Importance of Interior Designer
What comes on your mind when you hear about the word “Interior Design”?
One cannot deny that the fact that the first thing that came up on their mind was looks of the building’s interior. Well it is about the looks of the building’s interior but there is more than that to it. It also plays a key role in the building’s functionality because even a huge house can look space deprived if its interior design is poor. On the other hand, a small house can be made spacious and comfortable if the interior design is right.
Interior design is much more important than it may seem at a first glance and can be easily compared with the importance of architecture, especially when it comes to interior.
Types of Interior Designers
There are quite a few ways to categorise interior designers. They can be categorised based on their operations, pricing and choice of style.
Operations
Some interior designers operate by their own, meaning they are either working alone or have very few staff for operations. These types of interior designers are either new in the market or don’t have plans of expansions because they are content with the amount of work they take up in a fiscal year.
Some interior designers operate as large firms and in general very reputed. But with reputation comes a heavy cost, especially for small residential designs that needs a design in a particular budget.
Pricing
The small sized firms charge less in general when compared with the big reputed firms but it never hurts to take a quotation from as many designers as possible. Some quotations have the interior designer’s fee reflected transparently while some have hidden charges and some have both.
When asking for a quotation, a client is usually given a rough analysis of the design unless the client insists to know each and every detail of the costs of various processes involved in the design execution process.
A good firm, be it small or big, would generally show transparency in the pricing and give a detail analysis of the cost to make the client aware of why the pricing comes up to that much. This is done in order to educate the client about the sub-standard quality of materials used while execution by some designers to maximise their hidden costs.
Preference of Design
Some clients have no idea of they want their design and when they approach a particular interior designer, a good interior designer would generally be open to try different ideas such as traditional, antique, modern, continental, Indian, etc. But some designers stick to just one style and that affects the client’s personality considering that the client would be spending a few decades in the same house.
Why do you need an Interior Designer?
Some think why not just select one design from a carpenter’s catalog and go for it and why involve an interior designer in this process? Well that question actually makes sense but interior designers are specially trained in a science that involves problem solving. A good interior designer doesn’t give premade designs to their clients and believes in visiting the site and doing a basic analysis of the client’s personality. After the basic analysis, the interior designer works on the designs keeping the budget of the client in mind. Hence, hiring an interior designer is more than a good idea when building a new house or renovating the existing one.
It is often difficult to decide which interior design meets your needs and lifestyle the most because most designs usually do not show the need for improvements or alterations until you are actually using them. However, an interior designer will help you avoid finding yourself with a newly built or renovated house that could have been done better because all interior designers are trained to help their clients choose a design according to their personality and lifestyle. They not only take care of the design layout but also help you choose the right decor, lightning, paint colour, etc. depending on what you want to leave over to an expert and how much you can afford to spend on the project.
To sum up, a good interior designer firm will show the following characteristics:
During operations, set a deadline and adhere to it.
During pricing, show transparency in the costs, be it the fees or the cost of the materials, absolutely no hidden costs. This includes no usage of sub-standard materials in order to maximise their profits.
During consulting, discuss the client with various possibilities of designs and know the client better to put their personality in the design since they are going to live in the same place for a few decades.