the Price of Interior Design

The service involved helping us select new area rugs and a sofa set in style, colors, and fabric that complemented our other remaining furniture and the colors we used in the rest of the house.

The service was a part of purchases made at a home furnishings store, so a variety of products and services are available from delivery and installation to room and home "makeovers."

Our sofa was getting on in years and we figured we could sell it cheap to some incoming college student (we were right) and that we might as well get rid of the matching chairs with it. As all the wood furniture was still in good condition, we didn't want to replace any of it. Instead we went looking for a new sofa set that suited the style of our house.

After figuring we'd need to take pictures of the stuff we weren't replacing, or take fabric samples home and build sofas out of cardboard boxes, we ran across a furniture store whose floor sales person was a graduate of a local design school. She'd found her calling in sales instead of as a professional designer, it seems.

We did take the pictures and bring them in for comparison. And the decorator did convince us to spend a fair bit of money on some area rugs to, how did she put it, "tie the room together?" Anyway, the area rugs let us go a bit further away from the styles of the furniture we kept. They, ahem, bridged the gap between our existing furniture and our new, more "experimental" sofa set.

I don't know about the whole "professional interior designer" thing. I understand the necessity of good design, but I'm not convinced the designers are always helpful. Imagine if you will a designer creating a product. They go through dozens of iterations to get things just right. But as soon as the product goes on the market, the product is deemed unusable. The designer can't imagine why this could be the case after all the careful thought he put into it. Why does this happen?

Because the designer is so intimate with the design, knows it so well, they can't look at it fresh, like someone who has never used the product.

The reverse can also be true. A designer may not know as intimately how the customer uses their space and so can end up pushing on the customer their own prejudices rather than working with the customer's actual needs.