Hiring an interior designer is an investment in your home, but it is also an investment in your quality of life. There are very few things we invest in that we experience 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for decades. Your home is one of them. The way it functions for your family, the way it feels when you walk through the door, and the spaces where you gather, entertain, celebrate holidays and live your everyday life all have an impact that extends far beyond the value of the individual things inside of it. That is why we view an interior design project investment as something with a return you get to experience every single day.

With that level of investment comes a financial commitment that needs to be understood before the designing ever begins. At Proper House, we establish a preliminary investment range before a client signs an agreement with us. In fact, investment is something we begin discussing during our very first phone call because we don’t believe a client can make an informed decision about moving forward with a project without understanding what it will realistically take to accomplish it.

Why We Don’t Ask Clients To Establish The Investment

Trust is incredibly important to our process, and we believe building that trust starts before someone even becomes our client. We never want a client to begin working with us and later feel as though the financial reality of their project is different from what was communicated in the beginning. We don’t want them to get halfway through a project and realize they aren’t comfortable moving forward, nor do we want to create a situation where they lose trust in the process and feel the need to begin shopping their own project in an attempt to control costs.

For that reason, we begin talking about investment on our initial Discovery Call. We have project minimums, and we want to know immediately whether a potential client is comfortable with the minimum level of investment required to work with our firm. Those minimums aren’t arbitrary. Our standards and the current cost of the products we specify determine the minimum investment required to create the caliber of spaces represented in our portfolio.

Believe it or not, aside from the information collected on our inquiry form, we rarely ask a client what their “budget” is. For one, we view our services and the products we bring into a home as an investment with a return, rather than something we would describe with the word budget. More importantly, our clients don’t do this every day. We don’t expect them to know what a professionally designed living room, primary suite or entire home should cost. Determining that is part of what they’ve hired us to do.

Our job is to educate the client throughout the process, but that education happens in stages. During our initial call, we’re not yet trying to determine exactly what their home should cost. We’re establishing whether they are comfortable with the minimum level of investment required to work with our firm and whether it makes sense to continue the conversation. Once we meet for the In-Home Consultation, we can dig much deeper into their goals, taste and the inspiration they’ve collected. At that point, we can connect what they’re showing us with what it actually takes to achieve it. We can explain that a particular look or level of customization may lead us toward certain manufacturers, materials or custom work, and what that means for the overall investment. That information, combined with the scope of the project, gives us what we need to develop the preliminary investment range that is ultimately presented with our proposal.

How We Determine an Interior Design Project Investment Before We’ve Designed The Space

While we haven’t designed anything yet at this stage, we aren’t guessing. We use several formulas to establish a preliminary investment range. We begin with a square-footage formula that gives us a baseline number for each room. From there, we cross-check that figure by considering what we anticipate the space will require and the average cost of those pieces at the quality level we specify. We may account for a sofa, chairs, tables, area rugs, window treatments, lighting, art and whatever else we anticipate will be necessary to complete that particular room.

We then compare those numbers against our square-footage calculation and past Proper House projects with a similar scope. Together, those points of reference allow us to confidently establish a preliminary investment range. We generally allow for approximately ten percent in either direction and include that range in our proposal. The client sees this number before making the decision to move forward.

Once the project begins, we can get much more precise. After onboarding and vision boarding, we enter our Programming phase and develop floor plans for each space. At this point, we know considerably more about the client’s taste and expectations. We also understand the actual design requirements of their home. Instead of estimating what a room might require, we now know exactly how many pieces the floor plan calls for. With that information, we can refine the preliminary range into a much more specific target investment.

What Our Investment Plan Actually Includes

Our investment planning goes well beyond assigning one number to an entire room. We create a floor plan showing every furnishing, area rug, window treatment, mirror and piece of art we anticipate selecting. On that same sheet, we call out and quantify each item in a table. We also create a separate spreadsheet that accounts for every individual item and its anticipated cost, along with estimated taxes, freight, receiving and delivery.

Those additional costs matter because the cost of furnishing a home isn’t limited to the price of the pieces themselves. A sofa still has to travel from the manufacturer to our receiving warehouse, where the team inspects and stores it before final delivery and installation. We want our clients to understand the complete investment from the beginning rather than having those costs become a surprise later.

Every design decision we make from that point forward is influenced by the interior design project investment we’ve established. We aren’t designing a room in a vacuum and then figuring out afterward what it will cost to execute it. We build the design within an investment framework that we’ve already researched, calculated and communicated to the client. Because we put so much work into making that number realistic from the beginning, we very rarely exceed the investment we’ve established, and when we do, it typically isn’t by much.

What Happens When the Numbers Don’t Align

Sometimes accomplishing what someone wants requires a greater investment than they initially anticipated. That’s exactly why these conversations need to happen before the project begins. Sometimes a potential client’s desired investment reflects mass-market furnishing prices, while their expectations reflect the quality and customization represented in our work. In that situation, we aren’t going to take on the project and hope we can somehow make the two align later.

There are also situations where someone loves what we do and understands the investment but realizes they aren’t financially prepared to take it on yet. In those cases, they may decide to hold off, continue setting funds aside and come back to us when they’re ready. We would much rather have someone make that decision with all of the information in front of them than begin a project they aren’t financially prepared to complete.

Why This Matters to the Design Itself

Our full-service interior design process is built around creating spaces that are aesthetically pleasing and comfortable, but also functional, psychologically enhancing and designed specifically for the people who will live in them. Our clients hire us because this isn’t something they do every day, and a large part of the value we provide is knowing how to take their goals, tastes and needs and translate them into a complete home.

The best results happen when there is trust in that professional relationship. Our clients should understand where their money is going, what they’re investing and why, but establishing those expectations beforehand also gives them the freedom to trust the process once the designing begins. Rather than worrying about whether there will be enough money left to finish the next room, the client already has a framework for the project as a whole. That framework also keeps individual selections from becoming isolated decisions based solely on price.

Ultimately, that’s why we put so much work into establishing an interior design project investment before we begin designing. Starting a project without a realistic investment, defined scope and clear expectations can quickly lead to overspending, frustration and disappointment. Doing this work beforehand allows the client to be financially prepared and gives our team realistic parameters within which to design.

By the time we sit down to begin designing, we don’t want to be asking whether the client can afford to execute what we’re creating. We’ve already done the work to answer that question. Instead, we can focus on what they hired us to do: creating the very best home we can within the investment we’ve already established.