What Happens When You Skip the Interior Designer (Spoiler: It's Expensive)

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Now, I don't want you to think this episode being titled "Interior Designers" means we're going to be talking about fluff and pillows and picking paint colors, because that's not what an interior designer is. That's not what they do—or that's not all they do, I should say. This is where most homeowners get into trouble: they misunderstand the word and the profession.

a few other really important [: 00:01:00

For now, we'll just talk about you building a new home. You've likely hired an architect to design your home or maybe a residential designer, and you need somebody to be thinking about the interiors of the home—the finishes, the colors, the specifications, and all of the technical information that's required to achieve your goal and meet your expectations. So it's very often that an interior designer becomes part of the design team and works alongside the architect.

And if the architect [: 00:02:00

So another thing that the interior designer really does is provide translation services. You've spent months, maybe even years, grabbing and saving all of the pictures from Pinterest or Houzz.com, and you've been [00:03:00] saving ideas for your new home, trying to get an idea of your architectural style, the color scheme you like, furnishings, materials, et cetera. A qualified interior designer can take all of that information and distill it all into your style. They can apply all of those materials to certain rooms and spaces and provide mood boards or digital mood boards of all of your materials, showing them all coalescing with each other and with the entire home.

ate it into something that's [: 00:04:00

One of the biggest challenges that homeowners have is visualization. Architects are very capable of this too, but if we have somebody focused on the interiors, they can relieve themselves from that. Like I said earlier, technical documentation is huge when you are specifying materials for homes and how they are to be applied to the home and how they're to be installed in the home.

ard and showing them to you. [: 00:05:00

Interior decorators don't do that. Interior decorators are picking colors, fluffing pillows, selling you furniture. Interior designers can do that too, and they'll do that for you, but we go way beyond that with an interior designer. It's the technical documentation—meaning the plans and the details [00:06:00] and the kitchen and bath design—specifying all of the cabinetry, the countertops, the backsplashes, the cabinet hardware, the lighting fixtures, and then providing drawings and details showing how those materials are all going to come together so that the people who are actually installing it can see the vision. If they don't see the vision and it's not conveyed to them, they are left to their own devices.

e. So that's another element [: 00:07:00

Project supervision is another one. They're not expected to manage the construction project, but when certain elements are going in—when the cabinetry's getting installed in the kitchen, when the tile is getting installed in the primary bathroom, when lighting fixtures are being placed—these are things where an interior designer can be a participant in the project to make sure that things are going in as expected.

some materials delivered and [: 00:08:00

Here's an example: going back to the tile example, this is an area that gets really intricate and detailed, meaning there's a lot of opportunities to make mistakes. So what I would do as a design-build business, having my own interior design staff, my own project managers, and construction staff, we would schedule a meeting prior to the installation of the tile. We would have all the tile material delivered to the job site. We would lay it all out. We would have the owner there, the project manager there, myself there, and the design staff there—and the tile setter there, if I didn't mention that.

that with everybody involved [: 00:09:00

I'll be honest, the reason we do this is because back in the beginning of my business, there were a few times when the owner showed up and it was the wrong tile on the wall. That was really embarrassing, and that was the last time that happened. So we created the systems. Systems in business come about because of mistakes.

at go into play to make sure [: 00:10:00

Let's talk about when you would bring in an interior designer. So when you're meeting with your architect to begin with, or maybe even before you've engaged with your architect, a good question to ask them is: "Do you provide interior design services? Do I need interior design services? How do you handle the interior design aspect of my project?" And just listen for the answer.

ing out all those materials. [: 00:11:00

Now, it could be you. If it's you, you better know all of the things I just mentioned that need to be done to make sure that the interior design function of your project gets done properly. So that's the first thing in the "when" category.

ns much better. So having an [: 00:12:00

Another reason why having an interior designer early in a project is important is because interior designers have a little bit different mindset than architects in that they're thinking about the spaces. They're very capable of doing space planning themselves, as are architects, but they're also thinking more about the use of the space, specific to you personally and your family. They think about things such as the kitchen area. They may think that if we move the kitchen window over six inches, I can get a wine cooler in there. Details like that. "I think the island should be a foot wider and two feet deeper for pendant lights above it." There's a lot of things that they see all the way through early on.

d as long as the architect's [: 00:13:00

So when do you bring an interior designer into a project? Well, it's going to depend on the project, but for the most part, I would try to bring them in as early as possible, even if it's just for a few meetings.

ectations. One of the things [: 00:14:00

You may fall in love with a reclaimed walnut wood kitchen cabinet material that's 40% more than anything else on the face of the earth, and somebody needs to tell you that because the people selling you that aren't necessarily going to tell you that. An interior designer asks those kinds of questions, and you may say, "Well, that's great. I understand. I really love it. I want it. I'm going to do it." Or you could say, "Let's price that out as an option on the project, but for the most part, let's just go with a standard painted finish or something." So you become informed by [00:15:00] an interior designer. And an architect can do this too—an architect can do the same thing with you with windows and doors and any other material in the project. Those conversations will take place, but for some reason, the interior design aspect kind of gets lost, and you wake up one day and your tile bill for your job's $85,000 when you thought you wanted to spend half that. And it's maybe because you picked out some real exotic material and nobody told you.

ical, lighting, tile, stone, [: 00:16:00

It's not always because of the supplier. It's because of not specifying the material on time, not ordering the material on time, and sometimes a builder can use that as an excuse by saying "the supplier has delayed the order" when really it didn't get ordered in the right amount of time. The construction aspect of it—we will talk about that separately—but the interior design part of it is really important.

aterials. So you could think [: 00:17:00

So you can see it's a really, really important part of the project from a budgeting standpoint, a scheduling standpoint, and most importantly, meeting your expectations. I know I use that word a lot, but that's what we're talking about. The people that decide to take the interior design on themselves—it's a scary endeavor, and now you're probably realizing why. And the investment that you may have to make or should make into an interior designer will pay off tenfold. It'll prevent you from ripping materials out that you didn't like. It'll prevent you from emotional anguish that maybe you only built one home in your entire lifetime, and [00:18:00] you feel like you're making compromises left and right because materials were not what you wanted because you didn't order them on time, so you had to order something else.

So it could cost you more not to hire an interior designer. How about putting it that way? So this is where I'm coming from on the interior design world, so take the interior design aspect of the project seriously. Think really hard about it. Don't be afraid to investigate that, to see how that might help you achieve your dreams, relinquish you from that burden, and you can spend your time dreaming about your home and saving pictures.

tions, the technical aspect, [: 00:19:00

That's what I have for you today. I'm Bill Reid. This is the Awakened Homeowner Show.