Where the estate disagrees

6 repositories independently built a vocabulary for what a room looks like. None of them knew about the others. Between them they carry 164 terms across 10 separate dictionaries, in 135 distinct spellings.

Only 15 of those spellings appear in more than one repository, after folding case. Yet 8 concepts are carried by every repository that speaks about their axis, and 9 in four or more.

A table of verbatim strings flatters that. Seeing rustic beside Rustic reads as two vocabularies falling out, when it is one word written twice. So each row below counts its wordings as well as its reach, folding case, hyphens and underscores away. The answer is that casing is not the story: of the 21 concepts more than one repository reaches, 1 differs only in spelling. The other 20 use genuinely different words.

The disagreement is notational rather than conceptual, but the notation is real vocabulary and not just capitalisation. That is still the argument for a canon: a crosswalk can reconcile Rustic & Artisan with rustic, and nothing can reconcile two teams who mean different things by the same word.

Every concept, and how each repository spells it

One table per axis, because a single table mixing them is sparse by construction: each repository speaks about some axes and not others, and a column of dashes reads as disagreement when it is only a different subject. Within each, rows sort by reach and cells carry the source strings verbatim, typos and stray spaces included. A short rule means that repository has nothing for it.

Where the canon refuses to answer

A crosswalk that always produces a row is a crosswalk that guesses. These 5 decline instead, and the largest is the one that matters most.

DesignShop’s room schemes carry Modern and Contemporary as separate values at almost identical volume, together 38% of its tagged schemes. The merchandisers plainly distinguish them. Nobody wrote down how. The canon mints both style.modernism and style.contemporary and maps that row to neither. Minting one term would erase a distinction the corpus demonstrates; guessing which would corrupt it either way.

What a compound decomposes into

Every one of materia’s nine scene values is a compound, and warm minimalism had to be invented twice across the estate because no vocabulary could build it from parts. These compose.

Cotswolds green cosy cottage

evokes place.region.cotswoldspalette.hue.greenmood.shelteringevokes typology.cottage

4 axes. Nothing left over.

Mexican warm minimalism

evokes place.region.mexicanpalette.temperature.warmstyle.minimalism

3 axes. Nothing left over.

sun-bleached-mediterranean

evokes place.region.mediterraneanpalette.character.fadedpalette.temperature.warmpalette.character.light

4 axes. Nothing left over.

How much of it decomposes

Measured before a single term was authored, over all 164 terms. The denominator below is 142, because 22 of the terms in these “style” vocabularies are not about style at all: they are material properties like chalky and bare query-router markers like vibe.

decompose cleanly

92.3%

irreducible residue

0

decline rather than guess

5

need an anchor as well

3

That figure is partly fitted to its own inputs, because the axes were authored after these terms were read. So every mapping also records what it cost. 65.5% decompose onto vocabulary that already existed before the test was run - vendored from materialgraph, colorscope and architizer, or already published. That is the floor, and the number worth arguing with.