How to Settle Design Disputes Without Getting a Divorce

When you and your partner just can’t agree on what color to paint the walls, treating your conversations like therapy can help you find ways to compromise and stay connected.

When the time came for my wife and I to furnish our new primary suite, we started with mattress shopping. She wanted firm; I wanted plush. We knew we had to find a suitable middle ground. But at the mattress store, things got a bit ridiculous.

"Let’s go with that one," she said.

"But you have to lie down on it," I reminded her.

"No. Just tell me if you like it," she said. "That’ll be fine."

We were sending our oldest to sleepaway camp; lice was on everyone’s mind (and on plenty of scalps). As such, my wife refused to test out a single mattress, fearing the bug, opting instead to press down on the mattress in question with her fingers and say, "Yeah, this is the one."

Since she refused to test mattresses appropriately and I refused to get one without her assuming a more horizontal position, we left the store at a standstill. But that night, we found a simple solution at the foot of our bed. Peeling back the sheets atop our two-decades-old queen-size mattress—one that had offered us years of good sleep—we saw the Beautyrest logo. Since all we were doing was upgrading to a king-size mattress, and since one person in the relationship was mattress shopping like someone criminally insane, we decided not to complicate things. We went with the Beautyrest Black mattress, which felt apropos as we knew it promised us the same continued comfort and was a color that fit the mood of the next dozen discussion items on our list. Without any precedence to guide us forward through the rest of our design decisions, conflict bubbled like an approaching lava river on the dark horizon.

Questioning that inner child

Christopher K. Travis, managing partner of Truehome Design.Build, says that he has seen his fair share of projects "go to hell in a handbasket," where couples just couldn’t agree. Some build outs have even led to divorce. To mitigate couples’ fights during home renovation or design projects, Travis created a workshop based on a questionnaire he’s used over the years that explores how people are affected by their past experiences in places, like their childhood homes, and how that affects their relationship with those rooms, and the objects in those spaces, today.

"We use it to develop unique criteria for each person in a living space to enhance their well-being and relationships with their cohabitants," he explains. People can bring these questionnaires to architects, who can then "tailor the space to how that person reacts to those [spaces]."

While the design meetings my wife and I sat through didn’t look too deeply into our emotions—"Do you want this shower head or this one?" was pretty much the depth of our team’s emotional range—my wife and I each had a few must-haves for the bedroom that stemmed from our inner child.

My wife’s deepest desire was for the one thing she’d never had before—a walk-in closet, designed to maximize the space. I have a positive connection with and fondness for brown leather chairs, which had been in my childhood and my grandparent’s homes. Bickering over closet prices and furniture color occurred, but we eventually agreed to a compromise: my wife would get to work with a closet company, fork over a few more dollars, and create an efficient shrine to her clothing, and I’d get a leather swivel chair for the sitting area that she helped select from Arhaus. Her chosen walk-in considered my needs—giving me built-in drawers, since I had little patience for hanging clothes—and my chair, hand-finished by Mexican artisans, was more interesting to her than some Swedish piece, given my wife’s Mexican heritage.

Treat it like therapy (because it sort of is)

High school debate tactics were recalled and implemented when my wife and I were forced to talk about a mirror for the new primary bathroom. The negotiation surrounding over-the-bed sconces nearly required a trip with Jimmy Carter to Camp David to hash things out.

"I’ve never worked with a couple where there wasn’t conflict," says Daniel Romanoff, interior designer at Harrison Design. "The couples that dealt with it successfully were better at listening and compromise… It’s successful when people take space to listen, process, and find a version, even if it’s not [perfectly] to their taste." 

Anita Yokota, author of the book Home Therapy, who worked as a therapist for twenty years before becoming a designer, uses therapy-like intake forms when working with new clients. She wants to understand their core memories of spaces. For instance, if the client grew up with a small kitchen and equates that with chaos, then the new design should incorporate space into the kitchen to limit disorder. "It’s not just about functionality and aesthetics," she says. "I want to improve the relationship with the space."

The bedroom, arguably the most intimate space in most people’s homes, shouldn’t be a dumping ground for laundry or a place for a Peloton or filled with other distractions, Yokota argues. Instead, she has clients in a relationship answer one key question about the bedroom: "What are ways that you’d love to connect with your partner more?"

If you’re a couple that loves music, maybe it’s imperative to add a record collection and player in the corner. If you like to watch nature, maybe design a small sitting area before a window with a brown leather swivel chair. Those little additions and the removal of distractions allows couples to remark, "Yeah, we are a team," says Yokota. "Finding ways to remind ourselves why we love each other. Why we’re drawn to each other."

Dr. Sally Augustin, principal at Design With Science, explains that extroverts "don’t process sensory information as well… Introverts do a better job processing the information they receive from the world around them." That means if a bedroom is full of sound and color, it might appeal to the extrovert, but it could overwhelm the introvert in the relationship. "A bedroom is really important because it’s where we sleep and if we don’t sleep enough our health deteriorates. A bedroom really needs to be designed for an introvert."

Connecting, compromising, and cleaning in the bedroom

The same is true when you have one partner who’s a slob and the other who needs things to be tidy. In my home, I’m more of the former. My wife has tried methods to curtail this in the bedroom, even purchasing for me a basket that reads "Wore it once and I don’t wanna hang it back up." While she had deemed our new space too sophisticated for joke, near-laundry baskets, we needed ways to keep it more pristine. We got a cordless Dyson vacuum that could charge out-of-sight in a nearby closet to encourage more frequent vacuuming, and we moved the washer and dryer into our new bathroom, which was both convenient for doing laundry and a more encouraging way to hamper clothes once reserved for the joke basket.

"If there’s too much visual clutter that’s really stressful," Augustin explains. "You’ve got to go to the more tidy end of the spectrum."

It’s like if someone has an allergy to bird feathers—me—you can’t purchase down pillows, which is why we went with Brooklinen’s alternative down bedding. For my wife, down or alternative didn’t matter, but given my body’s antigen levels against the goose, the distinction mattered. In designing and purchasing for a bedroom, you have to consider the more sensitive end of the spectrum on any continuum.

In the end, Travis says of his approach to designing a home, "We’re not really building a house. We’re using a process to break down what are your particular automatic reactions to feel really good about a space or bad about a space. Everything in the middle, we ignore." 

Ilustration by Franz Lang

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