An Inside look on The Interior Design Process
Behind the scenes to how the process unfolds
If you ever plan on building a home or starting a business, it is a must to understand the design process. If you decide to hire a professional designer, or bootstrap it yourself, knowing the interior design basic process will save you time and money.
Here’s a breakdown of the design process:
CONSULTATION
Regardless if you’re upgrading your home or wanting to refresh your office, we start with an in-person consultation. During this meeting we talk through your specific design needs and learn your taste. We go in-depth with a detailed list of wants and needs to keep in mind throughout the process. This helps us understand how your family lives in your home, or how your company operates.
2. DESIGN FEE
After the consultation, we will send you a design fee proposal. Typically, commercial design is a flat fee. Designers calculate the flat fee using the square footage of the space they’re designing. Larger projects will charge less per square foot than smaller projects. Occasionally, it will be a percentage of the total construction cost between 5-10%. Residential can also be done as a flat fee, but more commonly, we charge hourly.
We take your ideas, inspiration and photos to bring your vision to life through mood boards such as this one.
3. CONCEPT DESIGN
Once you’ve accepted the design fee proposal, send us your inspiration. Send us photos, your Houzz account, Pinterest boards- we even accept magazine clippings. We want it all! The concept design is where the fun begins. The vision starts taking shape. With your inspiration we create mood boards for you to approve. Once approved, the team begins to develop the design concept further. We work through color schemes, design styles, finishes, furniture and materials.
Next we move onto space planning and layout of furniture. We select flooring, wall coverings, window coverings, lighting, and furniture. We present it to you, make tweaks from your feedback and get a final sign off.
4. Design Development
We create a 3D computer graphic that converts 3D models into 2D images. These 3D renderings will show what the space will look like with the actual finishes and give a visual walkthrough.
This is where we handle the nitty-gritty details, so you don’t have to. We coordinate with the architect, engineers and contractor. We create technical drawings for construction including floor-plans, detailed millwork drawings, lighting and ceiling plans. If construction goes over budget, we help during the bidding process with re-design. We call this phase value engineering.
5. Purchasing & Project Management
Residential: We’ll place orders and manage the furniture for you. The furniture will be shipped to our receiving warehouse and each item will be properly inspected and stored until install.
Commercial: With more ADA and fire codes to follow, commercial furniture is a lot more complex. Using companies that specialize in commercial furniture will have a warranty. Typically, if a designer purchases commercial grade furniture the warranty will not carry over to the client. In order for the warranty to cover the client, our designers will suggest a furniture dealership to work with your budget and needs. The contract will be through the client and dealership, but the designer will still select finishes, furniture styles and manage the project to the end with the dealership.
During this phase we schedule periodic site visits to check the progress of construction, attend any construction meetings and handle all of the boring paperwork to ensure all of the finishes and millwork are installed correctly. We know you are busy, so we make this as painless as possible.
6. Install
After months of waiting patiently to see everything come together, we near our final phase.
Commercial: We coordinate with the dealership and manage the overall space. We do a walk through and mark up all areas with blue tape for the contractor to make any changes that we call a punch list.
Residential: We’ll coordinate the movers and finalize the last details. Then we will prep everything for the grand reveal!
In all of our projects, we will do a walkthrough with you and you will receive a project binder with all of the information about your space, including images, finishes and cleaning instructions.
Starting a new space can be frightening and we would love to help you!
We love a grand reveal! Putting together the last minute details down to fluffing the pillows!