Oh.

My.

It's already February, and we at SYI have yet to reflect on last year—which was quite a momentous year actually (national politics aside).

We added two new amazing, can't-function-without team members, Jake and Caitlin.

We built a new studio. (All children in the Yeley house now have rooms of their own. As does Susan's wardrobe.)

Click through to see our studio (and Susan's ensuite bath and closet) progress, from June to January. (More photos to come of the finished product.)

Best of all? We helped (are you sitting down?) 94 different clients.

Wowza. 94. We can't quite believe it ourselves. Bring on the hashtags: #blessed. #grateful. #crazy.

To the 94, thank you. We love you. Truly. It's been our complete honor to help you through the not-easy process of brainstorming and weighing options, researching and purchasing, installing and accessorizing and repurposing and shifting... and sometimes, waking up to plumbers and electricians in your kitchen.

We will request (or have already requested) to photograph some of your homes. But not all. We don't photograph all our projects, for lots of reasons.

Sometimes, when clients have minimal budget and/or maximal chutzpah, they only enlist our help to get them going on a remodel. We brainstorm, offer tips and tricks, nail down the look and feel and material direction, perhaps the layout. Then the client takes it from there. That's ok! We love being your Friendly Local Enablers. But your project probably ought to be on your website, not ours. (Though feel free to tag us on Facebook if our guidance was helpful.)
Some projects have no finish line. A home is life, after all, and life is in perpetual motion. Our favorite homeowners are constantly curating, forever adding artifacts from their journeys to their homes.
Some clients, let's be honest, do not follow our recommendations—or only follow some of them. That almost never means the project has been a failure from our perspective; quite the contrary. Success for us means we helped guide, not "we got our way" and the house looks like a magazine spread. It means the homeowners made wise decisions for them, in context and with information, reflecting their needs and tastes. It means we honored the client's agenda, budget and lifestyle, and the home's bones and roots. Even if we wouldn't have used that particular tile.
We only have so much time (did we mention we had 94 clients last year?) and money to capture finished work professionally and with the kind of love and time that process deserves; so we make sometimes tough choices about which homes to feature.
Finally, our work? It isn't really ours. It's yours. The goal at SYI is "Love Your Home," not "Live in Susan's Home." So, in deciding which projects to photograph, we often gauge, "Does it feel like we can call it our work? Or is it really the client's baby, supported by our expertise?" We don't want to take credit where credit isn't due.

That said, let it be known:

We think all of our clients' homes are amazing, be they still on paper, halfway there, or complete (you lucky dogs!) —if only because of the rockin' people who live in them. Thank you for letting us be a part of your lives and your spaces.

We are so excited to see what 2017 will bring.

A Year In Review - 94 Clients