The following five actionable tips should drastically help you get the interior you want!
1. Show us.
This one is the most important. It’s very hard for designer to visualize the ideas in a clients mind. Being creative is difficult when the canvas is blank. If you can give us a picture to start with, illustrating some sense of what you’d like, it’ll help us enormously on the creative side.
This one is the most important. It’s very hard for designer to visualize the ideas in a clients mind. Being creative is difficult when the canvas is blank. If you can give us a picture to start with, illustrating some sense of what you’d like, it’ll help us enormously on the creative side.
2. Admit you’re just a tourist.
Clients often feel like they are visitors in the design world. They know that they don’t understand this stuff one-tenth as well as the professional does. They feel like they’ve stepped into a subculture where misinterpreting one decorating trend can lead to drastic results; thus they often shy away from the possibility of making weird suggestions, or demanding certain color schemes that probably don’t matter (but sometimes do). Know that we can tell you are all tourists. No matter what you do, you won’t blend in so relax and allow someone who is trained assist in accomplishing your vision.
3. Understand the boundaries.
If you’re building a basketball, you know what you can and can’t do. You could probably make one that’s bouncier or more durable than competing products. But you couldn’t make one that goes in the basket every time. Likewise since you don’t know the rules of the design and decoration game, you often don’t know what’s possible. More often than not, you’ll assume that something isn’t possible when it actually is. I have a good solution for this: I ask clients to create a folder of their wish list, and dump ideas in there. More often than not, I’ll contact them saying, “Hey, that’s possible. Let’s try it out.” But remember you know your financial limitations, sometimes creativity is only able to flourish inside the reality of those limits.
4. Ask us.
Good designers are flexible and can adjust the vision to meet the reality of the situation. If you wants something, but the designer points out that it would be costly or not be worth the extra effort. Request a workaround if you want, or just ask if there’s another way. Decorators are usually great at creative solutions; we make our living by avoiding barriers. But we can only avoid barriers if we know what they are.
5. Find a visionary.
Everyone appreciates an expert. When a client told me that he was considering downsizing from a 35000 sqf home to a 180 sqf room, I said something like, “Well, it fortunate that I started my career working out of a 100sqf studio.” He appreciated my experience and by demonstrating my expertise I was able to ease and instill trust while reaffirming that he had made the right decision to hire me.
Charmaine Wynter http://www.wynterinteriors.com/
