Blog #07: Interior Designer or not?

This was a hotly debated topic. Should we hire an interior designer or not?

Most of the design & build firms we talked to quoted us 10% -15% of the build cost for designing the interiors of the entire house. It was much more than what we had budgeted for. However, I also knew that there were A LOT of decisions that we will need to make that we didn't have the time or design sense for. Thousands of tiles, thousands of countertops, and thousands of faucets, sinks, door knobs and wall colors to choose from. All I knew was the design style and color palette we were most attracted to.

Pictures by Jean-Philippe Delberghe on Unsplash

But the deciding factor was when we stopped by a tile store and 5 mins into it, we looked at each other nervously. We were so overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices just for our bathrooms. After some contemplation, we decided to hire an interior designer as long as they fit in our budget. Upon searching for images online on Pinterest and Instagram, I kept getting attracted to images posted by a Malaysian interior design firm. They had done a lot of award winning designs. But assuming the firm was going to be expensive, I continued my search for a local interior design firm.

Pictures by Alona Gross on Unsplash

After a month or so, I decided to reach out to the Malaysian firm and was ecstatic when they got back to me. After talking to them I realized that working with an international firm would be a whole another ball game.

• Pros: They charged a relatively smaller flat-fee (yay exchange rates) to create the design for the ENTIRE house, do 3D renderings so that we can visualize the designs and provide the elevation drawings.

• Cons: Since they were an international firm not completely aware of the products available in the US, they would not be able to select the products for us.

Why we went with them: We were OK with this compromise since we were getting the 3D renderings that would show us the products that would go together. We just needed to find the products that looked like the ones in the renderings. Going with them also allowed us to get the entire house designed on paper at a fraction of the cost and gave us the flexibility to actualize the designs when our budget allowed us to. I am sure there are firms within the US that offer a similar service but because their designs spoke to us, we just decided to go with them.

Cost of the interior designer: Overall, our interior design firms flat fee was 2% of the overall budget.

Tip:

Start early - I cannot emphasize this enough. We started our interior designer search right after finalizing the architect. And when the architecture of our home was underway, we had the interior designer locked in. We realized that the initial designs that the interior designers came up with, helped us lay out a more accurate budget for our build. Small decisions like - Do we want to wrap all the bathroom walls with tiles or only wrap the shower area, impacted the budget. By the time we were building our budget, we had our initial interior designs ready and knew what we liked and where we were making compromises.