1. As a runner in Los Angeles, I have the pleasure of seeing celebrities drive past in fancy cars during my morning runs, of running in a marathon that takes me through every ethnic cityscape I can imagine, and of participating in one particularly interesting race that weaves its way through the Universal Studios lot, the very place movies are filmed. My first time running in this particular race, I was confronted by a truth so stunning it took more breath from me than the first miles of the race: the city hall that lightening struck in Back to the Future was not real. It was not even a building. It was just the face of a building supported by a wood scaffolding behind it.

This memory laid dormant in my mind for over a decade until I actually stepped foot inside Steve and Dina’s magnificently impressive home. Sitting on a beautiful tree-lined, sidewalk-free road near Los Angeles, this grand white house with imposing white columns sits far back on the property, inspiring visions of either the presidential mansion or a southern plantation. Walking to the front door for the first time, I played with the idea of greeting the owners as Mr. President and First Lady.

What a shock it was to be welcomed into the belly of this attractive body and be greeted by, well, nothing. To my left was an enormous room with a piano awkwardly placed in the middle, and in front and above me was an empty space that felt large enough to land a helicopter. It was as if the house that so impressed me was just a shell, and the interior I was standing in existed only out of necessity to support the shell, but served no habitable purpose. I caught my breath as I remembered the fateful day when the truth behind Back to the Future reared its fallacious head.

Dina and Steve had built their dream home on paper, but needed to add personality through interior design to complete their dream. The house had everything they wanted in terms of layout and size, but was severely lacking in decoration, furnishing, and personality. They began bringing the house to life room by room, but ran into trouble when confronted with their living room. Because this room was connected to the entry way, they decided to have me work on both in tandem.

2. Steve and Dina were two very different peas in a pod when it came to conceptualizing the use of their living room. Steve imaged it as a showpiece, as a piece of jewelry to be admired for a moment and then assimilated into the general impression that he and his wife live in a very nice house. He wanted the impressiveness guests beheld while approaching the house to resound throughout this room as a reaffirmation they were in a house worthy of praise and envy. One does not let children play catch with diamond earrings, and Steve did not imagine this space being used for any purpose other than impressing guests.

Dina did not understand the point of having a beautiful room roped off , as if it were a room in a European castle that guests walked past, said “ooh ahh,” and then headed to the gift shop. With three young girls, she knew that preserving a delicate piece of three dimensional artwork would be more trouble than it was worth, so she wanted it to be a comfortable, welcoming, durable space. She and Steve have over thirty relatives within thirty minutes of their house, so she imaged her loved ones sitting comfortably in the new space, enjoying her father’s music as it poured from the aged piano.

Much like the living room, Steve wanted an entrance that screamed status at his guests. He wanted it to convey a representative feeling that would be found throughout the house: large, powerful, and grand. As would be expected, Dina described her ideal entry way in less imposing, more personal terms. She wanted it to feel like a pair of open arms that invited guests inside and immediately made them feel at ease. While she had nothing against the grandeur Steve gravitated towards, she wanted to make sure it also had a homey feeling.

3. Although Dina and Steve did not agree on the primary function of their living room, they both recognized it served another important function. When planning their home, Steve made their kitchen absolutely enormous. He astutely recognized a shift in people’s preferences for where they typically congregate during parties that favored the kitchen. He designed one so large that it could literally fit the entire party within its cavernous walls. From the front door, the easiest way to get to first the kitchen and then the back yard is through the living room, so this room also had to be a thoroughfare for heavy foot traffic. The living room’s secondary role as a beaten path was reinforced by the need to walk through it to access Steve’s office.

The entrance did not double as any other sort of room, but was instead employed part-time as a dance studio for Steve and Dina’s girls. I watched firsthand as Dina, Emily, and Zoe swing danced wildly, shoes flying as Dina flung her daughters up, down, and around in time with the song. If activities like this were to take place in this room, it was not a space to be overcrowded. With the entry juxtaposed to the living room, I could imagine the two girls gyrating gleefully as their grandfather pounded away at the adjacent piano.

4. In Dina’s mind, the living room without her father’s piano would be like the Sistine Chapel without Michelangelo’s paintings. The space would not be a total loss, but the very element that makes it special would be absent. Dina wanted the piano to be a focal point in the room, not only for her father’s playing, but also because she saw it as a welcoming element. It’s a tool that beckons visitors to the space, as if its very musical potential adds a feeling of warmth to the room.

It was also important to Dina that there be ample seating for as many guests as possible without overly crowding the space, and that the furniture be both comfortable and durable. Since the arrival of her daughters, she had seen sufficient juice containers dropped, painted fingers smeared, and furniture climbed to steer her away from delicate pieces. She also wanted the furniture to be at least semi-mobile so the room could be reconfigured to accommodate more people than the seating allowed for. She also suggested a display cabinet be placed on one of the walls, and Steve agreed this would be a nice addition.

If Steve could have put an elegant chain with elegant guard dogs around the seating area, he probably would have. Between the enormous kitchen and the even larger family room, he did not see any reason to possibly tarnish the pristine nature of museum grade furniture by introducing the unpredictability of humans to the environment. Like Greenpeace to a threatened forest, he wanted to keep the people out so the natural beauty of the space could persevere within.

If he was to risk disturbing the balance of his gem by allowing people to trespass on its splendor, he certainly didn’t want the space to be dominated by a piano. He realized which fights could be won, so instead of embarking on the suicide attack of demanding the piano be removed from the room entirely, he tactfully suggested it be put in the corner. He imagined the room anchored by a traditional seating group of two couches facing each other with a coffee table in between.

Looking at the raw living room with its lone colonist, the piano, I initially got the impression it was a very large, very spacious room. What soon became obvious was how frequently the walkways would be used and how high a volume of traffic they would see. After I subtracted a three foot minimum walkway along the length of the room and another at the breadth, all of a sudden this very large space shrank significantly. Add in a piano, and there was nowhere near the amount of available seating space I initially anticipated.

I began sketching layouts of the room, and found couches and large chairs to be the most effective means of defining the walkways. It is almost as if they create invisible walls between the seating and walking areas. These invisible boundaries serve to both insulate the people sitting within the arrangement, and distance the people walking past.

To avoid marginalizing the piano, I proposed it be positioned in such a way the player can clearly see the entire seating arrangement. Furthermore, instead of backing a couch or large chair onto it, which would have put an invisible wall between the seating area and the piano player, I suggested Dina and Steve put two standalone chairs instead. Dina particularly liked this proposal because the keyboard faced the door from the entry way. She thought that an open keyboard along with an open book of music invited guests into the house with great warmth and no pretension.

I proposed a narrow table be run behind the couch because I rarely find the back of furniture attractive. This table would also serve to further differentiate the walkway from the seating arrangement. The room was not large enough to fit a display cabinet against either of the walls without sacrificing either capacity or comfort in the seating area, so this idea was put aside. As Dina aptly said, the house is large enough to find another place for display, so it was no loss at all.

In the entry way, Dina wanted to have furniture more for display than function, but emphasized her wish to maintain an open feeling in the space. I reassured her this would not even become an issue because the room’s spaciousness came not from square footage but rather from volume. The soaring ceiling, not the floor space, imparted the cathedral-like vastness Dina so enjoyed. To rob the room of that feeling would require dangling a large piece of artwork that functioned like a second ceiling.

Steve worried the vastness Dina valued would rob his entrance of the immediate impressiveness he wanted. He feared the large space would visually shrink furniture, so he asked for large pieces scaled to such a degree that they would still be striking despite their surroundings. I imagine his ideal situation would have been reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, where his guests walk into this enormous room with comically large furniture. He also wanted it to have a formality that matched his ideal living room.

When I first walked into the entrance way, I felt as if I’d wandered into a grain silo with a painted drywall interior. This space is enormous, and I knew tall, heavy furniture would be in order to fill it out. Ordinary pieces would look like toothpicks for chair legs, which is to say out of scale, undersized, and generally dinky. Neither Steve nor Dina wanted a product that was anywhere near dinky.

Because Dina wanted to have a welcoming feeling in the room, I proposed placing a settee against one wall. A seat invites guests inside by offering a place to relax, and the beautiful fabric art on the settee injects a softness into the space a simple wood bench could not. Against the other wall I suggested putting a large cabinet with space for decorative accessories on top. Finally, I proposed tall plants be added to finish filling this cavernous space. By reaching above an ordinary sightline, tall plants can psychologically diminish ceiling height without actually making a space feel constrictive.