INSIGHTS

Some kitchen and bath decisions are pretty easy to change if you decide later that you don’t love them. A finish usually isn’t one of them.

That tile covering an entire shower wall. The cabinetry filling the whole kitchen. Once it’s installed, changing your mind gets expensive fast. Denise Jones, who runs J2 Design Studio in Bedminster, says finish selections are some of the decisions homeowners need to think through most carefully before committing.

A small sample can become a very big decision

Jones describes a client who had just finished a brand-new master bathroom and hated how it looked. She had chosen a tile she liked in a small sample, and the designer hired by her contractor advised using it throughout the space.

“She has to live with it for the rest of her life,” Jones says, “because she’s not going to rip it out and respend that money.”

The tile itself wasn’t necessarily the problem. The bigger issue was making a decision about an entire room based on a piece of material only a few inches across.

I think most of us can understand how that happens. You hold up a sample. You like the color. You like the texture. It looks great sitting on a table.

What you can’t see from that little piece is what happens when the same material covers an entire wall.

That’s why scale matters. A sample can show you the material. It can’t always show you the finished room.

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