[00:00:00] All right. Welcome back to the Awakened Homeowner Podcast. This is episode 10, I believe, of the World of Design Series. In the previous episode, I got into understanding design professionals and specifically talked about architects and residential designers. You may or may not have listened to that episode—I'd recommend you listen to it before this one, but you can also listen to this one first. Not a problem.

Now, I don't want you to think this episode being titled "Interior Designers" means we're going to be talking about fluff and pillows and picking paint colors, because that's not what an interior designer is. That's not what they do—or that's not all they do, I should say. This is where most homeowners get into trouble: they misunderstand the word and the profession.

Interior design—what we're going to do is talk about what an interior designer really does, and then we're going to back into a few other really important [00:01:00] components that are important for you as you start planning your project. Now, if we're assuming you're doing a large-scale renovation, remodel, addition, or new custom home, there are a lot of elements that come into play with an interior designer, and a big one is that, in general, an interior designer becomes part of the design team.

For now, we'll just talk about you building a new home. You've likely hired an architect to design your home or maybe a residential designer, and you need somebody to be thinking about the interiors of the home—the finishes, the colors, the specifications, and all of the technical information that's required to achieve your goal and meet your expectations. So it's very often that an interior designer becomes part of the design team and works alongside the architect.

And if the architect [00:02:00] understands that you have an interior designer, then they also know that their scope is somewhat reduced, which will help you when it comes to architectural fees. So if an architect can focus on the big picture—the structure, the structural design, the architectural design, the exterior materials, and all the mechanical and electrical plans, dealing with all the consultants—and the architect knows that you have an interior designer alongside them, and he or she can depend on that person and collaborate with that person to generate a lot of the drawings and details for the interior.

So another thing that the interior designer really does is provide translation services. You've spent months, maybe even years, grabbing and saving all of the pictures from Pinterest or Houzz.com, and you've been [00:03:00] saving ideas for your new home, trying to get an idea of your architectural style, the color scheme you like, furnishings, materials, et cetera. A qualified interior designer can take all of that information and distill it all into your style. They can apply all of those materials to certain rooms and spaces and provide mood boards or digital mood boards of all of your materials, showing them all coalescing with each other and with the entire home.

This is one of the biggest challenges that homeowners have: seeing the big picture, seeing their project holistically, to get that overall perception of the style and the look and the feel that you're expecting. So we call that translation services. You've got this big pile of papers, and they're going to take it all and translate it into something that's [00:04:00] going to demonstrate to you what your new home's really going to look like. They can take all of your input and create the spaces with your materials, with your finishes, with your furnishings, and they can create spaces and drawings and details to demonstrate to you what it's going to look like.

One of the biggest challenges that homeowners have is visualization. Architects are very capable of this too, but if we have somebody focused on the interiors, they can relieve themselves from that. Like I said earlier, technical documentation is huge when you are specifying materials for homes and how they are to be applied to the home and how they're to be installed in the home.

Tile design is probably one of the biggest areas that interior designers deal with. It's not just picking out the tiles and sticking them to a board and showing them to you. [00:05:00] It's how all those materials come together and how they're going to be configured and installed in, let's say, your new master suite or your new primary shower. They will provide technical drawings and details explaining to the architect and explaining to the tile setter how we want the tile to look on the walls. So we may have a feature liner, we may have different shapes and different configurations, and the idea is to make sure that we meet your expectations as the homeowner by providing these drawings and details.

Interior decorators don't do that. Interior decorators are picking colors, fluffing pillows, selling you furniture. Interior designers can do that too, and they'll do that for you, but we go way beyond that with an interior designer. It's the technical documentation—meaning the plans and the details [00:06:00] and the kitchen and bath design—specifying all of the cabinetry, the countertops, the backsplashes, the cabinet hardware, the lighting fixtures, and then providing drawings and details showing how those materials are all going to come together so that the people who are actually installing it can see the vision. If they don't see the vision and it's not conveyed to them, they are left to their own devices.

This is just one example of what an interior designer brings to the table. Another one that is really important is electrical and lighting coordination. An interior designer will often do electrical—mostly lighting design—and coordinate that with the architect based on the fixtures that have been specified and the overall layout of the furniture relative to the recessed lighting in the ceiling, for example. So that's another element [00:07:00] that kind of gets overlooked with what an interior designer brings to the table.

Project supervision is another one. They're not expected to manage the construction project, but when certain elements are going in—when the cabinetry's getting installed in the kitchen, when the tile is getting installed in the primary bathroom, when lighting fixtures are being placed—these are things where an interior designer can be a participant in the project to make sure that things are going in as expected.

Often that's not done, and that can really cause a lot of heartburn for you because when you come in over the weekend to look at your new home under construction and you see what the progress is and you're not happy, it's because drawings and details weren't provided, materials weren't ordered on time, and there's nobody really who knows what's going on. Frankly, the architect doesn't know, the builder doesn't know, and there's just been some materials delivered and [00:08:00] somebody verbally told them what to do. Turns out that's not what you wanted. So project supervision is a big part of it.

Here's an example: going back to the tile example, this is an area that gets really intricate and detailed, meaning there's a lot of opportunities to make mistakes. So what I would do as a design-build business, having my own interior design staff, my own project managers, and construction staff, we would schedule a meeting prior to the installation of the tile. We would have all the tile material delivered to the job site. We would lay it all out. We would have the owner there, the project manager there, myself there, and the design staff there—and the tile setter there, if I didn't mention that.

And we would all stand back and look at the material. Number one, make sure it's all correct. Number two, we would pull out the drawings and details that were generated by the interior designer. We would review all of that with everybody involved [00:09:00] and on-site, looking at the walls where the tile's going to go, to make sure that everything is copacetic and is going to work based on the original plan. And then talk about the details and make sure that everybody understands, picking out the grout colors at that time, and all of those kinds of activities go on to make sure that we're meeting the expectations.

I'll be honest, the reason we do this is because back in the beginning of my business, there were a few times when the owner showed up and it was the wrong tile on the wall. That was really embarrassing, and that was the last time that happened. So we created the systems. Systems in business come about because of mistakes.

So this is an example of what interior designers do. Yeah, they help you pick out all the materials. Yeah, they take you shopping. Yeah, they do all that. It doesn't stop there, and you as a homeowner need to understand it doesn't stop there—that there are a lot of things that go into play to make sure [00:10:00] it really happens. The ideas are the easy part. It's the execution and the implementation that make or break a professional and make or break a successful project.

Let's talk about when you would bring in an interior designer. So when you're meeting with your architect to begin with, or maybe even before you've engaged with your architect, a good question to ask them is: "Do you provide interior design services? Do I need interior design services? How do you handle the interior design aspect of my project?" And just listen for the answer.

Some architects have interior designers on staff. Some architects say they can do the interior design with you. Some architects will tell you, "We don't offer that service. Here are three recommendations," or "I recommend you go find your own interior designer." Knowing that going into a relationship with an architect is really, really good because, number one, you now know what the game's all about. You know that you're going to need help with picking out all those materials. [00:11:00] Somebody has to do it.

Now, it could be you. If it's you, you better know all of the things I just mentioned that need to be done to make sure that the interior design function of your project gets done properly. So that's the first thing in the "when" category.

The next thing is: if you're designing a custom home or a major remodel with an architect, it's my recommendation to have an interior designer present at the very early stages of design, at the very least, so that they are engaged and understand how the design is evolving. I think this provides a lot of value because they will start to build up and just keep piling on all the details of your project so that when the time comes to engage with them more, they're going to have a much quicker start at it, and they're going to be able to meet your expectations much better. So having an [00:12:00] interior designer early accomplishes that.

Another reason why having an interior designer early in a project is important is because interior designers have a little bit different mindset than architects in that they're thinking about the spaces. They're very capable of doing space planning themselves, as are architects, but they're also thinking more about the use of the space, specific to you personally and your family. They think about things such as the kitchen area. They may think that if we move the kitchen window over six inches, I can get a wine cooler in there. Details like that. "I think the island should be a foot wider and two feet deeper for pendant lights above it." There's a lot of things that they see all the way through early on.

Architects are fully capable of this, but if you have another mind thinking about that along with the architect, you get a much better end result. And as long as the architect's [00:13:00] comfortable collaborating with an interior designer, you're in a really, really good position. Some architects aren't excited about that early on, but I don't know—in my experience, many are because they feel like that's off of their plate to a certain extent, so they can focus on all of the other thousand things they need to think about in designing a custom home. So that's another reason why you want to bring them in early for a project.

So when do you bring an interior designer into a project? Well, it's going to depend on the project, but for the most part, I would try to bring them in as early as possible, even if it's just for a few meetings.

Why do you bring an interior designer in? I think I answered that question. This is how you are going to meet your expectations. One of the things [00:14:00] that I forgot to mention about interior designers is when it comes to the budget aspect of the project. You know, we've talked a lot about that already, and managing that is really, really important during the design phase. And I emphasize that because you're not managing the budget during construction—you're managing it during design—and the interior materials can add up to a large percentage of the project. And it's important that those conversations take place while everything's being specified.

You may fall in love with a reclaimed walnut wood kitchen cabinet material that's 40% more than anything else on the face of the earth, and somebody needs to tell you that because the people selling you that aren't necessarily going to tell you that. An interior designer asks those kinds of questions, and you may say, "Well, that's great. I understand. I really love it. I want it. I'm going to do it." Or you could say, "Let's price that out as an option on the project, but for the most part, let's just go with a standard painted finish or something." So you become informed by [00:15:00] an interior designer. And an architect can do this too—an architect can do the same thing with you with windows and doors and any other material in the project. Those conversations will take place, but for some reason, the interior design aspect kind of gets lost, and you wake up one day and your tile bill for your job's $85,000 when you thought you wanted to spend half that. And it's maybe because you picked out some real exotic material and nobody told you.

Another thing about that, using the same example—an interior designer provides, or why you want an interior designer (that was the question)—it's because they can ask the important questions about price, but also availability. When should these materials be ordered? How long does it take to get them? One of the leading causes of project delays is materials that do not show up on time—any kind of material: windows, doors, electrical, lighting, tile, stone, [00:16:00] flooring, any material that goes into a home. If it's late, that can really delay a project.

It's not always because of the supplier. It's because of not specifying the material on time, not ordering the material on time, and sometimes a builder can use that as an excuse by saying "the supplier has delayed the order" when really it didn't get ordered in the right amount of time. The construction aspect of it—we will talk about that separately—but the interior design part of it is really important.

All the fixtures, all the appliances, all the materials that go into the interior design—think about interior design materials as you walk into a home, and all you see is just drywall, bare walls everywhere in the home. Anything after that that's attached to the walls, attached to the floor, attached to the ceiling, are interior materials. So you could think [00:17:00] about that: could be flooring, baseboards, cabinetry, countertops, backsplashes, plumbing fixtures, lighting fixtures, appliances, tiles, vanities—all kinds of elements that go into a home past the drywall stage are interior materials.

So you can see it's a really, really important part of the project from a budgeting standpoint, a scheduling standpoint, and most importantly, meeting your expectations. I know I use that word a lot, but that's what we're talking about. The people that decide to take the interior design on themselves—it's a scary endeavor, and now you're probably realizing why. And the investment that you may have to make or should make into an interior designer will pay off tenfold. It'll prevent you from ripping materials out that you didn't like. It'll prevent you from emotional anguish that maybe you only built one home in your entire lifetime, and [00:18:00] you feel like you're making compromises left and right because materials were not what you wanted because you didn't order them on time, so you had to order something else.

So it could cost you more not to hire an interior designer. How about putting it that way? So this is where I'm coming from on the interior design world, so take the interior design aspect of the project seriously. Think really hard about it. Don't be afraid to investigate that, to see how that might help you achieve your dreams, relinquish you from that burden, and you can spend your time dreaming about your home and saving pictures.

William Reid: All right. What I'm going to do is I'm going to post some links in the show notes or the YouTube description if you're on YouTube to some examples of what interior designers do, some of the deliverables they have, such as the floor plans, the elevations, the technical aspect, [00:19:00] maybe a few mood or vision boards to give you an idea of what to expect from a qualified interior designer. And that should help you navigate your project and make sure that you get the right person for your project. So I thought that might be helpful.

That's what I have for you today. I'm Bill Reid. This is the Awakened Homeowner Show.