"I don't like food in my mood boards..." - Mariana Ortiz
Most People Think a Mood Board Is About How a Space Looks
When people hear the words mood board, they usually picture a Pinterest board in their heads: a grid of pretty images, vaguely cohesive, and meant to suggest what a space might look like someday. That version isn’t wrong, it’s just incomplete.
A good mood board doesn’t describe furniture or just show rigid layouts. A good mood board describes a life and shows a dream to bring to physical form.
That’s how Mariana Ortiz, our in-house designer, thinks about it when working with clients. “The mood board is about giving the person a dream,” she says. “It’s not just about placing materials in a house. It’s about the feeling they felt when they first thought about the designs coming together.”
This matters more than most people realize because the mood board is the foundation of the design process. This is the part where the designer and the client learn about each other and discover whether they’re actually speaking the same language, or have the ability to. When that alignment is locked-in, everything downstream, whether materials, lighting, or layout, starts to make sense. When it isn’t, even good decisions can feel wrong.
A common mistake is thinking the mood board is about flexing your taste when really it’s about clarifying your intention for the space in question.
You Need Honesty More Than Design Vocabulary
One of the biggest anxieties homeowners bring to the first design meeting is the fear that they don’t know how to talk about design, don't know the name of the exact materials, or styles they’re after. They worry they’ll say the wrong thing, or it’ll be their fault if they don’t get their desired outcome because they didn’t know the difference between styles, finishes, or eras.
What Helps More Than Knowing the Right Terms
“You honestly don’t need to know design,” says Ortiz. “If you can show me what you’re responding to visually, or explain how a space made you feel, how you currently live your life, that’s more than enough. My job is to connect those dots.” Here's a list of things that help when working with an interior designer for your space:
- Images that caught your attention, even if you don’t know why.
- Explaining what you resonated with in a photo, not just saving it.
- Talking about how you live: how mornings feel, your habits or routines, where you spend the most time, and where you like to retreat.
Mariana often asks clients about their favorite television shows, and no, not just design and real estate shows. “I ask what they like about them, or their favorite parts from it, because now, I can learn more about the person who will be in the space I'm designing for,” she says. There’s something about film and television that can reveal more about a person’s dream scenario than a stack of curated images.
Someone who loves The Bear might be drawn to movement and warmth, a kind of controlled chaos. Someone who loves Succession might respond to restraint, formality, and more rigid expressions of styles and eras. In these cases, it’s not about trying to decorate like the show as much as it’s about identifying the client's emotional register.
That’s the secret sauce of a mood board when it comes to designing a space: the permission to talk about what you actually want, not what you think you’re supposed to want.
What Interior Designers Look for in a Mood Board
When Mariana builds a mood board, she’s balancing three things:
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The dream.
- What should this room feel like? Calm? Energizing? Formal? Protective? This is where the board does its most important work.
- The details.
- Materials, finishes, scale, light. Without these, a mood board is just aspirational when what you really want is for it to be a roadmap.
- The reality.
- What do the budget, timeline, and lead times need to be? A good mood board helps to set the expectations early.
From Digital to Physical
Most of Mariana’s boards begin digitally in Illustrator, sometimes Canva, but her favorite boards are physical ones. Fabric swatches, metal samples, paint chips, “you need to touch things,” she says. “Digital gives you the idea of course, but it’s the physical touch that gives you the truth.”
That similar philosophy runs through Residence Supply’s design process as a whole. Our goal isn’t just to imagine a beautiful space made for gathering, but to build one that still holds up when the light changes, when life happens, when the routines start to kick in, and the novelty wears off.
If you’re planning a renovation, a redesign, or even just trying to make one room feel more intentional, the mood board is where it starts. You don’t need to start with rules; you can start with the dream and with someone who knows how to translate it.
We offer free design consultations to help you through every step of the interior design process, including mood board making. Don’t worry about knowing enough or having the right vocabulary. You just let us know how you want to live, and we can get started.