A long walk with a mentor prompted Tommy Zung to stop trying to educate his clients and focus instead on telling them what they need to know.

Can one word make a project go haywire? In Tommy Zung’s case, the answer was yes—and the word was angles.

The founder and principal of New York–based multidisciplinary design firm Studio Zung was working on a Manhattan duplex with some unique spatial challenges. The best way to address them was with a curved, seashell-shaped staircase. The problem was that, over the course of an extremely detailed presentation, the client had gotten fixated on the idea that the style of the project was “modern,” and that “modern” meant “angles.”