The Interior Design Business

All designers have them. The clients who are allergic to colour, refuse to listen to the designer’s pearls of wisdom, fail to recognise their strokes of genius and only want what they already have. Or, worse still what their best friend already has! But why are some clients so afraid, and what exactly are they afraid of? And how can interior designers help their clients discover their true inner s...

In this episode, we’re exploring healthy spaces, happy places and how to integrate wellness into the design process. Wellness is defined as ‘the state of being in good health, especially as an actively pursued goal’. Interior designers have always understood that well-ordered, functional spaces can relieve anxiety and bring relaxation and peace, but today’s well-informed clients are now demanding...

Interior designers are well respected for their creativity, but much less so for their business practices. Most design studios are micro businesses whose owners are often too busy designing to pay sufficient attention to contracts and other key project documents. So, what do designers need to do to tighten up their business practices in order to be seen as true professionals? And where can they tu...

Success, like beauty, is firmly in the eye of the beholder. For interior designers, and the practices they run, it goes without saying that success involves happy clients and being paid to create beautiful, functional interiors but, in reality, what does this look like? What really constitutes success for an interior designer? Is it fame? Or is it fortune? And in the end, does size really matter?...

In this episode, we’re taking a detailed look at typical lighting issues facing interior designers with advice on how to deal with them from Luke Thomas, Design Director at John Cullen Lighting. Interior designers and their clients often underestimate the importance of lighting. Simply put, it seems senseless to spend time, energy and lots of money designing and installing beautiful interiors, if...

Interior designers are always looking for ways to showcase their work and gain recognition from a wider audience, but this is not always easy to achieve. Getting editorial coverage in glossy magazines can be tricky and Instagram has become a seriously crowded place. But what about winning interior design awards? Will winning a recognised design award bring about the desired rise in profile? Or doe...

You’ve worked hard to get your interior design qualifications and you have spent years working even harder in other people’s design studios honing your knowledge and skills. Finally, you feel ready to break free, spread your entrepreneurial wings and run your own interior design company.   But how do you know when the time is right to take the first step? And do you go it alone or join forces with...

So, you have spent a fortune on your website and have a clutch of completed photogenic projects ready to be showcased. As a designer, you know that quality photographs will make your interiors sing and induce those high spending clients to pick up the phone. But how do you go about finding that special photographer who will be capable of conveying and amplifying your unique style? Once found, how...

For interior design projects, the perfect client is one with deep pockets and a spirit of adventure; a client who admires their designer’s personal style and respects and trusts the designer’s vision for their spaces. So just how important is it for designers to have a recognisable style to attract their dream clients? And how should designers define their unique design vision and then communicate...

Most interior designers begin in a whirl of creativity, energy and optimism. In an average working week, they will act as designer, specifier, accountant, project manager, client liaison, IT support, office dogsbody and tea-lady. There is no time to spare for marketing the business or finding new clients. Workflows are impossible to manage, and famine follows feast in a never-ending cycle that can...

The worst experiences often make the best stories. Never has this been truer than in the world of interior design! In this episode, we are going to explore some of the best-worst moments in the careers of Joanna Wood from Joanna Wood Ltd, Irene Gunter from Gunter & Co and co-host, Susie Rumbold from Tessuto Interiors. We'll find out how this acclaimed panel of designers solved the insoluble an...

This year, Decorex, Europe’s leading event for interior design professionals, returns as an in-person event.  The show welcomes back the design community at Olympia London from Sunday 10 th until Wednesday 13 th October. What can we expect from Decorex 2021? In this special episode, we talk to designers Sara Cosgrove, Laura Hammett, Charu Ghandi, Olivia Outred and Dee Gibson as well as Ben Rigby f...

Home staging is the preparation of a private residence for sale but how far is it an area of opportunity for interior designers today?     We're joined by Paloma Harrington-Griffin, Founding Director of the Home Staging Association and Lauren Colquhoun, Senior Interior Designer at the Accouter Group of Companies to assess the state of home staging in the UK and find out how designers can tap into...

In this episode, we explore interior design and the circular economy with Jules Haines from The Haines Collection and Chaline Church from 540 World. In 2018, a major study concluded that the world was only 9% circular with more than 90% of raw materials not being cycled back into the economy. Clearly, for the health of the planet and the survival of the human race, we must become more sustainable...

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there for interior designers. The competition is fierce and new designers are entering the market every day. We work our socks off, our designs are beautifully considered, and we have happy clients, but for many designers the reality is one of alternating feast and famine, and sometimes it can feel as though we are being left behind.  Not only do designers have to find...

2020 was the year that bought our homes and the way we use them into sharp focus. Stuck inside while the pandemic raged, we were all forced to find space at home to work, play and carry out activities that would previously have been done elsewhere. For residential interior designers, all this domestic churn has created real challenges as they try to advise their clients on future home trends and a...

In the third decade of the 21st century, designers could be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed by the colossal variety of pattern available to them. Fabrics, wallpapers and tiles are embellished with patterns created by man, while stone, timber and other materials provide us with the ever-changing patterns that occur in the natural world. Throughout history, much of man’s ingenuity has been spent de...

A group of nine forward-thinking and influential design firms have joined forces to launch an ambitious initiative for our industry, Interior Design Declares. They have committed to working together to urge everyone in the UK design and construction industry to adopt a paradigm shift in their behaviour over climate change. We're joined by three of these founding members - Oliver Heath from Oliver...

In his 2003 book, Emotional Design, the well-known American academic, Don Norman, came up with a theory to capture how and why people react, and emotionally connect, to certain objects and visual experiences. His theory was that true delight and enduring pleasure in something can only be achieved if positive visceral, behavioural and reflective reactions are achieved. In this episode, Jeff and Sus...

How do you design an overseas project for clients, especially in these most difficult of times? Established in 2009 by husband-and-wife team Aaron and Laura Hammett, London-based studio, Laura Hammett Interiors, has since expanded into a global design powerhouse, undertaking complex residential projects for demanding private clients all over the world. But, how do the team manage to maintain their...

Originating in the late 1990s, blogs were, initially, personal online diaries or journals, mostly written in internet cafes by gap year students on their travels. From these humble beginnings, and with the advent of social media, blogging has evolved into big business and is an important way for creative businesses of all kinds to engage with their target customers. But, writing a blog can be a da...

In March 2020, hotel design was booming. There were 6,860 luxury hotels in the construction pipeline in Europe alone, containing a planned number of 1,516,493 new guest rooms. The sector was experiencing unprecedented global expansion and new groups of customers with new requirements were emerging. And, then, along came COVID-19... How have hotel designers dealt with the challenges they've faced i...

As awareness of the crisis facing our planet grows, more and more interior suppliers are making environmentally friendly claims for their products to increase their sales; but working out who to believe can be a minefield for designers. Greenwash, defined as behaviour or activities that mislead people into believing that a company is doing more to protect the environment than it actually is, is ri...

This year, Decorex, Europe’s leading event for interior design professionals, transitions from a live event to an all-virtual format show. Decorex Virtual 2020 will bring the industry together from 17th to 19th November and, in this epsiode, we explore one of the exciting, immersive features of the event, The Great Escapes. We talk to Sam Fisher, Event Director of Decorex, about how this new featu...

In this show, co-presenter Susie Rumbold, Creative Director of Tessuto Interiors, and our special guest, Julia Alexander of Julia Alexander Interiors talk us through that significant first step for a designer in any client relationship, taking the brief. The success or failure of every project lies in their ability to extract an accurate brief from their clients. It sounds straightforward enough,...