This is the second post in my Know Your Type series on the four collector types I’ve identified through years of advisory work. If you missed the first one on the Venturist collector, start there.

There is a moment I have watched happen like it’s Groundhog Day — and it tells me immediately that I’m looking at a Design-Forward Collector. They walk into a gallery or a fair booth, stop in front of a work, and before they’ve spent more than ten seconds with it, they say — sometimes out loud, sometimes just with their body — “I don’t know where I’d put that.”

That’s the Design-Forward Collector. And before I say anything else, I want to say this clearly: there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting art that looks good in your home. I have said it before and I will keep saying it. It’s okay for the art to match the couch, or not match the couch, whichever way your interior design swings. The art world has spent decades making people feel lesser for caring about how a work looks in their living room, and I think that’s one of the most damaging things it has done to its own future.

So this is not a post about why you should stop caring about how your art collection lives in your interior design schema.

It’s a post about what you might be doing before you even get to the walls.

The Design-Forward Collector has genuine skills that more intellectually driven collectors often lack. They think spatially. They curate instinctively — mixing media, varying scale, understanding that a room full of paintings on canvas is not very interesting. They are drawn to beauty and coherence and what I’d call a spatial story: the way objects in a room speak to each other, create tension, and establish a mood. Some of the most considered collections I’ve ever seen belong to Design-Forward Collectors. They understand that art lives in the world, not in a white cube, and that the experience of living with work every day is as important as the experience of encountering it for the first time.

They are also the ones who often approach an art fair with their Pinterest board in hand, trying to match a specific spatial vision with what is available to buy right now.

They are often the collectors the art world looks down on most. And I want to acknowledge something uncomfortable here: I have contributed to that problem.

Like most advisors who work on beautiful projects, I post the beautiful projects. The stunning living rooms, the carefully considered installations, the spaces where art and architecture and interior design have come together in a way that makes you want to sit down and never leave. I post these because they’re beautiful and because the algorithm rewards them and because, honestly, they’re what a lot of people want to see. But what I’m inadvertently doing — what we’re all inadvertently doing — is creating a visual culture that tells new collectors this is what collecting looks like. And so they go out into the world trying to replicate an image they saw on Instagram rather than trying to understand what they actually respond to.

It’s a vicious cycle and I’m part of it. I’m naming that because I think it’s worth naming.

Here’s what the Design-Forward Collector does brilliantly: they bring taste and intention to the spatial experience of living with art. These three artists are in The Collection for exactly that reason — they reward the Design-Forward eye while also checking the harder boxes.

Eve Ackroyd’s The Evening Before — a figure withdrawn against a field of deep red, painted with subtle psychological intensity — works for them because it has a clear emotional temperature that anchors a room without dominating it. The color story is strong but livable, the scale is considered, and there’s a melancholy in it that deepens over time.

Kristen Giorgi’s Mirror Field works for them because it’s atmospheric and geometric at once, soft and structured in equal measure, and the color palette is just bright enough to bring warmth to a room but not overly saturated or saccharine. It is the kind of painting that changes depending on the light and the hour, which makes it endlessly livable.

Lana Kova’s Totem III works for them because it breaks the tyranny of the rectangular painting — organic, textural, wall-mounted forms that create rhythm and shadow in a way that a flat canvas never could.

These are not compromises. These are genuinely strong works that also happen to live beautifully. That’s not a lower bar. That’s a harder one.

But here’s what the Design-Forward Collector sometimes does before any of this: they edit.

They look at a work and decide — in seconds, before the work has had a chance to speak — that it doesn’t go anywhere. That it’s too much, too difficult, too something. And in doing so they eliminate entire categories of experience from their consideration before taste even enters the equation.

Take Vaughn Davis Jr.’s sculptural paintings. Canvas and cardboard torn, painted, and cascading off the wall onto the floor in colors that are simultaneously beautiful and aggressive. A Design-Forward Collector looks at this and thinks: where would that even go? And I understand that response. It refuses to be contained. It won’t stay flat. It demands not just wall space but floor space and airspace and a certain willingness to let the work be uncomfortable in the room.

But what they’re walking past is a work that is asking something profound about the human process of becoming and unbecoming — the way we as people change and morph and become our truest selves with everything that happens to us. Living with that question every day changes how you think about everything you’ve hung on every other wall. That’s not a decoration. That’s a conversation partner.

Or consider Heekyoung Jeon, whose luminous blue and green landscape paintings a Design-Forward Collector might dismiss as too saturated, too exuberant, too much. And here’s where it gets interesting — because that’s not a spatial judgment. That’s an aesthetic one. They’re not saying it won’t fit the room. They’re saying it won’t fit their idea of what good taste looks like. Which means they are capable of making that distinction. They just apply it inconsistently: they’ll accept quiet decorative work without interrogating it, and reject loud challenging work without interrogating that either.

What Jeon’s paintings actually are is joyful in a way that takes genuine artistic confidence to pull off. The exuberance is not naivety. It’s a position. And a collector who has trained themselves to distrust joy in painting because the art world has taught them that serious art is restrained art is a collector who has let someone else’s taste override their own.

Here’s the thing about the Design-Forward Collector that I want to leave you with.

The room is not the point. The room is the context. And there is a difference.

The best collections I’ve seen in beautifully designed homes are not the ones where every work was chosen to complement the space. They’re the ones where the space was slowly, sometimes reluctantly, organized around the works. Where a collector fell in love with something that didn’t go anywhere and then figured out how to make it go somewhere. Where the art shaped the room rather than the room shaping the art.

That’s a different way of collecting. It starts not with the wall but with the work. Not with “where would I put this” but with “what is this doing to me.” And once you start asking that second question — even as a Design-Forward Collector, even knowing that you care deeply about how your home looks and feels — you find that the works you end up with are both more beautiful and more meaningful than anything you would have chosen by starting with the room.

It’s okay to want art that looks good in your house. It’s okay to want art that tells your personal story. In this case, you can have your cake and eat it too.

There is a particular kind of art collector who walks into a booth and knows within ten seconds. Not because they’ve done the research or read the wall text or recognized the gallery name. Because something in the work is alive in a way that everything around it isn’t. They feel it before they can explain it, and they trust that feeling in a way that more cautious collectors never quite manage.

I call this collector type the Venturist. And in my experience, they build some of the most exciting collections I’ve ever seen. This is the person who, in 20 years, you’ll be asking, “How did you know to buy that then?!”

They also build some of the most disappointing ones.

Here’s the thing about following energy: energy is real, but it isn’t always the same thing as quality. What feels electric in the booth — the rawness, the unrest, perhaps the slightly unresolved quality, the sense that you’re seeing something nobody else has noticed yet — can feel thin on the wall six months later. Not because your instinct was wrong. But because instinct alone doesn’t always tell you what’s actually there versus what you wanted to be there.

Typically, the Venturist is drawn to novelty above everything else. And novelty is one of the four criteria I use to evaluate whether a work has staying power, so there’s nothing wrong with leading with it. The problem is when novelty becomes the only question. When the thrill of seeing something you’ve never seen before crowds out the harder questions: Is this artist grounded in something more substantive than a strong visual idea? Does the work know where it sits in a larger conversation? Is the craft in service of a concept, or is the concept papering over the absence of craft?

To put it in really cliché terms, a Venturist would have loved Jackson Pollock. No one had ever splattered paint (and pee and all sorts of other liquids) on a canvas the way he did. BUT the key is that it wasn’t splatter paint for splatter paint’s sake. It was splatter paint in service of turning the hierarchy of art history on its head, shaking it around a few times, and then chucking it out the window. It was shattering every rule, every truth, every principle into has many unrecognizable shards as possible and then seeing if there was a new way to piece it back together. Concept met craft and transformed into contemporary art. (Ok, all you art historians, do not @ me with Lee Krasner, right now. I know she did it first but I am trying to illustrate a point here.)

Without those questions, you end up with a collection full of glitter and graffiti and young energy that doesn’t resolve. Work that was exciting at the fair and restless on the wall. Smoke and mirrors that looked like vision in the moment.

That’s the Venturist’s blind spot. And it isn’t a character flaw — it’s a calibration problem.

The artists who genuinely deserve a Venturist’s attention are the ones who satisfy both impulses: they stop you with something you’ve never seen before, and they reward you when you look and think harder.  I’ll highlight three artists from The Collection that do just this. Tom Jean Webb does this. His work has an immediate visual electricity — you feel it before you understand it — but the longer you spend with it the more you find. There’s a conceptual architecture underneath the surface energy that gives the work somewhere to go. Sachi Moskowitz is similar — her ceramics feels alive, relevant and slightly irreverent in the best way, but that irreverence is intentional, not accidental. She’s asking questions the work is designed to hold open, not questions she hasn’t figured out how to answer yet. Grace DeGennaro rewards the Venturist eye with something that feels genuinely singular — a visual language you think you recognize but realize you can’t resolve on your own without knowing more about how she thinks and views the world around her. The practice is grounded in a sustained investigation that gives the work weight beyond its novelty.

These are the artists a Venturist should be looking at. Not because they’re safe bets but because the risk is undergirded by substance rather than cosmetics.

Here’s the bottom line, if you take nothing else away. The question worth asking before you commit is NOT whether you feel something, NOT even whether you’ve seen anything like it before. But what’s actually sustaining the feeling. Is it the work itself — its intelligence, its intentionality, its awareness of what it’s doing and why — or is it the thrill of the discovery? Those are different things. They lead to different collections. And only one of them holds up over time.

I work with Venturist collectors not to take the risk away. The risk is the whole point. But to make sure the risks you take are the ones worth taking.

The Venturist is one of four collector types I’ve identified. Next week: The Design-Forward Collector.