<p>Ariel Kaye was the person her friends called when they needed their apartment to feel like a home. Not an interior designer by training — an advertising executive by day, a compulsive home-decorator by night, the kind of person who noticed when something was wrong with a room before she could name what it was. Her friends noticed too. They kept asking her to come over and fix things.</p>
<p>She was living in New York, building brands for other people's companies, when she began to notice something that, once noticed, couldn't be unnoticed. Every client she worked with had a brand. A name people remembered. A visual identity, a story, a feeling you got when you encountered the product. But when it came to the sheets she slept on every night — something she spent a third of her life touching — there was nothing. Blank space. A category that had apparently decided it did not need to be known.</p>