Ways to work with an Interior Designer.
Can you work with an Interior Designer if you have a limited budget?
The reality is that there is a lot of work involved in fully designing the interior of a home, and that Interior Design is not a low cost service. That said, if you have a limited budget, you could still get value from a design process, by limiting the scope. For example:
Developing your brief
Before starting design work, it is important to work out what you want to achieve (and to make sure all stakeholders in the project agree with the goals). We’ve written about this in our post ‘What are your renovation goals’. If you haven’t got a well developed brief, an interior designer can act as a consultant to help you work out your goals and priorities.
Full Design, one room only
Alternatively, you could appoint an interior designer to do a full, in-depth, design service but in only one, priority, room. That could include specification of window coverings, furniture (or re-upholstery of existing furniture), floor finishes and lighting design. You could then take inspiration from this room (and the process) to make decisions elsewhere in the home.
‘Concept’ design
For whole-home design, our first two design stages are often;
1. Create a ‘Concept Board’
2. Prepare initial layouts
Usually, we do these pieces of work to help agree a direction with the client before embarking on the rest of the detail – i.e. to make sure we are all aligned on the look & feel, and to agree the major spatial decisions (e.g. to extend or not to extend?
However, they can be useful as a piece of standalone work. If you are planning to manage your own renovation, and are comfortable choosing finishes and agreeing details with builders, a concept board can be a useful tool to give you a palette to work to and to help make sure all the finishes work together. The layouts may give you new ideas about how to use your space – or give you the confidence that you aren’t missing a trick.
We wrote before about the benefits of a ‘feasibility study’ at the early stage of a renovation. This combines layout design with preparation of a budget and sometimes additional investigations to assess the practicality of the layout changes.
If budget allows, these aspects of Detailed Design can be very valuable:
Electrical plans & lighting – Some builders are happy to work without an electrical plan, but that means they will make their own decisions as to where you are having sockets, lights and switches. Since lighting has a massive impact on the final finish of a home, and badly positioned switches/ sockets can be a daily annoyance, having a properly designed electrical plan can be very valuable.
Consultation/ advice on finishes – e.g. a designer can provide feedback on your choices, or recommend suppliers for you to visit.
Designs for specific pieces of joinery
While this ‘light touch’ design approach can be valuable, it is important to understand the limitations of what a Designer can offer you if they don’t follow the whole design process. That can include:
Dealing with adjustments on site: One of the reasons we offer an integrated Design & Project Management service is that sometimes the design has to be adapted to work with the reality of what the contractors discover during strip out. When this happens, we can usually develop a good solution, armed with the context as to why the design decisions were made in the first place.
Consistency & Cohesion: If the design scope includes all finishes, across the whole house, an Interior Designer will usually carefully consider which elements should be the same through the whole house, and what should vary but be complementary, to create a deliberate, cohesive look.
Obsessive attention to detail: We’ll consider details such as exactly how grout lines align, exact spacing of lights on ceilings and walls, and the junctions where e.g. skirting boards meet other finishes – to avoid awkward joins, boxing, or jarring asymmetry.
