Austin Interior Designer Amity Worrel Reminisces on 15 Visits to Her Cape Cod Project

The Magic in The Middle

People don’t talk much about the middle part of a project.

We celebrate beginnings: the first meetings, the initial inspiration, the excitement of imagining what a home might become. We celebrate endings too: the finished photographs, the reveal, the beautiful rooms, the moment when years of work are finally complete. But most of the magic, especially on a long-term project, happens in the middle. The middle is where trust is built. It’s where problems get solved. It’s where relationships deepen. It’s where a project stops being an idea and starts becoming real. 

The First Visit of Many

One of our longest-running projects began on December 6, 2022, when a team of six of us flew from Austin to Cape Cod. We’d been hired to transform a charming but complicated 8,000-square-foot home into a forever vacation house for a young family. 

It was winter on the Cape. We spent just two days measuring every corner of the house, studying its quirks, understanding its strengths, and trying to imagine what it could become. We assembled the team, selected a builder, developed plans, and began making thousands of decisions that would ultimately shape the home. Then the middle began.

This is What Trust Looks Like 

For the next several years, our lives became intertwined with the project. There were client meetings, selections, sourcing trips, construction reviews, shipping delays, budget conversations, and countless decisions. We worked to balance our clients’ desire for a highly personalized home with an ambitious 

timeline. The clients cared deeply about every detail, but they also trusted us to carry much of the responsibility. They wanted to arrive at a beautifully realized home without having to manage every decision along the way. That trust is one of the greatest gifts a client can give a designer. 

The first summer we worked on the home, our team spent three weeks living in an Airbnb nearby while we managed installations, coordinated painters, electricians, and wallpaper installers, and solved problems as they appeared, which they always do. The clients weren’t there. The decisions were ours to make, not because it was our house, but because they trusted us to understand what they would want.

We Started to Feel Like Locals

The following summer, we returned for another three weeks, this time living in the house itself while work continued in the basement and garage apartment. Between those extended stays, we visited almost monthly, sometimes with a team of three, sometimes with six. Over time we developed routines: favorite bedrooms, favorite beaches to visit before work, favorite spots for dinner after long installation days. We learned the rhythms of the town, the weather patterns, the shortcuts. For a while, we felt like locals. 

We got to know the house intimately too: which rooms caught the most beautiful afternoon light, which construction details had taken months to resolve but ultimately looked simple even when they were not, where the bunnies gathered in the mornings and where the wild turkeys wandered the property. We knew what the house sounded like in a storm and what it felt like full of summer sun. The house became familiar in a way that’s difficult to explain to anyone who hasn’t experienced the unique way a designer learns to be part of developing a home.

What the Middle is Really Made Of 

And of course, there were challenges. A year after the clients had enjoyed their first summer in the house, we got a call from the builder: wallpaper was peeling away from some of the walls. We investigated, repaired it, and moved on. Then it happened again. There were difficult conversations, new solutions, more troubleshooting, another round of work. There always is. Art arrives from Europe damaged and needs restoration. Materials fail. Installations don’t go as planned. A solution that should work doesn’t. 

The middle is where you discover what you’re really made of, not when everything goes perfectly, but when it doesn’t.

What Fifteen Visits Taught Us 

Over the course of fifteen visits and nearly twenty weeks spent on Cape Cod, the project became and more more meaningful. We built trust with our clients. We developed relationships with contractors, installers, landscapers, and local vendors. We learned what we were capable of as a team. Most importantly, we learned that showing up consistently matters more than getting everything right the first time. The real work isn’t perfection. The real work is solving problems, earning trust, and continuing to show up when the solution isn’t obvious. 

This spring, during one of our most recent visits, we photographed some of the last completed spaces. We made our traditional stops at Four Seas Ice Cream and Captain Parker’s Pub, and told newer members of the team stories from those first winter trips that have somehow become company folklore. As always, I found myself thinking about the middle. Because while the reveal is wonderful and the finished photographs are rewarding, neither is where the most meaning  actually happens. The middle is where relationships are built. The middle is where trust is earned. The middle is where a group of designers, builders, tradespeople, and clients work together to create something none of them could have accomplished alone.

Saying Goodbye to The Middle

As we drove away from the house on our most recent trip, I insisted we listen to “Old Cape Cod.” I’d played it during that first visit back in December 2022, trying to set the mood for the adventure ahead of us. This time it felt different. We were proud of what we’d accomplished, but there was a sense of melancholy too. After years of caring for this house, solving problems within it, and investing ourselves in its future, it was time to hand it back to the people it belonged to. 

That’s always the goal. The house is not ours. The vision was never ours alone. Our role is simply to help bring our clients’ vision to life and then step aside so they can enjoy it. Still, after years spent caring deeply about a place, it’s impossible not to feel something when the work is largely done. The photographs become ours. The memories become ours. The pride becomes ours. The house belongs to the clients. And that’s exactly as it should be. 

But if I’m honest, saying goodbye to the middle is never easy.