Do You Need An Interior Designer Or A Marriage Counsellor?

My husband James and I are decorating our new vacation house in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and have taken on so much more than we can chew that we’re choking…mostly because I’ve been a rude co-designer. Years of writing about decorating have turned me into the Joan Rivers of home décor, minus the comedy.

He wants wood, leather and black metal. If I don’t get white upholstery, one too many throw pillows and patterns as dainty as the pinnules on a maidenhair fern, I will perish.

When James texts me an image of a chair or light to consider, it’s often more masculine than I can bear—and I’ll text too brusquely why I hate it. My behaviour is not OK, especially because my spouse is one of the kindest souls on earth.

I’m not the only person whose style clashes with her partner’s as painfully as pink paisley and tartan plaid. “Disagreements between couples on residential projects is the leading reason our studio decided three years ago to pursue more hospitality and commercial projects,” said Dallas, Texas, designer Jean Liu. “Maybe we were unlucky, but we realized how unequipped we are to handle marital strife.”

It wouldn’t hurt an interior designer to bone up on strategies for couples-conflict resolution. In a 2021 survey by Houzz, a website and online community dedicated to home improvement and decorating, 11% of the couples among the 75,470 U.S. respondents declared they found it challenging to work with their spouse on a renovation. In the Houzz U.K. 2022 Renovations and Relationships Survey, 16% of 1,250 respondents said they considered separating during the renovation process.

When it comes to cohabitated spaces, the stakes are high, in part because your home is “an expression of who you are and your personality,” said Boston family therapist Terrence Real, author of “Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship” (Goop Press, 2022).

Los Angeles designer Kevin Klein has found that when working with couples, disagreements are as unavoidable as shipping delays. Consequently, during initial consultations, Mr. Klein asks clients how they’ll handle any impasse that might arise. “They always look at me cross-eyed, like ‘What are you talking about?’ But that moment inevitably comes six months down the line, when we’re doing relationship counselling rather than designing.”

Real-estate developers Ilana and David Duel credit Mr. Klein for steering them through their own renovation harmoniously. “It’s really hard between husband and wife to make decisions,” said Ms. Duel. “You can spend hours and hours on just the tile.” She longed for an all-white house with light wood floors, while Mr. Duel and Mr. Klein sought to maintain the 1930s abode’s Spanish character.

Today, such unlikely roommates as a boxy, white marble coffee table—a nod to her taste—and drippy Murano crystal sconces—a reflection of Mr. Duel’s—are shacked up happily in the couple’s living room. “If you decide to hire a designer, know that they’re much better at designing than you are,” she said.

In case you don’t have the coin to take on a personal interiors pro, video design consultations offered by websites like the Expert, billed by the hour, can yield affordable tiebreaker advice. Decorist’s new service, for example, lets you book a 30-minute Zoom session with a pro for $59.

Whether hiring an expert or going it alone, Mr. Klein recommends you set up “office hours,” as he puts it. “When you come home after a long day, you don’t want to address these design decisions,” he said. “It’s not sexy; it doesn’t feel right.” Dedicating specific chunks of time to the process, periods when you’re both well-rested, is a better way to hear the other person’s side, he says, “than while you’re sitting in bed together watching TV.”

Another sanity-saving strategy: Choose décor that’s easily swappable. When Los Angeles designer Rydhima Brar’s client sought a swashbuckling 1970s-inspired graphic wallpaper, her other half didn’t find it shagadelic. The peace offering? Removable wallpaper they could switch out if he still balked down the line. Ultimately, he was into it.

Pictures, in these situations, are worth a thousand exhausting negotiations. “Most people don’t have the vocabulary to define their style,” said New York City designer Rozit Arditi. Gray Walker, a designer in Charlotte, N.C., often asks client couples to “pin” images of things they like on Pinterest boards, an easy ask, and then seek compromise with the help of those visual aids. “I have found that hearing both parties and giving each person a bit of what they want is the way to go without conflict,” she said.

For the living room of her clients’ 1930s Georgian revival home in Charlotte, Ms. Walker navigated warring aesthetics by acknowledging each—installing a Chinese screen and timeworn Oushak rug for him, an antique obsessive, and a bergère upholstered in faux fur as well as a minimal brick-red-velvet sofa for her, a fan of all things modern.

Seeking middle ground can lead to unexpected dynamism. When he first met his husband, Atlanta designer Vern Yip gravitated toward clean lines and Asian antiques. But his husband “brought a lot of European antiques into the picture that I never wanted and always felt kind of claustrophobic around,” Mr. Yip said. The happy medium they found was far from middle-of-the-road. “He had this dining table that had a ton of carvings. It was really well made but very old European. And we paired it with these Brno chairs—black leather and chrome—and it just sang, you know? They gave each other space.”

Pulling a common nostalgic thread from a pair of clients’ pasts helped PJCArchitecture find a design detente for the couple’s lakeside second home in Indian Lake, N.Y. Rob Maher, a retired Metropolitan Opera chorus member, asked for something resembling a Japanese tea house, while his wife, Deborah Allton-Maher, a retired Metropolitan Opera dancer and attorney, longed for the lusciously loggy cabin in the 1981 film “On Golden Pond.” After learning that the couple had toured Japan several times, the New York City architects found consensus in a shared memory of shou sugi ban (charred wood), a common feature of the country’s temples. The bridging fix: The architects sided a modern Adirondack pitched-roof house with the material. “We loved it,” said Ms. Allton-Maher.

Therapist Mr. Real’s bottom line: “You can bully your way and get what you want in the short run. But you’ll breathe in that solution in the long run, in your partner’s resentment,” he said. “If you frame it as a power struggle in which one of you wins and the other one loses, you both lose.”

I didn’t want my husband and I both to lose, so I (mostly) quit being a tyrant. I relented on two of James’s desires, a pair of leather-and-walnut chairs and channel-tufted leather bar stools. And you know what? They look great next to my white bouclé sofa and the Deco-ish barrel armchairs I chose in a cinnamon velvet—and I think they’re all destined to live happily ever after.

Charles Gasparino is a gladiatorial journalist. When he steps into the arena to fight a money-man or enterprise that he believes is anticapitalist or crooked, he can be brutal. Making an enemy of him is not for the faint-hearted: Watch him trade insults with his critics on social media. He was once a Wall Street reporter for this newspaper, where editors and colleagues remember him for his no-holds-barred style. Which is precisely how we’d describe the approach in “Go Woke, Go Broke,” Mr. Gasparino’s blistering account of “how corporate America became something close to a foot soldier in the progressive movement.” Now a senior correspondent at the Fox Business Network, Mr. Gasparino is also a columnist at the New York Post, whose irreverent, indignant (and often irresistible) tabloid style is very much in evidence here. (Fox, the Post and the Journal share common ownership.)

“Go Woke, Go Broke” is a takedown of “corporate wokeness,” which Mr. Gasparino describes as the “noxious ideology of progressive politics in the boardroom”—an ideology, he says, that “needs to die a thousand deaths.” The book can be seen as a demotic complement to “Woke, Inc.” (2021), by the brainy (and sometimes tiresome) former Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy. Mr. Gasparino’s is the better book for its plainspokenness: Many more Middle Americans—whose jobs have been outsourced or have been imperiled by the high-minded dictates of “diversity”—will grasp its message. These are the people who, Mr. Gasparino argues, have been shafted by the Wall Street “fat cats” who’ve grown “much fatter” by their “feeding at the ESG trough.”

ESG stands for “environmental, social, and governance”—metrics intended to direct or funnel investment in an ostensibly socially responsible direction. Mr. Gasparino is a populist-capitalist, and ESG is his bête noire, along with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). These “leftist shibboleths” have, the author says, “warped” American business practices for nearly two decades and grew in intensity under the second Obama administration.

Mr. Gasparino traces the roots of ESG to the 1980s and ’90s, when business leaders began embracing so-called corporate social responsibility (or CSR, in its now archaic abbreviation). CSR, in time, evolved into bien-pensant notions of stakeholder capitalism, championed by the likes of Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Davos Man, writes Mr. Gasparino, “represents the ultimate marriage of the progressive globalist corporate citizen with the globalist progressive regulatory bureaucrat.”

All this performatively moral investing is a revolt against Milton Friedman, the economist who in 1970 stated that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” Friedman, writes Mr. Gasparino, would have hated ESG and DEI, “among the most heinously anti-American management philosophies ever developed.” (Readers of Mr. Gasparino’s robust book will realize pretty quickly that nuance is for wimps.)

Basing his book largely on a host of interviews with “company insiders,” Mr. Gasparino gives us entertaining (and informative) accounts of corporate blunders in the name of wokeness. He reminds us of the time AB InBev—the holding company for Anheuser-Busch and its beer, Budweiser—thought it would be a great idea to use a “transwoman influencer” named Dylan Mulvaney to market its top-selling Bud Light. Middle America revolted and stopped buying the beer, heretofore branded as a manly beverage. Mr. Gasparino also recounts how the discount retailer Target was punished by consumers for promoting “tuck-friendly bathing suits for men transitioning to women” alongside rainbow-colored onesies for toddlers. And Disney, recalls the author, erred politically and financially when its chief executive, Bob Chapek, embarked on a bruising battle with Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis and challenged the validity of a state law barring public schools from teaching sexual education to children before the fourth grade. In each case, the company’s stock price tanked and sales plummeted.

It enrages Mr. Gasparino that America’s corporate management luxuriates “in progressive causes as a side hustle.” But in some cases, he tells us, these causes are the main course. Among the villains trying to ram ESG down our throats are Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock; Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase; David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs; and the “ESG-obsessed” Gary Gensler, President Biden’s chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whom Mr. Gasparino describes as “a male version” of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, “among the most woke, annoying, and . . . dangerous bureaucrats in government.” Add to the list Adena Friedman, the CEO of Nasdaq, which demands that companies seeking to list on its exchange disclose board-level diversity statistics and, if the need arises, explain why they don’t have a diversity of directors. Such demands aren’t, of course, slapped on Chinese companies, which are, Mr. Gasparino points out, curiously exempt from all the wokest rules. When was the last time a Chinese company was asked why it didn’t have a Uyghur on its board, or an LGBTQ+ person?

Attacking Larry Fink as “Mr. ESG,” says Mr. Gasparino, has become “a rallying cry on the populist right,” whose backlash against corporate wokeness has been so fierce that even BlackRock has started to dismount from its moral high horse. Consumers’ Research, a conservative advocacy group pushing back against ESG, derides the abbreviation as “elitists, socialists, and grifters,” as well as “erasing savings and growth”—pungent and effective put-downs. More and more investors are aware that ESG-specific funds are expensive and rarely beat the market. In fact, writes Mr. Gasparino, “they’re some of the worst investments,” even as they make it harder to tackle inflation by forcing curbs on fossil fuels. But Middle America appears to have woken up to the perils of ESG and is giving voice to its displeasure. “It’s now their Arab Spring,” says Mr. Gasparino. This may be hyperbolic overreach, even for the crusading Mr. Gasparino, but he’s confident that America’s version of a grassroots people’s revolt will end better than the one in the Middle East. Let’s pray he’s right.

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society.

Do You Need An Interior Designer Or A Marriage Counsellor?

Interior designers often employ therapy-like techniques to find stylish compromises for clients with warring aesthetics.

Charles Gasparino of Fox Business excoriates the progressive pieties that dominate the modern boardroom.