Sam didn't finish his studies. He uses that absence as a working reminder: he has to try harder than people who did. Not occasionally. Constantly. It's not a wound. It's a discipline.

UNO is the firm he built after a renovation of his own went badly enough to make him think the industry could be done differently. The decision he makes most often is some version of the same one: do the right thing for the person in front of him, or do the thing that's better for the firm. A client whose expectations probably won't align with what UNO is — turn them down. A finish that's gone over budget — absorb the cost rather than ask the client to, because the original price was a promise, not a starting point. A week where the team is stretched thin — slow the pipeline. None of these are dramatic. They're small, daily, mostly invisible. They add up into the firm.

He'll tell you the rule is simple: put everyone else first, and the answer mostly falls out by itself. What he won't tell you, but is true, is that the rule started as a solution to a quieter problem. The founder seat is the lonely one. The team brings things to him; he doesn't have the same place to bring things back to. On days when he isn't sure whether the call he's making is the right one — and there are days like that — the rule is what he has instead of certainty. If the decision serves someone other than himself, he can trust it. That's enough to keep moving.

He reads constantly. Different writers, different cultures, different minds. Not to check whether his decisions were the right ones — those are usually already made by the time the book lands in his hands. He reads because the work is hard, and he wants to keep encountering people who've thought about it differently. Sometimes, weeks or months later, he'll find a passage that describes a situation he navigated alone, and recognise it. It isn't permission. It's company.

If you ask the team what Sam actually does at UNO, they'll say he clears the path. That's accurate, but not the whole picture. The shape of how he leads is from behind. Close enough that the team can feel him there, far enough back that the room sees them and not him. He takes the difficult conversation with the client so Jeselyn can keep her focus on the work. He makes sure clients understand what SY is actually doing on a project — because clients tend to underestimate her, and making things feel easy is the hardest thing of all, and if he doesn't say that out loud they won't see it. He protects Loise's confidence in the room when the trade tries to flatten it. The team's ability to do their best work depends on his ability to take on the friction that would otherwise reach them. He's chosen this. It's the job.

The thing he's still working on is the thing the work doesn't let him put down. Even when he isn't at the studio, he's thinking about the studio. The reading helps. So does getting himself out of his own head and back to the rule. Put everyone else first. It quiets the rest.

If you ask Jeselyn what she did at work today, she'll struggle to answer. The white specified for the living room read too clinical, so it got swapped for one with a touch of warmth. The carpentry on the feature wall wasn't quite symmetrical, so the joiner was asked to shift a panel two centimetres. The painting above the sofa was hung half an inch too high. None of these will end up on a punch list. All of them will end up in the room.

This is how she works — not in dramatic interventions, but in continuous small corrections, every day, on every project. Most of what makes a finished UNO space feel resolved is the cumulative weight of Jeselyn having noticed.

The way the work moves through the studio: Sam meets the client first, listens, and comes back with the broad shape of the project — the layout, the flow, the feel. Jeselyn fills it in. The detail, the proportions, the specifications, the concept that turns a shape into a place someone could actually live. Sam fine-tunes. That rhythm is most of how we design.

Not every client comes in knowing how much proportion matters. Most discover it partway through, usually in a conversation with Jeselyn — the moment she explains why the sofa wants to be slightly lower than they thought, or why the painting needs to come down by an inch. There's a eureka in it. After that conversation, the client tends to see their own home differently for the rest of the project, and often for years after.

She trained formally — interior design, strong results — and then kept training, mostly with people who never had her credentials. Carpenters. Tilers. Site supervisors. She learned early that nothing in this line of work goes according to plan, and that the people who survive it well stay flexible without losing sight of what they were after in the first place. That's the lesson she now passes on to anyone she trains here. Not how to draw. Not how to specify. How to stay oriented when the plan breaks.

Her one tendency, which the rest of us have learned to love and occasionally interrupt, is to push for the perfect version of a design past the point where it's already good. Sam is usually the one who pulls her back. There's beauty in imperfections too, he'll say. She knows. She'll let it go for now.

When the team takes time off, she travels with her family. Seoul, Tokyo, Vietnam, Thailand — modern cities, quieter places, no particular pattern. She finds things to notice in all of them. That's just how her attention works.

Every project at UNO has a seam. On one side, the design team — concepts, proportions, the way a room should feel. On the other side, the build team — the timber that's actually in stock, the carpenter's tolerance, what's possible by next Tuesday. Most projects in this industry fail at that seam. The design gets handed over, something gets lost in translation, and the finished room is a compromise nobody chose. SY is the person who keeps that from happening. She holds both sides of the seam, in both directions, every day.

To do that, she speaks two technical languages at once. With the design team, she can talk in concept and intent. With the build team, she can talk in materials, sequences, and what will and won't hold up. The bridge between them is where projects either come together or quietly fall apart, and standing in that bridge is her job.

She also speaks several other languages, though not in the way that phrase usually means. In a single morning she'll be on the phone with an Indian contractor whose English is limited, then with a carpenter conversing in a dialect she's picked up enough of to follow, then with a supplier whose English is fully fluent. She changes register each time — tone, pace, the kind of clarity she's offering. When the gap is too wide for a question to land the way she asked it, she doesn't ask louder. She rephrases. Then she rephrases again. The burden of being understood, in her hands, belongs to the person doing the asking. That's the part very few people manage. It's also the reason contractors and tradesmen take her calls quickly.

Before UNO, she trained as a chef. People sometimes hear that and treat it as a left turn. It isn't. A kitchen is exactly where the work she does now gets trained: a creative side and a production side, both running at once, both depending on someone who can write the plan, set the sequence, and make sure each station knows what's coming next. The instruments changed. The job didn't.

A lot of what she does happens on site, in person, in real time. Most ID firms in Singapore don't actually staff this. The design team draws, the build team builds, and the seam between them gets handled by a project manager checking in by phone. We chose to put a person physically in the seam instead. SY is the person. The issues other firms discover at handover, she's catching at 9am on a Wednesday with her hand on the timber.

If something on a project is about to go sideways, she's usually already two moves ahead of it. If something has gone sideways, she's the one who's already on the phone. The team doesn't always see how much she's caught — the catches are quiet by design — but the projects feel it.

The thing the rest of us watch her on is that she takes on too much. She decides, quietly, that if someone needs help she'll be the one to help them — clients, contractors, suppliers, the team. Most days she pulls it off. Some weeks she pulls it off at her own expense. We've learned to pry things out of her hands before she'll volunteer to put them down.

Outside of UNO, she runs a disciplined life — regular exercise, the kind that doesn't get skipped for a busy week. She also loves food. Not in a polite, restaurant-list way. She's after the good stuff, the indulgent stuff, the meal that earns its place in the week. There's a logic to it. She spends her working hours holding many things together for many people. What she's built outside is the freedom to take very good care of one thing — herself — properly.

Loise is the youngest of us. She came to UNO from a larger firm across the causeway — a place that ran on profit and didn't have much time for nurturing the people doing the work. She arrived with a First-Class Honours degree and quieter about her own opinions than her work deserved. Most of her first year here was about rebuilding that.

Before she joined, our first drafts to clients were mostly 2D — elevations, top-downs, the kind of drawings a client either could read or, more often, politely pretended they could. There were always moments later in the project where an assumption had been made on one side or the other, and we'd be unpicking it. Loise quietly changed that. She brought SketchUp into the way we present, so the first time a client sees their space, they're seeing it, not interpreting it. The flow between rooms, the proportions, the reasons we keep returning to the same conversations about space planning — all of it becomes legible in a way 2D never quite let it be. Most of the misalignments that used to surface at the build stage now get resolved in the conversation around her screen, weeks earlier. A small structural shift in how the firm communicates, from the newest person in the room. We let it.

When the space planning isn't quite right and a layout needs to be redone, she takes it without bitterness. Jeselyn sits with her through it. Loise treats each redo as a calibration of her own sense — this didn't work because of this, the way it needs to work is this. That's the right relationship to have with iteration in this work, and not everyone arrives with it. She did.

There's a way that some people are warm because they want to be liked, and a way that others are warm because they actually like the people in front of them. Loise is the second kind. She doesn't lean on being the youngest or the newest as a reason to give less. She gives all of it, on every brief, including the ones a less serious person would coast through. Clients feel it. So does the team.

The thing she's still building is her presence. She's soft-spoken, and the trade she works in — contractors, tradesmen, site supervisors — sometimes reads soft-spoken as indecisive. It isn't. She knows what she thinks. The work is in making sure the room knows it too. She's getting there, project by project, and the rest of us watch the progress with a particular kind of attention.

She's the eldest of three. She's also the one her mother wants to see regularly, and have meals with, and check in on. That's not a coincidence.