Windsor Smith’s 3 Principles for Designing with Your Gut

For Windsor Smith, good design is a gut feeling. “As an artist, you go with what feeds you intuitively,” she told me over the phone from Montecito, where she is currently bringing several client dream homes to life.

Celebrated interior designer, author of Homefront: Design for Modern Living, and one of the definitive artists responsible for shaping the California design aesthetic (when you see it, you recognize it), Smith has an undeniable eye for beauty. But, she insists, the key to her design style is resisting the urge to replicate her successes. Instead, she leads with her instincts. By developing trust in her own impulses—which was a skill that took nurturing, she assured me—she has become a wildcard in the design world.

Never shying away from a challenge, her appetite for the unexpected is perhaps most pronounced in New York City, where she manages to create sanctuaries in Manhattan without sacrificing charm. In a Gramercy Park apartment currently for sale, for example, she used skylights, a curved staircase, and a ceiling full of stars to pull natural elements into the concrete jungle.

“The subtle palette of cozy shearlings and plush mohairs were designed to cocoon this living oasis,” Smith says of the Gramercy Park project.

Meanwhile, the classical paneling and silver finishes—not to mention the industrial details complimenting the marble bathroom—maintained the integrity of its location. “The mantra—create a timeless space where the noise of the world surrenders to calm beauty—was the continuous thread throughout,” she says.

Risk has defined Smith’s career. But never wild whims. Grounded in a deep respect for history, the stories that objects and spaces hold within them, and an emotional connection to her work, Smith creates homes that feel surprisingly soulful.

“When you’re an artist, you think about these things when normal people think about much more practical pursuits,” she says.

Designing the entryway of a Federalist home in Brentwood, for example, Smith chose to forgo the expected hardwood flooring and instead install vintage tiles from a Peruvian monastery. Their vibration drew her in, she explains, a sort of hum. These floor tiles also struck a chord with Gwyneth, who then bought the house and collaborated with Smith to design it. Smith’s philosophy echoes through every vignette in her former, now-iconic Brentwood home: its intuitive (rather than archetypical) layout, its family-centric design, and the famous entry hallway.

Decades of experience have honed Smith’s style, but she still makes every project feel brand-new. “You’re not going to, by osmosis, make someone live in a vision of what’s worked for you and 30 other clients,” she says. “Every new environment is a new opportunity.”

Vitality is at the core of Smith’s design philosophy. No two projects are alike because no two clients, or properties, are identical. And each one vibrates with a different feeling. “At the end of the day, your home is the best opportunity to say who you are,” she says. “We’re going to feel the most at home if we’re somewhere that really expresses that.” Whether you’re working on a house, an apartment, or just a room, Smith believes anyone can carry this ethos into their design projects.

But how to take a feeling and make it into something you can live inside of it? Smith gave me insight into how anyone can create a home that feels like theirs.

To guide a project, Smith has to know her clients. That means getting to “the really primal instinct of how they want to live and what would serve them best,” she says. Before the colors are picked, the furniture is sourced, and a single wall is knocked down, she starts with a list.

“I come up with words that represent a feeling that I hope to accomplish. Whether it’s an apartment, a house, or an Airstream, you want to say, How do I really want to feel when I’m there? What does that look like? If it was a color, what would that color be?”

Though this might seem intimidatingly esoteric—how do you create something livable out of words?—it’s actually an accessible way for anyone to start their design process. “When we watch something or hear something, we’re always creating a visual space, right? So try to do the same thing with interiors,” Smith says.

I think of luxury in terms of thoughtfulness: where things are positioned so that you can spend more time with family, having space, having time.

Getting clear on your vision is paramount to bringing it to life. It’s the power of saying things aloud. Suddenly they feel less ephemeral. More real. And the clearer you make the visual world in your head, the more you can trust your gut. You’re less likely to be influenced by trends or conventions. To Smith, this personal conviction is the definition of luxury.

“I think of luxury in terms of thoughtfulness: where things are positioned so that you can spend more time with family, having space, having time,” she says. A home that is tailored exactly to how you want to live in it—the pathways you take, the most intuitive way to navigate the furniture, even the feel of the ground beneath you (plush carpet? a jute rug?)—is the ultimate luxury.

She first honed this definition in Gwyneth’s Brentwood house. “I started putting it on paper and it was this house that was in the shape of an H. It was really risky,” Smith recalls. She broke all sorts of design rules. She made the entry hall wider than usual, for entertaining. She put the bedroom behind the closet. But because it was tailored to a specific feeling and a lifestyle, it worked. It felt grounded. Personal. Like home.

Photo courtesy of Melanie Acevedo

To keep a project grounded, Smith likes to draw from what’s already there. “I have a lot of reverence for what is existing,” she says. “I usually look at the environment, the landscape, the slope of the property, the trees. How can you at least sort of honor the land that it’s on and place it properly?”

Drawing from the landscape also helps narrow down your scope. It gives you something to play against—but also create contrast with. Smith’s signature style is defined by intentional moments of tension.

Smith describes her fascination with contrast as an obsession with dichotomies. Over time, her own love for natural and soulful objects has married with contemporary styles and pieces to create something entirely its own: “I am fascinated by how these two opposite approaches can not only blend but create their own dynamic.”

Creating visual interest in your home often rests on creating moments of tension, then relief. “I’ve always been fascinated by the feeling that I get from found objects and things that have provenance in history,” she says. “I had this intuitive connection to things that had a vibration from a long time ago. My education over the years was learning how to make them coexist with modern design to create a beautiful tension rather than them being an assault on each other.”

Be playful about it—Smith is. She encourages experimentation and even “clumsiness,” as she sometimes refers to her own approach. “I mash things up where someone who’s really disciplined would maybe not do that as much.”

This doesn’t mean eschewing trends altogether—things are popular for a reason. The key is to find balance between objects and styles from disparate periods. A vintage sofa on a checkerboard rug. A bouclé chair for a vintage oakwood desk.

So many of us feel the need to define our interior style. Smith doesn’t feel that pressure. She pulls from different eras and revels in the tension the juxtapositions create. Curved lines with straight lines. A modern house with a patinaed floor. “Like small poems about love and life,” she says. By embracing the tension in our lives and how we live, we can reflect that in a beautiful way in our homes.

Photo courtesy of Anthony Barcelo

“I love Pinterest,” says Smith. (It was Pinterest where Gwyneth found the inspiration for the fluted fireplace in her Montecito kitchen.)

If you want to start collecting items, first collect images. Smith encourages taking an unedited approach to exploration: “It doesn’t even have to make sense. Don’t do it self-consciously. Then collect, collect, collect.”

How do you know what is worth collecting? Lead from the core of you that loves things. Yes, you have your Pinterest board, but also turn to other sources of inspiration. Smith understands that many of us are intimidated by trends, the idea of taste, or the price tags on our most coveted items. But with the democratization of design—something she is passionate about working toward—she says, “You can get good things anywhere, for any budget.”

But good design is also hard work. It’s a gut feeling, yes, but one that’s been honed over time into something that you can trust. To get there, she insists there are no shortcuts: “Do your homework. People for whom design really matters, they’ll be up all night doing the work.” Pore over design magazines. Scroll through inspiration images. Walk around vintage stores, antiques markets, and design stores, and figure out what you like. Touch everything. Then collect and curate what you love into a home that reflects who you are.

“When you’re first collecting items, just buy things you love. Don’t worry about how they fit in the house. Just buy things you love,” Smith says. It all goes back to that primal instinct, that gut feeling. And it should carry through every purchase—big and small: “Our homes are a wellspring where the small choices add up to an overreaching sense of place.”

Then, live in a “constant state of upgrade,” Smith says. For her, an upgrade doesn’t have to be something more expensive or trendy. Creating a home that feels intentional and yours is about curating a sense of depth and history that comes with a long-imbued sense of personality and intimacy.

And if you don’t know where to start looking, the answer is everywhere: “What makes us feel good, things we’ve observed, memories we’ve had, how something looked in a friend’s home or in someone’s home we admired or in a play or in a movie. Things that touch us,” Smith says. “The more we have those things around us, the more we’re going to feel at home.”