The best interior designers can bend the laws of physics; they create great beauty with seemingly very little and make it look easy. At least, that’s how it may appear to their clients. Ironically the harder we work the easier it can look, if we’re doing it right! The ability to handle all the tricky unseen stuff is one of the many reasons clients turn to professional interior designers; to take all those spinning plates off their hands and in return, deliver a beautiful, functional home. This isn’t to say that clients don’t get a say in the creative process. They get to sign off on how a space will function, look, and cost. As a result, the client will only experience the “pretty” stuff; concept boards, renderings, images of furniture and material samples, a few decisions during the construction process, and then finally the actual space.
However, that hidden unseen stuff takes up 80% of the whole project! I’m talking problem-solving, negotiating, producing hundreds of drawings of furniture and architectural details, ordering, more problem-solving, checking, communicating with every trade and every supplier, mediating, chasing, organising, and did I mention problem-solving? And when you’re done with all that, you’ve got to go back and fix any problems that will inevitably pop up. Yes, the “pretty” 20% is important, but it’s how you handle the hidden 80% that will determine your legacy.
A well-designed project should always be thoroughly planned out; this is how we do it at Karina Fisun Interiors...
First, we want to get to know you! As it’s our first date, we’ll take you out for coffee near our studio, or have a complimentary discovery call over Zoom. We want to know what you’re looking to have done in your home and we need to know what we’re getting into - so we can figure out the size of the project. This is when we’ll talk about your ideal budget for your home, and of course, we’re here to help you work out all the potential costs - if you go to our contact page and leave your details, we’ll send you our helpful, ‘How Much Will My Refurbishment Cost’ sheet. But this isn’t going to be some one-sided affair; this is your opportunity to get to know us! You can ask anything you like and we’ll do our very best to answer all your questions. As this is just the first date - hopefully not the last - afterwards, we can put a detailed project scope together, which will include our deliverables, a timeline, and our design fees.
For date number two, things get a bit more exciting; we’ll do a home review consultation! I wasn’t kidding when I said ‘exciting’. This is where we’ll head to your home for a good walkthrough and gather as much information as possible - probably a good idea to put your laundry away before we arrive! This is also a chance for you to tell us what you would like to reuse within your new scheme. We’ll then have a look at any current drawn up floor plans and if blueprints don’t exist, we’ll organize for your home to be measured and drawn up. We’ll also discuss taste and aesthetics, review any imagery that you have been collecting, and we’ll do our best to answer any questions you may have about this. At this stage, we’ll have to start talking about the awkward subject of money, such as how much you’re looking to invest in this project, as this will really help to guide us when we begin making our product selections. It is important that you know what you will be comfortable spending and for us to know that we will comfortably complete this project to the client’s satisfaction. One of the benefits of hiring a professional experienced interior designer is for our clients to not only get a beautiful home, but also to have a realistic estimate of what it will cost to achieve this design. As professionals, we help our clients correctly allocate their budget and should we see that the job will cost more than what our client intends to spend at that point, then this is the best time to look at ways we can adjust the scope to fit into the desired investment. And don’t worry about taking notes; we’ll produce a brief report about everything we discussed, including our observations for the space. If the scope does need to be tweaked, we can do so at this point before we get to work on the concept.
What’s next? Well, we then gather all the helpful information you’ve given us and we get to researching! We’ll look at the style of your home to discover original features, your desired lifestyle, and what we feel could work best for the home to maximize its potential. We call this Concept Direction, this will include furniture floor plans that address how the spaces will function, and inspiration imagery to help us relay our design intention for your home. If possible, we will bring some sample materials to see what you think and to get your impressions of them. It’s then another tour of your home, but this time we’ll guide you through our vision for your house room by room and listen closely to your feedback on our initial ideas. The next draft will have incorporated all the design changes you may have discussed with us at this meeting. Generally, by this point, we should have a pretty clear direction for your project.
We will then move to design development, this is where we take the agreed concept and we develop it into the actual design for our client’s home. Planning applications, building control approval & listed building consent is applied for if required. We will start sourcing all the furniture, lighting, materials, we will draw up any custom millwork and produce renderings of our intent for the spaces. We love to include vintage pieces as these always help to ground the rooms. Art and accessories is another area that if our client does not have work they collect we will be working with a few galleries to suggest pieces that would match our client’s aesthetic. We will gather all the material samples and set a meeting to present everything. We will also arrange visits to showrooms to try the proposed furniture if required. What our clients don’t see is that before we present everything we would have called all the manufacturers of the proposed furniture and finishes and ensured that the products are available for the timeline we are working towards and the prices are within the agreed budget. What does happen a lot of the time that between the date of our clients agreeing to the products and the date of placing orders, weeks if not months go by and the stock situation may change, it does happen that products get sold out and then we as designers take it upon ourselves to go back and research the products again to try and find a similar item with a similar cost that are available, we get samples and present to our client to get approval for the swap out. It is our job to inform our clients of the possible problem like a delay on the whole project if we do not swap the product out for one that is readily available.
From this point, all the unseen stuff begins where you get to sit back, relax and let us take over, though we might get in touch to discuss solutions or cost implications etc. By now, we know exactly what needs doing and all the items for your home. To start, we’ll produce blueprints for your new home layouts, which the builders will use to help them with their planning. We’ll produce all the detailed drawings for bespoke furniture and have it tendered; when we tender the construction work, we need to communicate everything that is going to be built, how we want it to look and the materials used. We’ll advise the builders on where the products will be placed to ensure that they will work with the existing architecture and services. Sometimes there can be hiccups such as the contractors informing us that a particular product cannot go where we had initially wanted it due to some architectural anomaly, meaning we may have to switch out the product for something else or even change our concept for the space entirely. We try to get ahead of such problems by making sure we have looked at all the potential problems before they happen by making sure the contractors have all the necessary designs to allow them to do their jobs correctly. A meticulously planned project is a happy project!
Then comes the implementation phase, which will likely be your least favourite part - sorry. This is when construction starts and we begin placing orders. As a result, you’ll have to do a lot of waiting while parting with big chunks of money; not really anyone's idea of a good time, but trust me, it will all be worth it. We’ll be on hand to either project manage the construction or act as a support for all the contractors, where we will be in constant communication with them. Before the builder touches walls or ceilings there’s no way of knowing what is behind them or what state they are in, so we always need to work alongside them and be ready to go back to the drawing board and replan spaces or architectural details to accommodate these findings. We’ll regularly keep in touch with you over virtual or face-to-face meetings, where we’ll reassure you that everything is going smoothly and according to schedule and make sure you’re fully up-to-date with what’s going on.
If the project is happening on another continent, we keep regular checks on the building progress through the local project manager and weekly meetings. We’ll also be awarding contracts for millwork and ordering any bespoke furniture; it’s fairly standard practice that any bespoke pieces have a manufacturing lead time of between 9 to 12 weeks. We’ll be getting samples for finishes made up, which usually takes three to four rounds to get the finishes right, and we’ll be checking the shop drawings produced by the furniture manufacturers. If we find that something is not right or missing, we’ll ask for amended drawings and recheck everything. For bespoke furniture such as sofas, we’ll place purchase orders where every detail will need to be specified, from the leg colour to the fabric trim on a scatter cushion, always checking that everything is correct. When working with trade sources, you benefit from trade pricing, however that means we are financially on the line for all the products ordered, hence we always ask our clients to put down a 75% deposit for the products we order. With bespoke items, unfortunately, there is no turning back once the product is in production, as it is made specifically for you. To try and avoid any setbacks, we keep tabs on all the different furniture manufacturers, often by visiting the workrooms to examine the millwork in case we have any objections to any of the details, so it can be rectified before the order is sent out. This phase is easily the most time-consuming part of the whole project. Even seemingly simple tasks can in reality be mammoth challenges. For example, to get something as simple as a chair in a custom fabric, we need to get the fabric ordered to be shipped to the manufacturer and then ensure the manufacturer received the right fabric - sometimes the fabric supplier may send the wrong fabric to the sofa company and if that happens on our watch, we’ll absorb the costs of solving that problem - then they eventually start making the chair, and once made, we need to consolidate all the deliveries from other manufacturers and organise a receiver to pick the pieces up, check them and finally, deliver them… phew!
Finally, we move to the best part where the home is starting to look like the finished article; construction is complete, and we’ll generally do a walk through the spaces and create a snagging list of any details we would like to be touched up before the site is handed over by the contractor. We love this part as we truly feel that this is what will make a difference to the end result. Someone said that a difference between a £500K job and a £50K job is in the way the skirting board meets the wall, and I completely agree! I have seen so many examples where I walk around homes that have had hundreds of thousands spent on them, but you can see the floor of the next room when the door is closed, or the cornice has not been planned out with the shape of the ceiling in mind, or the light switches are in awkward locations, or the bedroom is big but intentionally such an awkward shape that you cannot fit a bed and furniture it needs, and the list goes on and on and on…. I almost feel that I should make my next article about things to watch out for when designing your home. This is also why as interior designers we are responsible for creating spaces, not just decorating them.
Then the delivery! We try to plan the delivery in a way so that it all happens at the same time instead of letting the companies drip-feed the furniture. We’ll be on hand to check that the correct products have been delivered and that nothing was damaged on transit. Any damages or inconsistencies will be noted down and filed with the companies accordingly. We’ll often get involved in curating the finishing touches on our client’s homes. This could be anything from getting towels and soaps for the bathrooms, visiting markets, browsing for one of a kind vintage objects or creating a list of coffee table books - it’s all about the details!
Photography is a very important step for us as designers because unless a new client is a referral, all new prospective clients like to see the type of projects we have worked on before they decide to hire us. Understandably some clients will not want their homes published and that is totally fine; we completely respect our client’s privacy and will only show their home in a printed portfolio to prospective clients. Organising a photographer requires a lot of planning as they need to be booked months in advance of the project being complete. If the dates slip, it’s likely that the photographer may not be available and need to come after the client has already moved in and started living in their home, making photographing it a lot more difficult. We’ll often hire or purchase accessories for styling purposes and the client will have the option of keeping anything they like from our photo sessions.
Note: Often clients think that the smaller the space the easier and cheaper it is to design - this is never the case! Simply put, the smaller the space, the greater the planning. For example, a cabinet door might not be able to open fully, so we need to reconsider the door design, and when it comes to making this cabinet, 1m wide or 50cm, you’re not saving on construction costs, you’re only saving on the materials. So, a smaller room will usually end up costing more per meter squared than a bigger room. Another challenge is finding the right products as we are trying to integrate the aesthetic feel for the room with function. A good example is towel radiators in small bathrooms; there are many manufacturers, but there will not be many that will have the exact right size so it doesn’t stick out too far, has the right heat output, the desired finish, and the right style, which needs to be delivered at a specific time, and all of a sudden you find yourself looking for a needle in the haystack, which at this point, seems like the easier task … I think you get the idea…
Now that you understand all the ways that we will help you ensure you end up with a beautiful and functional home, can you afford not to get an interior designer involved considering the alternatives……