Oh, hey! 👋🏼 There’s a lot of new faces around here these days (um, thanks!!) so we figured it was time to get the whole team behind the camera again so you guys can see who makes the magic happen around here.
If there’s one thing you need to know about us, it’s that we love to create spaces that feel like home & have fun along the way (ok, ok I guess that’s two things). We are also in the process of moving into our new office space, which feels like a HUGE accomplishment for our little one-woman firm that started behind a kitchen table with a newborn in tow just a few years ago.
All of that to say, thank you to the team, our amazing clients and last but not least everyone here on Instagram for being a part of our journey. Stay tuned guys, the best is yet to come!
#StilJamesTeam
It’s the first thing you see when you wake up. The last thing you look at before you fall asleep. Everyone makes extraordinary decisions about every surface in a room- floors, walls, hardware, millwork, then leaves the one directly above their heads completely untouched.
The fifth wall is the most underused surface in the house. This is what happens when you stop ignoring it.
Design: Sarah | By Stil James Studio
She never once asked us if it was too much. Turquoise cabinetry, red stove, purple pendants, Calcutta Viola marble- she wanted all of it and she was right. That kind of confidence is half the project.
Design: Erin & Natalie | By Stil James Studio ft. @lorancabinetry
Here we goooo. The designers take you along on the BTS of our client work. We decided it’s time to take you behind the scenes of what else goes on at Stil James.
Amy (guru of the @lorancabinetry side of our business) and I are taking an AI course with @callanfaulkner at The Uncommon Business and we’ve got this (I think 😅).
Today was mostly just system setup but here’s what’s been most helpful so far:
1 Mindset- invest in yourself like you already have the business of your dreams. Get a paid subscription and if you only use one AI platform, make it Claude Teams.
2 Perplexity (which I had never heard of) is your best friend for deep research. Perplexity searches the internet in real time and summarizes what it finds, so think of research like: what’s trending in your industry, is this supplier legit, what are people saying about a product right now. Claude & ChatCPT don’t browse anything, they are trained on a massive amount of information and work from what they already know.
3 Protect your data by turning off model training. In Claude this is under Settings & Privacy, turn off “Help improve Claude.” In ChatGPT it’s under Data Controls, turn off “Improve model for everyone.”
4 End every prompt with “Please ask 4-6 clarifying questions one by one before you answer”. This will give you a much better AI output.
So come along on this wild journey of levelling up our business from the inside 👊🏼
BEFORE & AFTER. Small space, still got all the love it deserved (and a little more 🤍).
Paint Colour: Benjamin Moore Boreal Forest AF-480
Design: Sarah | By Stil James Studio
The laundry room door, open. Sight line straight to the most beautiful piece of @eileen.murray_art . Close it. Antique doorknob.
Sometimes it’s the big things, sometimes it’s the small ones. What matters is that every room in this house got the same level of thought, including the one with the washing machine.
Design: Natalie | By Stil James Studio ft. @lorancabinetry
If you said “keep it neutral” and your designer just nodded and painted everything white- they did you dirty.
Neutral is not a colour. It’s a feeling. And getting to that feeling actually takes more conversation, more samples, more back-and-forth than picking a bold wall ever would. Because the goal isn’t no colour. It’s no wrong colour.
The spaces we’re most proud of are the ones where the client thought they wanted safe and we talked them into something slightly braver- white grasscloth wallpaper instead of white paint, a greige and cream tile laid in an interesting way. Still neutral. Still them. Just more them than they thought they were allowed to be.
That’s the job. Not to override what you want. To get you all the way there. These are mid-process- more soon. 🙌🏼
Design: Maja | By Stil James Studio ft. @lorancabinetry
BEFORE & AFTER. She knew her style & her taste (which were spot on, by the way). What she didn’t know was how to make it all actually work and she wasn’t willing to guess on a forever home. So we moved walls, shifted the island, opened the whole kitchen up, and built something that could hold the life they’re growing into. When she walked back in she said it was better than anything she could have pictured. That one never gets old. 🤍
Design: Sarah | By Stil James Studio ft. @lorancabinetry
