Great, I want an interior designer. Sh*t. Now what?

Maybe you're currently sitting in the middle of your living room surrounded by five shades of green, wondering whether you're losing your mind because they all look exactly the same. You ask your partner which one they prefer. They stare at them for approximately three seconds, point at one and say:

“That one.”

Why?

No idea.

Brilliant. Glad we did that.

Or maybe you've spent the last six months saving beautiful houses, kitchens and bathrooms, and your Pinterest board has now reached the point where it needs its own project manager. Somewhere between I know exactly what I want and the 600th saved image, you've realised you actually don't.

Good. Now we're getting somewhere.

Because you don't need to have your entire house figured out before you call an interior designer. That would rather defeat the point.

Right. This is where we come in.

You don't need to know your style. Please stop trying to name it.

We'd much rather hear how you want your home to feel than hear that you've diagnosed yourself as “warm contemporary with mid-century influences”.

Tell us it feels too cold. Tell us you want it to feel sexier. Tell us you want colour but every time someone shows you colour, you panic and choose beige. That's useful. And if you've got no idea at all? Also useful.

Interior design isn't an exam you need to revise for before you're allowed to call us. Our job is to get underneath all the saved images, contradictory references and occasional absolutely bloody not and work out what actually makes sense for you and your home.

We need to know how you actually live

Not how you imagine you'll live once the extension is finished and suddenly everyone in the family becomes extremely organised.

Real life.

If everyone comes through the door and dumps everything on the nearest surface, we need to know. If you love the idea of formal dining but actually eat at the kitchen island every night, that's useful information too. We're not here to judge your habits. We're here to design around them. Because there is absolutely no point creating a beautiful house that requires you to become a completely different person in order for it to work. Your home should work on a random wet Wednesday evening, not just on photography day. That's the difference.

Now for everyone's favourite subject: the budget

Ah. The budget. The question that somehow makes perfectly articulate adults forget how words work.

“Well... we don't really have a budget.”

You do.

Everyone does.

And whatever it is, that's fine. We're not asking because there's a magic number we're hoping you'll say. We just need to know what game we're playing. Good design isn't about making everything expensive. Sometimes the £8,000 thing is absolutely worth it. Sometimes the £8,000 thing is just... an £8,000 thing.

Our job is knowing the difference.

So don't panic and suddenly forget your native language. Just tell us.

A realistic budget gives us something to design with. A secret one gives us a very expensive guessing game.

Please call us before everyone needs an answer by Friday

Trust the process, they said.

There is a beautiful little period at the beginning of a renovation when everything feels quite relaxed. And then suddenly it isn't. The builder needs the socket positions. The electrician wants the lighting layout. The kitchen company needs a decision. Someone has ordered something nobody remembers approving and apparently the tiles have a twelve-week lead time. This is why we bang on about bringing your interior designer in early.

Not because we want to sit in every meeting and dramatically point at floor plans. It's because the decisions are connected. The furniture affects the electrics. The joinery affects the lighting. The kitchen affects almost everything. And the thing you casually decide today has an annoying habit of becoming the thing somebody has to physically build three months later. It's much easier- and normally much cheaper- to move something on a drawing than on site.

So what does an interior designer actually do?

Yes, we choose beautiful things. Obviously. But if that's all you needed, you could probably have a very enjoyable Saturday wandering around Chelsea Harbour and call it a day. The real work is making hundreds of decisions feel like one idea.

We're looking at the space before we're looking at the sofa. We're thinking about what you see when you walk through the door, whether the kitchen works with the living area, where the joinery should end, what the lighting is doing, whether something needs to be bespoke or whether we're all getting slightly carried away.

Sometimes our job is to find the thing.

Sometimes it's to design the thing.

And sometimes it's to look you lovingly in the eye and say:

No. We are not doing that.

That's also part of the service.

Because you're not paying a designer to agree with everything you already thought. You're paying us to make the project better.

What happens at the first meeting?

We talk. That's really it. You don't need to turn up with a presentation about yourself. Send us the plans if you have them. Show us what you've been looking at. Tell us roughly what you want to spend and what you're trying to achieve. But mostly, tell us what's going on. What's driving you mad about the house now? What are you excited about? What are you worried about getting wrong? What does everyone in the family disagree on?

That's the interesting stuff.

We'll ask questions. We'll probably ask some you weren't expecting. We'll look at the space differently to you because we haven't been staring at it every day for the last five years. And somewhere in that conversation, the project starts taking shape.

You don't need to have the answers. That's kind of the point.

Hiring an interior designer shouldn't feel intimidating. You don't need to know the terminology. You don't need immaculate taste. You don't need a perfectly organised Pinterest board and you certainly don't need to have chosen the green. You just need to know that you want your home to be better than it is now.

We'll work out what better actually means together. And if you're still sitting on the floor with those five paint samples? Bring them.

We'll choose the green.

WHY NOT?