With our Book Club series, we hand over the proverbial mic to our Experts—letting them share their work, their thought process, and their best tips, all in their own words. The following is an excerpt from Brian Paquette’s Outside In, published last month with Gibbs Smith.

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This 1920s bungalow, all but four hundred square feet, is my clients’ pied-à-terre in Seattle.

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I had worked with them on their main residence in Idaho a few years back. We made this small-sized project all about story and having fun, focusing on the cute bungalow aspect of it.

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The space consists of a living room, kitchen, small bathroom, and bedroom, each room with its own charm. The bedroom, for example, holds a king-sized bed and essentially nothing else, aside from the built-in cupboards we designed to take the place of the previous standard closet.

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Thinking like shipbuilders, we included storage wherever we could and thought about multi-use spaces. The palette of greens, pinks, burgundies, dirty beiges, and yellows came from the story that this cottage would give nods to traditional British design. The Marthe Armitage wallpaper in the kitchen was, in fact, printed in the UK. We wanted fabrics that felt collected instead of curated, and a bit “off,” like the bedroom’s headboard fabric, which was just that right bit of off and unexpected.

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The experience of this project taught me to collect what I like without forcing things into context or matching; all will work together as fine pieces and feel uniquely yours, more organic, and less intentionally decorated.

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I have some of the best phone calls with these clients, laughing for hours and throwing many ideas back and forth on whatever we are working on. One of them constantly challenges me and then ends every call saying, “I love you, and you are doing great things.”

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Buy Outside In and meet with Brian to get personalized advice for your own home.

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