Chase Served Champagne at Reveals. We Do This.

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

Steve Chase is dead. His method is not. The Interior Design Hall of Fame inductee who transformed client presentations into champagne-fueled transformations left behind more than beautiful rooms. He left a principle that D&J Concepts has spent 25 years evolving: the design client presentation is not where you show options. It is where you eliminate doubt. Every renovation that stalls, every budget that spirals, every client relationship that fractures can be traced to a single failure point. Someone showed choices when they should have shown clarity.

David Hornung learned this firsthand in Los Angeles, watching Chase orchestrate reveals that left clients speechless. Not because the rooms were expensive. Because the rooms were right. That distinction, between impressive and inevitable, is what separates a competent design client presentation from one that actually changes outcomes.

The Original Method: What Chase Actually Did

Chase’s process was deceptively simple. He would complete an entire installation before the client saw anything. Furniture placed. Art hung. Lighting calibrated. Then he would invite the client home for cocktails, open a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and walk them through each room as though narrating a story. The champagne was not decorative. It served a specific purpose: to slow the room down. To shift the client’s nervous system from evaluation mode to experience mode.

This matters more than most designers acknowledge. Neuroscience research published in Harvard Business Review confirms what Chase intuited: decision fatigue degrades judgment. Clients who are asked to approve 47 fabric samples, 12 stone options, and 8 lighting fixtures in a single meeting do not make better choices. They make exhausted ones. Chase solved this by removing the decision entirely. He made the decision. The client experienced the result.

Of course, that level of trust required extraordinary skill. Chase earned it through years of delivering rooms that clients could not have imagined on their own. His material palette, his lighting instincts, his spatial intuition were calibrated by decades of practice. The champagne reveal was not arrogance. It was earned confidence, backed by a track record that included some of the most important residential interiors in America.

Why the Old Model Broke

Chase operated in an era before Pinterest, before Instagram, before every client arrived at the first meeting with 400 saved images and strong opinions about unlacquered brass. The modern luxury client is more informed and simultaneously more overwhelmed than any previous generation of homeowners. They have access to every material, every finish, every designer’s portfolio. Paradoxically, this abundance makes clarity harder to achieve, not easier.

The traditional design client presentation, a mood board with fabric swatches and a few hand sketches, cannot bridge that gap. Neither can a digital slideshow of comparable projects. These tools show possibility. They do not show resolution. A client looking at a mood board for a $5 million Hamptons renovation is still imagining. They need to be seeing.

Additionally, the stakes have escalated. Material costs have risen dramatically since Chase’s era. Lead times for custom fabrication can extend to nine months. A wrong decision on stone selection at the $15 million level does not just cost money. It costs a season. For Hamptons homeowners who measure their year in 16 summer weekends, that loss is irreplaceable.

The Visual Clarity Method: Chase’s Principle, Modern Tools

D&J Concepts’ Method of Visual Clarity preserves Chase’s foundational insight while adapting it for contemporary practice. Instead of completing an installation sight-unseen, the firm creates magazine-quality visual presentations that render the finished environment with photographic precision before any construction begins. Every material, every finish, every piece of furniture is shown in context, at scale, in the specific light conditions of the actual space.

The technical execution draws on David Hornung’s 25 years of experience and Jason’s background in landscape architecture and graphic design. Presentations integrate interior and exterior views, showing how a kitchen renovation connects to garden sight lines, how a living room material palette responds to the light that enters from a specific orientation at a specific time of day. This full-property approach is D&J’s evolution of what Chase achieved in individual rooms.

More importantly, the method preserves Chase’s commitment to decisiveness. Clients are not shown three options and asked to choose. They are shown one fully resolved vision and asked to respond. The conversation shifts from selection to confirmation. That shift, subtle as it sounds, eliminates the cascading indecision that derails most luxury renovation timelines.

Case Study: The Farrell Building Approach

D&J Concepts’ partnership with the Farrell Building developer validated the Visual Clarity Method at scale. Multiple units required consistent design language while accommodating individual buyer preferences. The traditional approach, letting each buyer make independent choices from a catalog, would have produced visual chaos. Instead, D&J created comprehensive visual presentations for each unit that showed buyers exactly what their finished space would look like.

The results confirmed Chase’s principle. Buyers who saw fully rendered presentations made faster decisions, requested fewer changes during construction, and reported higher satisfaction with their finished units. The presentations did not limit creativity. They focused it. When a buyer wanted to modify a material choice, the conversation happened around a specific, contextualized image rather than an abstract swatch. Consequently, modifications were targeted and purposeful rather than anxious and scattered.

The Presentation as Design Investment

Luxury homeowners sometimes question the investment in a comprehensive design client presentation. The answer is arithmetic. A Visual Clarity presentation for a $3 million renovation typically costs a fraction of what a single wrong stone selection would require to correct. The presentation fee is not an expense. It is insurance against the decisions that transform a 12-month project into an 18-month one.

Elle Decor’s coverage of Hamptons renovation trends has consistently highlighted the relationship between upfront planning investment and final outcome quality. Designers who present resolved visions rather than menus of options deliver projects closer to budget, closer to timeline, and closer to the emotional experience clients originally envisioned. Chase knew this intuitively. D&J Concepts has spent 25 years proving it empirically.

The champagne is optional. The clarity is not. Steve Chase built his reputation on the understanding that a client who sees their future home with total precision becomes a collaborator rather than a critic. That principle has survived the transition from Palm Springs mid-century to Hamptons coastal vernacular, from hand-drawn renderings to digital visualization, from a single designer’s intuition to a firm’s systematic methodology. The tools evolve. The truth endures.

See Your Project Before It Begins

D&J Concepts offers the Visual Clarity Method to homeowners undertaking luxury renovations across the Hamptons, Manhattan, and Palm Beach. To discuss how a fully resolved design presentation can transform your project timeline and outcome, contact the team. For Polo Hamptons event sponsorship and tickets, visit polohamptons.com.

Subscribe to Social Life Magazine for ongoing coverage of Hamptons design, architecture, and luxury living. Join our email list for exclusive content. Print subscriptions are available. Support independent luxury journalism with a $5 contribution. For more on D&J’s proprietary methodology, read The Visual Clarity Method in Luxury Design and Steve Chase: The Mentor Behind Visual Clarity.