Interior Designers - have you used them and how much does it cost?

[Indy]

A long way off from actually using them (need to build the building first) but in the planning stages and wanted to see what the general consensus was.

 

The missus is particularly keen on having an interior designer to bring the 'box' (as she calls it) to life. Having looked into it at a very cursory level, the costs aren't as eye watering as I thought they might be. You can get online designers that charge £600 or so per room to do mood boards, and I'm attracted by this approach. I would end up doing the actual sourcing and decorating myself but it doesn't seem like the worst idea to have someone do the ideation/creative part for us.

 

Is this something you've used in the past? What's a good ballpark to pay? Does it make sense to do the whole house (300 sq m) or room by room (some rooms like kitchens/utility/bathroom will be designed separately anyway)?

[Thorfun]

not an interior designer as my wife has very good ideas about how she wants the house to look but we used a lighting designer as we feel that lighting is a very important factor in a 'beautiful' home. we put together a mood board of the sort of interior design we were looking at and she came up with a brilliant lighting scheme. was about £70/hr iirc but we think it was money well spent.

[ToughButterCup]

As  @Thorfun, we put together a mood-board. The interesting thing was that as soon as we went through that process, we found   trawling through relevant books and YT videos was so much easier. You can also find plenty of ready made mood-boards online.  Grand Designs episodes  help - a bit.

 

We also assembled a 'scrap book' of the things we liked about the houses we saw: anything at all - and thats how we came to ask for a timber clad house, and why knew we wanted a large area of glass facing south. The scrap book helped us show other people what we wanted. And there's a good deal of value in that.

[nod]

I often work for two interior designers 

They will spend your money like 

It’s your money

I recently completed a Clay works job for the £80 a bag 50 bags of assorted colours over 

Money is always secondary to the design 

[SteamyTea]

You need a mood room.

 

 

 

[Indy]

16 hours ago, nod said:

I often work for two interior designers 

They will spend your money like 

It’s your money

I recently completed a Clay works job for the £80 a bag 50 bags of assorted colours over 

Money is always secondary to the design 

 

This is why I would source and do the actual work myself. Not going for a full hands off approach where budget is of no concern.

 

Essentially paying for a 'design only' service that gives us a palette of colours/materials/furnishings to choose from and we can do the final tweaking to our tastes.

 

There seem to be a lot of sites that are now offering this kind of service, even IKEA is in the game offering online interior design. 

[Indy]

19 hours ago, Thorfun said:

not an interior designer as my wife has very good ideas about how she wants the house to look but we used a lighting designer as we feel that lighting is a very important factor in a 'beautiful' home. we put together a mood board of the sort of interior design we were looking at and she came up with a brilliant lighting scheme. was about £70/hr iirc but we think it was money well spent.

The one that we like the look of does lighting design as part of the interior design package, so that's a good sign. Another is that she's fully booked out for the rest of 2022 which isnt an issue for us but points to how popular these services are becoming I guess. 

[Carrerahill]

20 hours ago, Indy said:

A long way off from actually using them (need to build the building first) but in the planning stages and wanted to see what the general consensus was.

 

The missus is particularly keen on having an interior designer to bring the 'box' (as she calls it) to life. Having looked into it at a very cursory level, the costs aren't as eye watering as I thought they might be. You can get online designers that charge £600 or so per room to do mood boards, and I'm attracted by this approach. I would end up doing the actual sourcing and decorating myself but it doesn't seem like the worst idea to have someone do the ideation/creative part for us.

 

Is this something you've used in the past? What's a good ballpark to pay? Does it make sense to do the whole house (300 sq m) or room by room (some rooms like kitchens/utility/bathroom will be designed separately anyway)?

Google images, Pinterest and Instragram is all you need.

 

Even go through the Dulux, Farrow & Ball, Little Greene sites and look at the photography, I get a lot of ideas by accident when looking for paint. Wallpaper manufacturers, even carpet manufactures sites, all show interiors. 

 

I have to deal with interior designers maybe 1 in 6 projects we are involved in, the worst are the ones who have no clue about how buildings go together and work and just show colour and fabric swatches and pick daft stuff that will be a nightmare to make work. They also overstep their mark in my opinion when they start to get involved in things that have nothing to do with them. The most recent was one who wanted to omit fire alarms in a hotel lobby! 

 

You would be better with an architect with an interest in buildings, at least they then know what can and cannot realistically happen. 

 

 

[Gow]

22 hours ago, Indy said:

 

 

...to bring the 'box' to life.... room by room 

Use bright colours that make the most of the natural light. Pastel colours make rooms look bigger. So far most of the rooms in my wee house are buttercup yellow, similar to the yellow used in stately homes in sunny France. That's where I got my inspiration...  My curtains seriously contrast the yellow walls. "No, they said, "you can't use yellow on the bedrooms walls" they cried. Oh yes I can and then they said, "OMG, I never thought it would work and it does". Why follow current trends. grey walls, grey furniture etc. I live in grey Glasgow where an extra touch of sunshine is always welcome.. And, if it had been a disaster, a cover up job would have been easy! Be brave and buck the trend then you won't have to keep up with the Jones when grey is no longer fashionable!

[recoveringbuilder]

I did an interior design qualification many years ago which has been quite helpful through the two builds we have done since then. I always start with a base colour which in my case at the moment is grey flooring throughout, some wood some carpet but then I pick something in a colour that I really like and go from there. The stores that do the interior design service ( next etc) are only doing what anyone with an eye for colour can do themselves and selling you their products. And yes I do like yellow!

[Simplysimon]

you take the furniture/rugs and paraphernalia in the existing house and transfer it into the new house, rearrange to suit. hate waste

[recoveringbuilder]

Just now, Simplysimon said:

you take the furniture/rugs and paraphernalia in the existing house and transfer it into the new house, rearrange to suit. hate waste

Did that for years through different houses mainly because I couldn’t afford to do anything else but in 2008 I had a clean sweep however when we downsized I had to get rid of a lot of furniture and then unfortunately we upsized again and had to buy more 🙄

[Simplysimon]

4 minutes ago, recoveringbuilder said:

Did that for years through different houses mainly because I couldn’t afford to do anything else but in 2008 I had a clean sweep however when we downsized I had to get rid of a lot of furniture and then unfortunately we upsized again and had to buy more 🙄

yup, don't throw anything away, it'll come in handy in 30yrs.

[ETC]

Having an interior designer is like having a personal shopper spend all your money on sh*t you don’t need, don’t like and will never use in a month of Sundays.

 

Oh and don’t forget the “iconic” piece of furniture that we found in a flea market in Hong Kong which we shipped x thousands of miles that we “just thought was typically you” which will go with the £1000m2 roll of gold wallpaper from Venice hung by a trio of Italian circus tumblers.

 

Not for me thanks.

[CharlieKLP]

I have worked with interior designers yes.

 

They are best at making empty spaces work when there is no customer with personality living there, like for showhouses. 
 

I think most people have personality and taste that’s very particular to them. I do not believe an interior designer can really interpret that and still make a space feel like yours.
 

Definitely get someone to sort out the lighting… but don’t let someone buy tatt for your house. You aren’t going to like the tatt.

 

I can see the benefit to them if they are putting in feature walls and designing workspaces, but honestly, just go to   Dunelm and pick a colour you like.

[Adsibob]

On 26/04/2022 at 19:22, nod said:

I often work for two interior designers 

They will spend your money like 

It’s your money

I recently completed a Clay works job for the £80 a bag 50 bags of assorted colours over 

Money is always secondary to the design 

Sounds about right. We had an architect who also specialises in interior design. And we ended up spending a fortune on clay works. But it looks amazing, and I never would have learnt about it otherwise. If you have the money to do it, i think it’s worth doing, and also integrating it at an early stage as it really is difficult to separate “interior design” from architecture. Everything is connected.

[Adsibob]

1 hour ago, CharlieKLP said:

but honestly, just go to   Dunelm and pick a colour you like.

Dunelm… yuck.

[SteamyTea]

7 hours ago, Adsibob said:

Dunelm… yuck.

Too posh for down here, we use Trago Mills.

 

[dpmiller]

Harry Corry round these parts.

[SteamyTea]

6 minutes ago, dpmiller said:

Harry Corry

Seems to politically tame for the Cornish.

 

From Wikipedia.

 

 

Controversies and legal disputes[edit]

Statues of local political figures and officials the owner believed were opposed to his development "welcome" shoppers to the Liskeard store. One source of opposition may have been that planning permission did not always precede building work^{[citation needed]}

Robertson's local newspaper advertisements resulted in three newspapers carrying the adverts being successfully sued for libel by Sir Edward Heath,^[7] when some of his comments became highly personalised.

Robertson placed advertisements in the 1980s and 1990s calling for the castration of gay men. The United Kingdom Advertising Standards Authority ruled against Trago Mills and demanded the withdrawal of all advertisements in 1998.^[8][9] Trago still occasionally runs inflammatory copy within their ads, one entitled "For any cash strapped Moslems reading this…" appeared in the Falmouth Packet in 2009 to promote a book by senior UKIP official David Challice.^[10]

With his son and successor, Bruce, Robertson supported Eurosceptic political parties, most recently the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Robertson threatened to refuse to stop using imperial measures in his stores, attributing UK metrication to the European Union (Trago today sells goods in metric quantities, sometimes with imperial equivalents, in line with the law).^[11] He remains opposed to speculative immigration from Eastern Europeans. Robertson supports job-specific immigration, more liberally than some in UKIP.^[12][13] In January 2007, the Mid Devon Star suggested this was hypocritical, as his large Newton Abbot site employed around 30 Polish people.^[14]

In September 2011, the company was fined £199,588 after admitting five breaches of the Environmental Protection Act 1990. This followed the discovery of several thousand tonnes of dumped waste, including asbestos, at its Newton Abbot and Liskeard sites.^[15] The fine was reduced to £65,000 in January 2012, after an Exeter Crown Court judge accepted that Trago Mills had paid nearly £500,000 in clean-up costs.^[16]

In 2014, Trago Mills was featured on BBC's Fake Britain, after local Trading Standards discovered fake top-brand shampoo on sale in store. Trago management said that the product had been purchased from a reliable source and they had worked closely with local trading standards to ensure that the product was taken off sale once it had been identified as a fake.

In June 2018, following the opening of the company's store in Merthyr Tydfil, some locals threatened to boycott the shop after Robertson criticised bilingual education and described bilingual English and Welsh signage as "visual clutter".^[17]

 

[ProDave]

In the early days of the build SWMBO said she wanted an interior designer.  When questioned why and what she wanted it seemed her No 1 thing was "I don't want every wall plastered and painted"

 

I quietly resisted, but made a point of showing her on Grand Designs every "non plastered and painted" wall they featured, and when I said I can do one like that bloke with strips of old pallet wood (really that was what one guy did on his new build) I got a firm NO.

 

As it happened everything in the house was planned by us as we built it.  It meant a LOT of visits to the shops as everything was individually chosen. Wooden flooring, tiles, multipanel for the wetrooms, doors, door handles, kitchen units, worktops, taps, basins, toilets,  lights, and so it goes on.

 

So we ended up with an interior designed by us.  And all the walls are painted plaster........

[Gone West]

21 minutes ago, ProDave said:

And all the walls are painted plaster........

IMHO the most pleasing finish there is.

[joe90]

Well I painted everywhere magnolia and used existing furniture (mostly), I think you have to live in a house fir a while and the colours and “bits” will develop as you live in it.

[Bitpipe]

I have a friend who is a quite talented interior designer - her hourly rate is not that expensive but the recommendations can be depending on the client's budget and taste. She has trades & suppliers that she can recommend but no obligation to ever use them.

 

As you would expect it's mostly higher end clients, rarely new builds and often just a single room or 'problem area'.

 

The interior design masters show on BBC 2 gives a flavour of how they usually work.

[SteamyTea]

17 minutes ago, joe90 said:

Well I painted everywhere magnolia

Like choosing the colour of a car. Black or silver. Can't really go wrong.