Les designers ont-ils tout compris ? Présentation du document

Do Designers Have It All Figured Out? Introducing The Paper

Les designers ont-ils tout compris ? Présentation du document

WORDS
Lauren Rhodes

THE PAPER
Thought Pieces

4th May 2026

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We returned back to the studio from Milan last week. Hours on our feet, running across the city from fair to fair, then doing it again the next day, and the day after that. Whenever we could find a moment we'd stop at a backstreet café for a coffee in the sun, or pause for an aperitivo on a street where empty glasses had been stacked, somehow without complaint, on the bonnet of a parked car. We saw a lot — you can read Sharon's notes on this year's Salone here. But what stayed with us were the conversations. The ones with designers and makers we already knew, and the ones with people we'd just met. The same theme kept appearing, in slightly different forms each time. Everyone, from a distance, looks like they have it figured out. Up close, almost nobody does.

Most of what shapes a studio’s work is still talked about in private, between peers. The supplier somebody recommends. The question a designer asked a client that nobody else would have thought to ask, and how it changed the whole conversation. How they keep Instagram going alongside everything else. The voice note about how to handle a difficult brief.

This is how the work of being a designer has always been learned. Through years of working on projects, education and the exchanges with others that fill in the gaps. But interior design has grown faster than any of us can keep up with. Most designers we speak to are exhausted, piecing it all together as they go. Running a studio is full-time. Doing the work is full-time. There is rarely time left over to follow the latest changes on social media (which can feel like a second job), to rewrite a fee structure, or to translate twenty years of taste into a website that actually represents the practice.

A designer setting up alone may have the training and the eye, but is figuring the business side out from nothing. A studio with two decades behind it may have a clear way of doing things, built carefully over years, only to find the industry has changed around them. The question is no longer whether they need to adapt, but how they are meant to find the time to learn it all.

We consume a lot of traditional design media, from interviews to project editorials. We learn and draw from them. But those publications are written for the wider audience around design, for the readers and the enthusiasts. The Paper is for the people inside the work, the questions designers ask each other and rarely see in print.

This is what we have been building toward at Casa Ren since the beginning. The resources we created are still the heart of what we do, and they always will be. We added video workshops to each of them early on because there was more to say than a document on its own could hold. The Paper is the next part of that. The conversations we wish someone had been having when we were starting out, and the ones we still find ourselves looking for now. It is for designers and architects in their first year of practice, their thirtieth, and every year between.

It is what we are reading, looking at, asking, and working out. References from history we keep coming back to. The notes from a design fair. The supplier we can't stop thinking about. The home that has to hold both extraordinary work and an ordinary morning. The questions about how a practice presents itself, prices the work, finds the perfect audience, develops the right tone of voice, evolves over time without losing what made it itself in the first place.

There will be conversations with designers and makers we admire, with the questions that tend to go unasked. References we keep returning to — from history, travel and the long line of things that have shaped how we look. The business of running a studio: pricing, structure, and navigating the difficult conversations. On Lauren's side, years of branding and art direction. Voice, identity, the way an audience finds you. The part of running a studio nobody quite teaches, and the part that, conveniently, costs the most to learn through trial and error. We'll share our thoughts and observations, what we are reading and noticing, in the spirit of opening up the conversation. It is a place to slow down for a moment, and leave with something useful, something interesting, or something to take into the next project.

We don't think any designer has it fully figured out. We are always learning, always adapting, and we would rather share that than pretend otherwise. The Paper is where it gets to happen out loud.