Jennifer Taylor

Jennifer joined the studio from a contract furniture dealership, where she spent six years watching beautifully designed schemes arrive late, damaged, or in the wrong finish. She came here to fix that problem from the other side of the drawing.

What she looks after

Every project in the studio passes through her hands at least weekly. She holds the master program, the procurement log and the budget tracker, and she is the person who tells a designer that a twenty-week rug will not fit a twelve-week program.

• The studio program: every project, every stage, every deadline in one place
• Procurement, from purchase order to receiving warehouse to installation day
• Budget tracking against the approved allowances, reported to clients monthly
• Supplier relationships, contracts and the awkward conversations that follow a late delivery

How she works

Jennifer’s rule is that a schedule is only useful if it is believed, which means it has to be honest. She would rather quote a longer lead time and beat it than quote the supplier’s optimistic number and explain it away later.

Design is decisions and delivery is arithmetic. If the arithmetic is wrong, nobody ever gets to see the decisions.

She introduced the studio’s receiving warehouse process, where every item is unpacked and inspected before it reaches a client’s home. In the first year it caught damage on roughly one delivery in nine, all of it resolved before anyone noticed.

Outside the studio she restores mid-century case pieces, mostly Danish, mostly in worse condition than she expects when she buys them.