Process We Use with Every Design!

The interior design process starts with a consultation. This is where we come to your home and spend up to 60 minutes with you. It’s the all-important first step.  We’ll start with a tour of your home so I can get a feel for not only the spaces you want me to work our magic on, but the home overall. I want to get an idea of your current interior design style (if there is one) as well as explore what existing pieces of furniture or décor you might want to work with many clients give me blank canvases, in which case there’s nothing existing to work with. But some clients might have a treasured piece of art, for example, that they want to keep and use in the room. So it’s good to know this upfront.

When you’ve read through my post-consult email and feel comfortable with the estimated product spend and design fee, we will send you an agreement to sign. That’s stage two of the interior design process underway.  Don’t worry, the agreement is not very full-on. It simply states what rooms we’ll transform, what my responsibilities are to you as your designer, and what your responsibilities are to me as my client. It also details pricing estimates.  Once you’ve signed the agreement, we will go away and get started on your concept document. Now, this is where we take all of the things we discussed in the 60-minutes consultation and start to work my design on a document we will present to you during a return visit to your home. The concept is the design blueprint for your home.

The Specify stage is the third part of the interior design process. It’s where we go away and start putting a list of products together for you to review and agree to purchase. there are a ton of products to include in this list .  If we’re doing any work where a trade is involved (like window treatments, paint, flooring, joinery) we’ll also organize a trade day at this point. This is where I’ll come to your home for a third time with my trades and get measure and quotes carried out.

Once we have a final list of products approved by you in our online design portal, it’s time for us to go to all of our various suppliers and get invoices from them. This part of the interior design process can take a few days because for some projects there could be 20 different suppliers we’re getting product from (sometimes more).  As a guide, we tend to specify about 90% of products from our trade suppliers, not retailers. This not only secures you a lot of products your friends can’t buy in stores, but it also gets you better pricing, because we get trade discounts from our suppliers.  We’ll collate all of the supplier invoices and then prepare one invoice for you to pay us. Once we have your payment we’ll lock in all orders with our suppliers and organize deliveries of the products to your home.

Woohoo! The Style part of the journey is the last and most exciting component of the entire interior design process. This is where we come to your home and put all the furniture in its place as per the layout we provided in the concept document.  Understandably, items may have arrived at different stages due to stock availability and some large pieces of furniture might already be unpacked (like a sofa or bed). That’s OK. We’ll still come to unpack everything else and move it into place.  At this stage, we’ll also line up trades to install the various items they need to install, if required. Our window people will come and install your curtains. Our electricians will come and install pendant lights if we’ve specified them. Our hangers will come to fix art and mirrors to the walls.  This installation day might also be spread out over a few days due to availability of the trades, so again we just need some flexibility on your part here.

Once all the furniture is in place, we’ll put a list together of smaller decor items that need to be purchased to finish off the rooms. This decor shop is done by me, in-person, in stores across Melbourne. I shop for smaller items like trays, ornaments, candles etc. You know, those finishing touches for tabletops, bedsides, sideboards and more.  Because of the ever-changing stock levels at retailers it’s impossible to include these smaller items in your product list during the Specify stage. So I’ll go off and do a shop and then return to your home one last time to pop in all the decor, and hopefully photograph the spaces for my portfolio.