The Design Process
Every object begins long before it takes shape. At The Lakehouse, the design process is less about invention than about listening — to textures, to atmospheres, to the moods that arrive unannounced and ask to be translated. What results may look like a rug, a cushion, or a tea towel, but it begins as something more abstract: a fragment of memory, a rhythm in colour, the way light falls across stone at a particular hour.
We resist speed. In a world of fast interiors, where products are sketched, manufactured, and marketed in a single season, we slow down. We allow space for repetition, redrafting, refusal. A line on a page may become a pattern, or it may not. A palette may appear harmonious until placed against light, when it suddenly collapses. To design at The Lakehouse is to accept these detours. Process is not efficiency; it is patience.
Often, the beginning is language. A working title, Angle Study, Between Days, Said Without Saying , sets the tone long before material is chosen. The name acts as compass, guiding the design towards a mood rather than a motif. From there, sketches emerge: lines tested, colours placed side by side, tensions explored. We ask not only what looks correct, but what feels resonant.
Textiles are then tested in physical form. A rug is woven in small sample before full scale. A pattern on paper becomes a folded duvet cover, checked for how it drapes, how it holds shadow, how it resists flatness. A tea towel is printed and hung, because fabric behaves differently in the hand than in the sketch. We watch for what remains alive when scaled, and what dies.
Material choice is its own philosophy. Linen is chosen not only for honesty, but for how it changes with use, softening and wrinkling into intimacy. Wool is valued for memory, for the way it retains warmth and absorbs footsteps. Colour is tested in different lights, because no shade is constant. Even details like stitching or fringe are reconsidered — not embellishment, but punctuation, the way a sentence ends or trails off.
At every stage, the question remains: does the object hold emotion? Not does it match, not is it efficient, but does it carry something beyond itself? A rug that merely fills a floor is incomplete. A cushion that only decorates misses the point. We want objects that gather, that wait, that frame moments.
By the time an object reaches collection, it has already lived through many trials. Some designs are abandoned, some are delayed, some wait for their season. This too is part of process: allowing absence, letting objects arrive when they are ready.
The Lakehouse is not about speed, but about resonance. The design process is our way of protecting that, holding space until an object feels less like a product, and more like a companion.
