How to Work With an Interior Designer

With design inspiration and accessible home goods at the fingertips of today’s consumers, interior designers have evolved their roles and services to meet customer demands.  But how to select an interior designer or design firm to best suit your style and budget?  To help homeowners make the right choice when considering an interior design service, LivingBetter50 offers these tips for what clients should look for in an interior designer:

They should elevate your style 

When working with an interior designer, they should develop a plan based on your preferences and style, and take it up a notch, introducing you to looks you may not come up with on your own, but that feel like you.

“Any designer or decorator can go into a room and create a space that looks great,” says Suzanne Sus, a Calico in-home consultant “but if your client can’t live in the space and feel comfortable, there’s no success in that. It has to be who they are and they have to feel good in that space.”

Do they ask for your style preferences? 

In order to fully understand your overall style and aesthetic, interior designers should ask for references and photos of designs you like and don’t like.

Go onto Houzz or pull pages from favorite shelter magazines to come up with looks that you like. Discuss these images and looks with a designer to then assess. 

They should explore how to work with what you have

Not all homeowners want to start from scratch, and interior designers should be willing to design spaces that incorporate furniture or decor items that you want to keep in your home.  A fresh fabric and/or coat of paint might give new life to older furnishings! 

Look at the whole room and take measurements to decide how your existing furniture will fit in, what needs to be reupholstered, or what new piece we can add to a room to make it work.

They should fit your budget and your lifestyle 

Interior designers and custom-design services can range greatly in price. Some interior designers charge high hourly rates and can bill clients thousands of dollars before any products are purchased for the home. When engaging a design consultant, make sure their fees, availability, and timelines work within your budget and expectations.

Free Interior Design Services

Some stores throughout the U.S., Calico, for example, offer customers access to highly skilled design consultants and design services completely free of charge. Customers can even schedule a free in-home consultation on evenings or weekends, making the service easy and accessible for those with busy schedules.

Calico carries a collection of over 5,000 high-quality curated fabrics, so clients have more choices than what most other retailers offer. And whileCalico may be best-known for fabric and window treatments, they also offer new furniture, reupholstery, wallpaper, bedding and a great selection of Hunter Douglas shades.