By David Hornung, Co-Founder & Principal Designer, D&J Concepts

In 1954, Arthur Elrod opened a design studio on Palm Canyon Drive in Palm Springs and began inventing what we now recognize as the modern luxury interior design process. He had no digital tools, no rendering software, no project management platforms. Instead, he had fabric swatches, hand-drawn sketches, and a client list that would eventually include Lucille Ball and Walt Disney. He also had an intuitive understanding that the desert demanded a new way of designing. Seven decades later, the tools have transformed beyond recognition. Yet the fundamental challenge remains identical: translating a client’s unspoken desires into spatial reality before construction makes those desires permanent.

The lineage that connects Elrod’s Palm Springs practice to D&J Concepts’ Method of Visual Clarity runs through one critical figure: Steve Chase, who joined Elrod’s firm in the 1960s and later trained David Hornung. Each generation refined the interior design process by solving the specific communication gap that prevented clients from understanding what they were getting before they got it.

The Elrod Era: Design as Performance

Elrod’s interior design process was inseparable from his personality. He presented designs through force of charisma, describing rooms with such vivid conviction that clients trusted his vision without demanding visual proof. His presentations were performances. He would arrive at a client meeting with fabric samples draped over one arm and hand-painted renderings under the other. Then he would describe how the room would feel, how light would enter, and how guests would respond.

1stDibs Introspective documented Elrod’s career extensively, noting that his firm’s success depended on his personal involvement in every client relationship. The design process lived in Elrod’s head. Associates could execute his vision. However, only Elrod himself could sell it, because the selling was the designing. When Elrod and his associate William Raiser died in a car accident in 1974, much of the firm’s design intelligence died with them.

The limitation of Elrod’s approach was scalability. After all, one designer, however gifted, can personally shepherd only so many projects. The interior design process that depended on charismatic presentation could not survive the departure of the charismatic presenter. This fragility pointed toward the need for a more systematic methodology, one that captured design intent in communicable form rather than relying on individual performance.

The Chase Revolution: Structured Revelation

Steve Chase, who worked for Elrod before establishing his own Palm Springs practice, solved the communication problem with presentation discipline. Specifically, Chase introduced structured client reveals. These replaced Elrod’s improvisational performances with carefully choreographed experiences. Notably, the champagne at every presentation was not hospitality. It was psychological priming. Chase understood that the emotional state in which a client encounters a design determines their response to it.

Chase’s interior design process introduced material boards organized by room, with samples mounted in proportional relationships that approximated their final positions. Accompanying each board was a written narrative explaining not just what the room would contain but why each element was selected. For the first time in luxury residential design, the process generated a transferable document. Other designers could interpret and execute it independently.

This documentation discipline produced two results. First, Chase’s projects achieved remarkable consistency because his methodology did not depend on his personal presence at every moment. Second, his associates, including David Hornung, could absorb not just Chase’s aesthetic sensibility but his process logic. The method was teachable in a way that Elrod’s intuitive performances were not. Chase’s contribution to design was not primarily aesthetic but procedural: he demonstrated that systematizing the creative process amplified rather than constrained design quality.

Visual Clarity: The Digital Resolution

David Hornung brought Chase’s process discipline to D&J Concepts when he co-founded the firm in Southampton in 2001. The Farrell Building developer partnership provided the pressure that forced further evolution. Multiple units requiring simultaneous design attention demanded visualization quality that material boards could not deliver at sufficient speed.

The Method of Visual Clarity replaced material boards with magazine-quality digital renderings that showed clients their rooms as they would appear when complete. Materials appeared on actual surfaces. Furniture sat in three-dimensional space. Light fell through windows at the correct seasonal angle. The imagination gap that Elrod bridged with charisma and Chase bridged with structured presentation was eliminated entirely. Clients saw what they would get.

McKinsey’s research on construction industry efficiency demonstrates that visualization quality directly correlates with project performance. Projects where stakeholders clearly understand the intended outcome before construction produce fewer change orders, shorter timelines, and higher satisfaction scores. D&J Concepts’ Visual Clarity methodology applies this principle to luxury residential design with results that 25 years of practice have consistently validated.

The AI Inflection Point

Artificial intelligence tools have entered the interior design process with force since 2023. AI rendering platforms can generate room visualizations from text descriptions in seconds. Virtual staging tools transform empty rooms into furnished presentations for a fraction of traditional rendering costs. Style transfer algorithms apply design concepts to existing photographs with surprising accuracy.

The question for luxury practitioners is not whether AI will change the interior design process but which changes represent genuine improvement and which represent dangerous shortcuts. D&J Concepts evaluates AI tools against a specific criterion: does the tool increase design quality, or does it merely increase design speed?

AI excels at generating conceptual variations during early design phases. A designer exploring color palette options can produce thirty variations in the time that manual rendering produces three. This acceleration of ideation is genuinely valuable because it allows designers to explore more possibilities before committing to a direction. AI also excels at generating client-facing presentations for preliminary concepts, where photographic accuracy matters less than directional intent.

Where AI currently fails is in the precision that luxury execution demands. An AI rendering that positions furniture approximately where it belongs is adequate for conceptual discussion. A construction document that positions furniture approximately where it belongs produces a room that does not quite work. The gap between “approximately” and “precisely” is where professional design expertise lives, and AI has not yet closed that gap for bespoke residential projects where every dimension is custom.

The Constant Through Every Era

From Elrod’s Palm Canyon Drive studio to Chase’s structured reveals to Visual Clarity renderings, the interior design process has evolved continuously. Yet it serves one unchanging purpose: helping clients understand what their investment will produce before that investment becomes irreversible.

Elrod did it through personal conviction. Chase did it through systematic presentation. Hornung does it through visual precision. AI tools will do it through computational speed. Each generation’s contribution solved the specific limitation that constrained the previous generation’s approach. Elrod’s charisma could not scale. Similarly, Chase’s material boards could not achieve photographic accuracy. And digital rendering could not generate variations quickly enough for comprehensive exploration. AI addresses each prior limitation while introducing its own: computational confidence without material expertise, visual fluency without spatial wisdom, speed without the judgment that experience develops over decades.

Architectural Digest features the world’s finest interiors, and every one of them was designed by a human being who understood things about space, material, and daily life that no algorithm can yet replicate. The interior design process will continue evolving. However, the need for experienced practitioners to guide that process will not diminish. It will become more valuable as AI makes adequate design accessible to everyone and exceptional design remains the province of professionals who understand why “approximately right” and “precisely right” produce fundamentally different rooms.

Start Your Design Conversation

D&J Concepts brings 25 years of luxury residential design experience to every project. The Method of Visual Clarity ensures your vision is resolved before construction begins. Contact Social Life Magazine for features, advertising, or partnership inquiries. Visit polohamptons.com for event tickets and sponsorship opportunities.

Subscribe to Social Life Magazine for ongoing design intelligence. Join our email list for exclusive content. Support independent Hamptons journalism with a $5 contribution.

Read more: The Visual Clarity Method in Luxury Design and Chase Served Champagne at Reveals. We Do This.

David Hornung co-founded D&J Concepts in 2001 after training under Interior Design Hall of Fame inductee Steve Chase in Los Angeles. From Southampton headquarters, D&J serves clients across the Hamptons, Manhattan, Palm Beach, and Southern California. A member of the Society of Design Administration, Hornung brings 25 years of luxury residential design experience to every project. Discover the Visual Clarity Method at dandjconcepts.com.