Austin interior designer Amity Worrel on why great design teams thrive on pushback, not agreement, and why she wants her designers to prove her wrong.

I recently listened to an interview with Simon Upton, the photographer who has shot for nearly every great shelter magazine over the last thirty years. He was talking about how he works with designers before a shoot. Before he goes in for a shoot, he wants to understand how the designer sees the room. What story are they trying to tell? Where does the light matter most, and why?

Here’s what struck me. Simon doesn’t need this input. He’s spent decades building an eye that could walk into any space and find the shot on his own. And yet he asks anyway, because he knows something that took me a long time to learn myself: the best result rarely comes from one perspective, no matter how practiced that perspective is.

That idea has been sitting with me for weeks. It’s the same philosophy I try to bring into our Workshop every single day.

Questions Build Better Rooms Than Answers Do

After more than thirty years in this industry, my team comes to me with questions when they feel that they need input or need to bounce ideas off of me. How would you improve this floor plan? Where would you put the sofa? What do I say to a client who won’t budge on a color selection? Most days, I have an answer ready.

But more often, I turn the question back around. “What do you think is right here?” It isn’t a dodge. Asking pulls out context I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, and that context usually leads somewhere sharper than my first instinct would have. I’ve watched beautiful floor plans create genuinely terrible living spaces because someone stopped asking questions too early in the process.

The dialogue and trading of ideas is where the good work actually happens. 

Sometimes I Just Answer With An Opinion

Some days, when I’m moving quickly, I’ll offer a strong opinion, and every so often it lands nowhere near what my team was thinking.

When that happens, I tell them the same thing every time: here’s how I would do it, but do it your way, and if you prove me wrong, I will be thrilled. I mean every word of it.

This doesn’t happen constantly, and experience still counts for something. But a studio where everyone simply echoes the most senior voice in the room stops evolving. 

Fresh Eyes Ask The Questions I Forgot To

I want strong opinions in my workshop, especially ones that disagree with mine. Younger designers are amazing because they haven’t yet convinced themselves that something has to be done a certain way just because it’s always been done that way. They ask “why not?” 

Part of leadership is making enough room for people to push back on me without fear. If my team is quietly nodding along instead of speaking up, the better idea sitting two desks away never makes it into the room. I think about this often when I reflect on what it actually means to hold power in a client relationship. The point was never to be the only voice that mattered.

Mistakes work the same way. I’d love to spare my team every misstep I’ve already made, but experience doesn’t transfer secondhand. Telling someone about a lesson I’ve learned will never register the same as them actually living it. Within reason, I want my team to get it wrong sometimes, because that’s how judgment actually forms.

A Studio Grows When No One Owns The Answer

Letting go of always needing to be right is, strangely, what lets a business keep growing. It also makes the work far more interesting to show up for. I’ve written before about why our studio refuses to run on a single dominant voice, and this is exactly why. A lone wolf might move fast, but a room full of people willing to challenge each other moves further.

Just like Simon gathering perspective before he ever raises his camera, I want my team to bring their voice to every project we touch. That collaboration is what separates a space that photographs well from one that’s genuinely worth living in.

I hope our work speaks for itself, and I hope it’s comfortable and rewarding for the people who live inside it. Mostly, I hope it’s growing better designers along the way, ones who trust their own instincts enough to challenge mine.

So yes, I’ll say it plainly. I want my team to prove me wrong.