The studio on her portfolio

A couple in Al Khobar are choosing an interior designer for their new flat, and two names have reached them.

One spent several years at the best-known design studio in the Eastern Province. The other has worked on her own for the same years, for clients nobody has heard of. The first gets the call before anyone has asked a single question.

It is an understandable shortcut. Everyone is busy, taste is hard to judge from a few photographs, and a well-known name feels like a summary of a person. If the studio is excellent, surely the people who passed through it are too.

But the name tells you about the studio. It says almost nothing about what this particular woman did there, whether she shaped the rooms in its brochure or ordered the fabric samples for someone who did. A studio's reputation is built by a great many people over many years. She may have added to it, or simply been in the building while it happened.

The shortcut runs the other way too. Someone who worked at a firm that later collapsed in scandal carries a stain they did nothing to earn. A small maker who once supplied a shop that closed is quietly marked down.

We do this with suppliers, with partners, with the brands we choose, and with people. The famous name on the CV, the respected store in the list of stockists, the family a person happened to be born into.

None of it is evidence. It is proximity, mistaken for merit.

The better question is slower and more awkward: what did you yourself do there, and can you show me? Good fortune belongs to the place. It does not rub off on whoever stood near it.