place by pcp

The middle of an interior-design project is strangely difficult to see.

A product may begin as a browser tab, move into a WhatsApp thread, appear on a Pinterest board, enter a spreadsheet, and eventually become a line in a presentation. The image, price, room, status, client reaction, and design rationale rarely remain connected.

That fragmentation creates work for the designer and uncertainty for the client. Links disappear. Decisions lose context. Budgets become stale. The client sees polished presentations but not the living process that produced them.

I built place by pcp to make that process visible, organized, and collaborative without reducing it to a project-management dashboard.

The central product decision was to recognize that inspiration and selection are related, but they are not the same activity.

A moodboard is emotional, associative, and unfinished. A product registry is structured, financial, and increasingly consequential. Combining them into one interface would make the moodboard feel administrative and the registry feel imprecise.

I therefore designed two connected modes.

Design communication does not consist only of formal approvals.

Clients send Instagram posts, Pinterest links, videos, products, observations, and half-formed ideas. These fragments are often useful, but they become difficult to interpret once they are separated from the room or decision that prompted them.

The Notes & Links layer keeps that informal communication inside the project.

Users can share a URL, add a note, associate it with a room, react, and reply directly to a message. The feature is intentionally lightweight. It is not meant to replace every form of communication; it is meant to keep design-specific communication attached to the design work.

Studio is deliberately less dense than Selections.

At rest, the interface gives priority to the images. Product and reference metadata appears only when it becomes useful, keeping the room's atmosphere from being overwhelmed by labels and controls.

Inspiration can be uploaded directly or added through a URL. Items already marked as inspiration in Selections can also surface inside Studio, while promising Studio items can move into the purchasing workflow.

The background adapts to the imagery within the selected room, allowing each space to develop its own visual tone.

place by pcp was built for one trusted residential project, and some of its current choices reflect that scale.

The present build uses lightweight persistent access appropriate to a small known user group. A multi-client commercial product would require stronger authentication, project-level data isolation, more formal permission enforcement, and a client-distribution system for the extension.

That boundary is intentional and visible. The prototype was designed to prove the workflow before investing in platform infrastructure.

Building place by pcp taught me that product architecture mattered more than adding features. The value came from connecting capture, room organization, collaboration, budget, and procurement into one coherent path, not creating another place to save beautiful objects. AI helped me move faster as an engineering collaborator, but the product strategy still depended on deciding what the system should make easier.