Talent is common. What I am looking for is rarer than talent, and it takes exactly three questions to find it.
Since I began this search for the next great name in design, I have sat across the table from a great many gifted young designers, and I have come to rely on three questions to tell me who is ready for the work ahead and who simply needs a little more time.
Does this person have a point of view, or only good taste
Good taste is easy to spot and, frankly, easy to teach. A point of view is different. It is the willingness to say that a room should feel a certain way even when the client, the budget, and the trend of the moment all suggest otherwise. I have designed palaces, yachts, and private jets for people who could have hired anyone in the world, and in every one of those rooms is a decision I made because I believed in it, not because it was safe. I ask every candidate to show me the one choice in their portfolio they would defend even if their client had asked them to change it. If they cannot find one, we are not ready to work together yet.
Can this person finish a room, not just start one
Anybody with a good eye can produce a beautiful mood board. Far fewer people can carry that idea through procurement delays, a contractor who missed a measurement, a client who changed their mind twice, and still deliver a room that looks, on the final day, exactly as confident as it did on the first sketch. Finishing is where design becomes a profession rather than a hobby, and it is the part of the work that no design school can fully prepare a person for. I look for evidence of it in the small, unglamorous decisions a candidate made when a project went sideways, because that is where I learn the most about how they will behave on a real commission.
Is this person willing to be corrected in front of a client
Ego is the most expensive material in this industry. I have watched brilliant designers lose commissions not because their ideas were wrong but because they could not bear to be told, gently, in a room full of people, that an idea needed to change. The designers I choose to mentor are the ones who can take a correction standing up, without flinching, and come back with a better answer five minutes later. That quality cannot be taught in a semester. It can only be practiced, and it is the single greatest predictor I have found of who will still be designing significant rooms in twenty years.
If you recognise yourself in these three questions, I would like to hear from you. The search continues, and I am always looking for the next name worth putting my own reputation behind.