Interview with Salome Gulordava

Design is the act of carrying a person's inner world out into physical reality and giving it visual form. A space, in that sense, is never just walls and furniture, it is a kind of translation

Residential homes, showrooms, and cafés are where the interest sits most naturally, spaces where atmosphere and daily use meet directly, and where the design has to hold up under ordinary, repeated living rather than a single dramatic impression.

The first project completed for a company was a showroom, a useful early lesson in designing for both a brand's identity and a constant flow of visitors.

Marble. Its weight and its coolness immediately shift the character of a room, and no two slabs read exactly the same way once light hits them.

Traveling brings that on more than anything else, particularly time spent in museums and exhibitions, both contemporary and historic. There's something about standing in front of work built in a completely different context that resets how a space or an object might be approached.

Detail, lighting, and ergonomics come first, in that order of attention if not importance. A space can look right in a photograph and still fail the person living in it if these three aren't resolved together.

It's closest to a feeling of fullness, an idea builds until there's an almost urgent need to sit down and get it onto paper or onto a screen before it loses shape.

An individual character that couldn't be copied onto another project, paired with correct lighting and the right orientation of the space relative to the cardinal directions. Get the light and the orientation wrong, and no amount of styling afterward fully compensates.

Whether the concept itself is fully resolved, whether the lighting is right, and whether texture and color are working together rather than competing. Everything else follows from those three.

A designer's responsibility goes beyond the brief itself. Material choices, energy use, and how long a space lasts all have consequences, so sustainability should be part of the design from the start, not added on afterward.

Design is moving toward a closer bond between technical performance and aesthetics. Energy efficiency and material choices are now part of the creative process from the beginning, not adjustments made at the end. At the same time, craftsmanship and locally made elements are becoming more valued, even as tools like 3D modeling make it easier to test ideas early. The future likely sits between these two things: precise technical execution and human, handmade character.

Home is Georgia, in Tbilisi, a country with one of the richest and most distinctive cultural and architectural legacies in the region, shaped over centuries by its position at the crossroads of different worlds. Growing up surrounded by that depth of history, stone churches, ancient wine culture, a design language all its own, it becomes almost impossible not to create something that carries some trace of that character. That heritage shows up in the work less as direct reference and more as an instinct: a respect for material honesty, for craftsmanship, and for building things meant to last. Designing in a fast-growing city like Tbilisi also brings its own creative energy, encouraging fresh solutions for light, privacy, and a genuine connection to nature.

The process begins with getting to know both the space and its owner, understanding not just the dimensions of a room but who's actually going to live in it. From there, work on the concept turns into a fully live, evolving process, ideas get tested, revised, and sometimes abandoned entirely, as paths and options slowly open up along the way toward the final goal. It's rarely a straight line, sketches and material samples tend to redirect the concept as often as they confirm it, and that back and forth is really where the design takes its final shape.

Lamps, sinks, mirrors, sconces, and rugs, the kind of pieces that seem small on a floor plan but end up doing the most work in how a room actually feels day to day.

Weeks are deliberately split across different kinds of days, some spent entirely at the computer, others visiting showrooms, and others on site at active projects. Keeping these separated avoids losing time to unnecessary back and forth travel and keeps productivity steady across the week rather than scattered.

Learn to listen before designing anything, the strongest concepts usually come from understanding a client's actual life, not from a personal style imposed onto their space. And don't rush the process, the best ideas tend to arrive after several rounds of revision, not in the first sketch.

The reward is seeing an idea move from a sketch to a space someone actually lives in and enjoys every day. The harder part is that a project's timeline rarely depends on the designer alone, construction delays and sourcing issues can stretch out a process that was, on paper, planned much tighter.

The rule is to remain, on every project, an interior designer, someone who builds a concept and a coherent design around the client's and the space's needs and priorities, never ჯუსტ a visualizer who transfers a client's own ideas onto a screen without adding anything of real design thinking.

Technical knowledge comes first, understanding exactly how each design decision will actually be built and executed, not just how it looks in a drawing. Close attention to detail matters just as much, since it's usually the details that decide whether a finished space feels resolved or not.

Almost always some version of: what does it cost to renovate a single square meter?

Working on the design of my own home turned out to be the most important experience so far, there's no client to defer to, so every decision has to be justified on its own terms, which sharpened a lot of instincts that carry over into every project since.

mail:sally@gulordava.com
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