OPINION
Against the mood board
By Plinth Studio · Jan 2025 · 2 min read
A mood board tells you what a client has seen. It rarely tells you what the room actually needs.
Pinterest boards and mood boards are useful for one thing: showing us what a client responds to visually. They're less useful for telling us what will actually work in their specific room, at their specific latitude, with their specific budget.
The problem is that a beautiful reference photo has already solved a dozen problems you don't see — the light in that photo, the ceiling height, the climate, the ten other rooms in that house you're not looking at. Copy the surface and you inherit none of the reasoning.
We ask for references, but we treat them as a starting vocabulary, not a target. What is it about that image you actually responded to — the warmth, the restraint, the way the light falls? Usually it's one thing, not everything.
Design that from your own site and your own brief, and you get something that looks like it belongs there — not something that looks like the reference photo, badly translated.
Let's talk about your space.
Tell us about the site, the brief, or just the feeling you're after.