the foreseeable furture.

I respond to that energy the only way I know how: by curating the gallery in its image. Summer becomes a kind of fever dream, fast, bright, salt-laced and the room has to be able to hold it. I’m often asked what the “summer show” will be. The question makes sense, but my mind doesn’t work in themes; it works in arcs. For me, summer is an overarching composition of color, texture, and sea water. It’s the slow build of a point of view you can walk into and feel immediately.

The first decision is always the palette.

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The longer I do this work, the more certain I am of one thing: the rooms people remember are rarely the result of a single mind.

Not because one person cannot have taste or vision, but because vision needs translation through the right hands, the right materials and the right timing all with the right conversations. Collaboration is the difference between something that merely looks finished and something that feels it has always belonged.

I have watched it happen across interior design, curation and residency-making: when the partnership is genuinely aligned, the work gains clarity. There is a sense of creative magic in the air and the finished product is always more layered and authentic than if it was singularly created.

Collaboration is refinement

At its best, collaboration is not compromise. It is refinement. It introduces friction in the places that matter, and removes it everywhere else. A strong team makes the work smarter without necessarily making it louder. When you work with people who care, the project starts to hold itself.

There is a considerable amount of trust inside good collaboration. You are saying:

• I know what this could be.

• I am willing to build it with people who can make it better than I can alone.

That is not surrendering authorship. It is protecting the outcome.

Great rooms are composed, not assembled

In interior design, the projects with real soul are never “built out” in a straight line. They are composed.

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Image Shannon Hammond

Interior design is less about decoration and more about translation. I’m translating what a space wants to become, what a client needs it to do and how those two things can meet in a way that feels aligned and inevitable rather than imposed. This work is different from art curation. It’s broader, more architectural and more collabor…

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Ischia met me the way the best places do: without performance, without hurry and with a light that insisted on recalibrating my eye. My artist residency this month wasn’t a “trip” in the casual sense - it was a working season, a lived-in interval where the days were organized around attention. The island has its own cadence; it doesn’t reward speed, but…

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Too many pieces in front of you and the signal disappears. You stop responding with instinct and start negotiating with yourself. Most people recognize this immediately. Forty whites in the paint aisle. A camera roll full of “maybes.” Ten tabs open, each one promising the answer. I am not describing freedom, it’s noise.

After fourteen years curating collections and advising clients, I’ve learned someting simple: volume doesn’t create confidence, an edit does.

I present two, sometimes three pieces. Never ten.

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Collectors live with work for years. Meaning accrues slowly: the first sighting, the person who introduced it, the season it marked, the room it held together. And then one day the walls fill up. The story blurs. The collection starts to feel busy instead of intentional.

That is not a taste problem. It is an editing problem.

Editing is not about guilt. It is how a collection becomes legible again, how you clarify your point of view, protect what matters, and make room for what comes next.

The seasonal edit: keep, store, release

When I edit a collection (or a home), I do it the same way each season: not in a frenzy, not as a purge, more like an intuitive recalibration.

I like three categories:

• Keep: Pieces that still do real work visually, emotionally, or conceptually.

• Store: Pieces you’re not ready to part with, but that don’t belong in the main narrative right now.

• Release: Pieces that no longer resonate, even if they were once perfect.

If you’re having trouble with this, I find literally touching the work helps. You feel what you’ve been avoiding and you know when it’s still perfect.

For paid subscribers: my complete six-step framework for editing collections without regret, including how to identify anchors, separate sentiment from curation, and decide what "release" actually looks like.

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After fourteen years running a gallery and advising collectors, I’ve learned that how someone finds their work matters almost as much as what they acquire. Not necessarily because one method is better than another, but because each approach reveals something about how that person collects, what they need from me and what kind of relationship we’re building.

There are four primary ways clients find work through me. Each serves a different collector, at a different stage, with different needs. Understanding which path fits you is the first step toward building a collection that actually reflects how you want to live.

1. Visiting the gallery and seeing work in person

This is the most direct path. You walk into the gallery, spend time with the work and something stops you. You stand in front of a piece longer than you planned, you step closer. Maybe you come back to it after looking at everything else. Your body is telling you something your mind hasn’t fully processed yet. This is how I know a piece is right for someone, not because they say “I like it,” but because they can’t exactly walk away from it.

When this happens, my role is simple: I provide context. I tell you about the artist, the work’s place in their practice, why it’s priced the way it is, and how I think it will function in your space. But I’m not convincing you. The work has already done that.

What this path reveals: You trust your own eye. You don’t need extensive validation or comparison. You’re comfortable making decisions based on immediate, visceral response. This is the most instinctive way to collect, and often, the most satisfying.

What I provide: Confirmation. Context. Logistics. The work speaks for itself; I’m just making sure you understand what you’re responding to and how to bring it home.

The four pathways collectors use to find work through me reveal different collecting styles and different kinds of relationships. For paid subscribers, I'm sharing the other three paths and what each one tells me about how you collect best.

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PC Jacqueline Marque

People use these words interchangeably. They should not.

Decorating is about making a space look good.

Curating is about making a space mean something.

I have worked with collectors for years, and I can feel the difference the moment I walk into a room. A decorated space can be beautiful, even impressive. But it is often pleasant in the…

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Art Confidential Vol. I Confetti Inspiration

The details can really get lost when everything is shown at once. When a body of work is presented online in scrolling format, the eye moves quickly. The decisions become hard to differentiate due to half processing a blur of information. I find one of the most important parts of collecting is the slow relatio…

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Images Shannon Hammond

Yes, there are practical questions, budget, timeline, measurement, photos, logistics, and they all matter and we will cover them. But I do not start there because logistics are not going to tell me what we are actually making.

When someone invites me into their home or collection, they are not asking for “a look”. They are asking for a lived experience like a mood, a rhythm, a sense of identity that can hold up on ordinary Tuesday mornings as well as on the nights when the house is full. My job in the beginning is to undesrtand that experience clearly enough to curate toward it with precision.

I start with the outcome, not the aesthetic.

Early on, I do not ask about what style do you like, I do not ask for a Pinterest board. Those inputs can be useful later, but htey can also keep us on the surface where everyone repeats the same vocabulary: modern, traditional, coastal, minimal and these are not goals, but labels.

Instead, I ask a more direct question: What do you want it to feel like when you walk into this space?

That question changes the entire conversation and I find clients have yet to be asked to articulate the emotional brief of their own home. They have been asked to choose adjectives that describe other' people’s homes.

There’s quite a bit of listening on my part here as some clients can answer immediately: calm, exciting, warm, but not cluttered, grounded, grown up, elevated. Others need time to find the language that is honest, but we’re usually able to work together to find that clarity in time.

Once we have it, that feeling becomes the north star. Every piece we consider, every edit we make, every trade off we accept has to support that intended experience, the very intention of the home. If it does not, it is not right, no matter how objectively beautiful or “good” something migh be.

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I built On Holiday to document what happens when my practice leaves the studio and enters the world. Travel tends to change my eye, and my vision changes what I make. Not in the vague, inspirational we we sometimes romanticize, but in the practical way that matters when you are building a world of work.

Light rewrites palettes, architecture recalibrates…

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I used to treat rejection as proof that I had miscalculated. That I had reached too far, spoken too soon, priced too high or asked too boldly. It felt like a door closing and with it a verdict. Over time, I have come to see rejection differently, I even look forward to it at times, keeping a list of the bigger NOs I’ve received. I now experience rejection as directional.

In creative work, we routinely place fragments of ourselves into the world: a proposal, a painting, a pitch, a collection, an exhibition, a full body of work. We offer something vulnerable and wait to see how it meets the room. Sometimes it lands. Sometimes it does not.

When it does not, the instinct is often to retreat. To make the next attempt smaller, safer, easier to accept. With practice, I have learned to do the opposite. Rejection, when received without dramatizing it, carries information. Sometimes the message is subtle. Sometimes it is blunt, but either way results in clarity that was not there before.

Not this audience.

Not this timing.

Not this framing.

Not this direction.

It does not mean not you.

The shift that changed everything came when I stopped letting rejection define me and started letting it redirect me. For paid subscribers, I'm sharing how that reframe has shaped not just my creative work, but my material capacity to build.

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PC Madeline Guimond

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Photograph Jacqueline Marque, Pen Craig Cottage Dining Room, Present Day

There’s a photograph from the Pen Craig Cottage project in Newport that keeps circulating. It shows the dining room with a sculptural Lindsey Adelman chandelier suspended over an Italian marble table Angelo Mangiarotti, surrounded by restored Karl Springer chairs from Lobel Modern. …

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Art auctions can feel like theater designed to make you uncomfortable. The pressure of a room watching you decide in real time whether to spend or not can be effective, but it’s also exhausting. I’ve never been interested in replicating the model.

When I started hosting auctions at the gallery, I had a different question: What if buying art felt like be…

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I was initially hesitant about venturing into sculpture as a new medium. The resistance was familiar, overwhelm with current projects, fear of diluting my practice, the vulnerability of putting new work into the world. No matter hoe much I painted or tired to quiet it, the voice only grew louder: Make the sculptures.

This uncertainty transformed when I e…

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