What Stages Interior Design Project Preparation Includes? (Part 1)

This article includes instructions for those who decided to turn to a professional interior designer. Slight redecoration can be handled without any project and designer’s assistance, but if you are in the mood to start major repairs it’s pretty hard to do without a professional’s tips. A designer not just gives you a piece of advice on what kind of furniture or accessories to pick and how to arrange them within your living space, but also knows for sure, how to locate pipes, ductwork and overlapping, and what is more important – how to reflect all this on a technical plan for a construction team.

In this post a professional interior designer will explain all the stages of preparing a good interior design project.

Beginning: Requirements specification for an interior design project

It’s no coincidence that this point is treated as a separate stage of an interior design project. If you ask a designer to create a beautiful functional interior, he or she will surely handle this issue and will offer you a few options. The interior will be both functional and beautiful, but it doesn’t mean that you are going to like it. Every person has a different understanding of the “beauty” concept, and it’s absolutely normal. But for your future interior to be really convenient, beautiful and implementable, you have to prepare a requirement specification including the following points:

• daily routine of each member of the family
• minimum requirements for the quantity and type of furniture for each room
• examples of images of those items that you like and those that you’d never want to see in your interior
• requirements for technical aspects: smart home system, air ventilation, alarm system and etc.
• budgeting

Here is the example of client’s requirements to the basement floor arrangement:

And here is the sample of a client’s selection of ideas with comments:

One of the key issues on this stage is linking all the above-mentioned points together. If any conflict arises, for instance, if the budgeting and wants of the clients do not coincide, it’s not worth moving to the next stage. An experienced designer can roughly estimate on the very first stage whether the budget of a client can afford this or that project.

Planning decision

The next step is a planning decision. A planning decision is a drawing, a top view of walls and furnishing arrangement in an interior. Based on your requirements for furnishing and daily routine you specified on the first stage, a designer can create a convenient layout scheme. And it would be convenient not in terms of general, abstract criteria, but particularly according to the daily routine of each member of your family.

Here is an example of a planning decision of a basement floor according to the requirements specification we saw above:

On this stage the budgeting must be minded as well. A competent interior designer would provide for standard dimensions in planning a storage system. For instance, he or she wouldn’t plan a wardrobe that would have to be custom-made due to its complicated shape or non-standard size. This saves the budget of a client.

A practicing designer knows that extra 10 centimeters of a kitchen set can increase its price by up to 20-40%. So, a designer’s task is to find a golden mean between price and quality. And choosing standard sizes one can pick more expensive and high quality materials, which is more reasonable than spending the same money for a non-standard size and finishes of inferior quality.

To be continued….