Real-Life Decision Making
The customer is always right -- right? Well, when you're an interior designer, it's not always that simple.
You're an experienced interior designer with your own private practice in a small city. Your reputation, which you spent 15 years building, is impeccable. You pride yourself on your honesty. You speak your mind, even when it means telling your client their ideas won't work.
Today you're dealing with a valued account -- a retired couple decorating their new, smaller home with mementos of their life together. You've been working with them for months, helping them arrange their photographs, antiques, trophies, certificates and other knick-knacks.
You look over the work you and the couple have done with pride -- until you reach the library, a small room off the living room. Lined with books and beautiful shelves, the room is marred by what you consider a gaudy bronze statue sitting right in the middle of the space. You try to conceal your shock and dismay at the sight of the monstrosity. Then you work up the courage to ask about it.
Seems the couple's granddaughter did the piece when she attended art school. The piece itself shows amateurish styling, but that's not the problem. It ruins the quiet, contemplative mood you created for the library.
You stand there, your shock slowly giving way to concern. What will you do? After all, it is the client's home. You're only an adviser and if they want the bronze statue where it is, that's their business. What do you do?