The Hardest Part of Being an Interior Designer in London Isn’t the Design

Eighteen years in, I still love this job. But the hard part has never been choosing between the emerald velvet and the teal. Design is the easy bit.

The hard part is everything around it. Explaining clearly what we do, what it costs and how long it takes, without hiding behind designer speak. Most of our clients run businesses or busy careers. They want a beautiful home, but they don’t want a course in interior design to get one. They want a team that takes the project from brief to handover, with contractors we trust and a process they can follow without having to manage it.

That’s why we’ve put as much work into how the studio runs as into how it designs. Every project lives in Basecamp. Clients can see what’s happening, what’s been decided and what’s next, without needing to understand every step. Schedules, orders and snagging lists sit in one place, so nothing depends on someone remembering.

We haven’t always got this right. We once changed our entire project setup twice in a month, for good reasons both times, and left the team more confused than before. Chasing the next app isn’t a system. What works is deciding how a project should run, and only then choosing the tools.

That organisation is what lets a team of six run anything from a three-room refresh to a whole-house refurbishment with the same care. It’s also what lets us hand a client the keys on time.

Good design is the minimum. The rest is how you get there.