Ready to Start your Renovation? Here’s Why You Should Hire an Interior Designer First
Ready to Start your Renovation? Here’s Why You Should Hire an Interior Designer First
Often when people think about hiring an interior designer, they imagine someone who is going to come in after the renovations and make the space look pretty with furniture, art, and decorations. But the truth is, an interior designer does so much more. In fact, an interior designer is the first person you should hire on a project because their job is to create the vision for your whole project. Defining your project with pictures, drawings, specific furnishings, and materials helps to streamline the execution. When you know what you want the end result to look like, you can be much more efficient and will end up much more satisfied with the final outcome. Interior designers also oversee the contractors who are doing the construction and make sure the vision is implemented properly.
Your interior designer is HANDS-ON during the whole project
Designers don’t just make a design that looks good on paper, we manage the execution of the vision. Many pieces of a design can get lost in translation when it comes time to implement. This is why you need someone who has the expertise required to both create and execute a beautiful vision for your space.
Our goal is to give you a beautifully detailed custom space with a feeling of depth in the environment that lifts you up and makes you feel completely at home.
There’s only so much you can detail in a drawing.
Without a skilled designer on-site during construction, there are many mistakes that can happen due to small decisions that make a big difference in the end. Your electrician isn’t going to know how high to hang the light fixtures without specific instructions and oversight. There are nuances to the way that tiles should be laid, exactly how a shower sill gets done, or how to go about transitioning from one material to another, which require decisions to be made on-site.
We speculate as best we can on paper, but an important skill for a good interior designer is the ability to guide the proper installation and implementation of the project. It’s also important to have someone there to help with creative problem-solving when things don’t go as planned. Designing your dream home is a complex and detailed endeavor, and it’s important that it’s done right. Unexpected surprises are part of the process, and the construction workers who are putting things together don’t always have the expertise to guide you when something doesn’t turn out the way you’d hoped.
Here’s an example:
Chipped tiles – oh no! What do we do?
We’ve been working a lot with these beautiful Moroccan zellige tiles lately. They are absolutely beautiful, but they chip very easily. Some people love a chipped, aged look, but not everyone. We recently had these dark green zellige tiles installed in a client’s bathroom and they chipped so you could see the clay around them. The wife loved it, but the husband said “This is going to drive me nuts!” The person laying the tile was frustrated too, he thought “This looks bad and I don’t know what to do”.
Your interior designer is the person you turn to when little things like this happen that you couldn’t have projected.
Luckily these clients had USIL on the job, so we quickly stepped in with a creative solution. We researched dark green grout and found some for just $15. The grout filled in the chipped tiles in a way that gave it a little bit of an aged, textured look that appealed to the wife, without it looking so worn in that it would be irritating to the husband’s aesthetic. It turned out beautifully.
This story is just one small example of how your interior designer will save the day and ensure your whole project is executed harmoniously and to your full satisfaction.
Your home is your haven, where you live day in and day out. You deserve to have your space be a gorgeous reflection of all you love, without making any sacrifices due to mistakes.
You also deserve to have your whole project orchestrated in harmony. Uma Stewart Interiors & Lifestyle is an interior design firm and we are also licensed general contractors. We will coordinate a full team of structural/architectural consultants, skilled tradespeople, A/V experts, landscape designers, and artisans to execute a consistent vision across your project.
If you have any questions or if you’d like to get started on designing your dream home, please get in touch. We can’t wait to work with you.