The Design Process

You would think that this part would be the easy part - as a Professional Interior Designer I design renovations and additions for a living. The trick is that those designs are for other people. With our Clients we always try and come up with the best design possible for the requirements as determined in our pre design meetings. We build on the design concepts as the project is moved forward but there is always the underlying question - "what is this going to cost me in design fees". We all have a personal connection to your homes and this is always a sensitive conversation. I always try to explain to Clients that it is important to "make our mistakes on paper" as these are easier to change now then when the Contractor has already built it. Unfortunately when Clients are looking at another couple of hours of design time versus being able to have the latest __________ (insert material item here) the design experience tends to loose out.

When ever I start a new design I like to pose the question to the Client - If you had a million dollars to spend anyway you want, what would you have or do (this is assuming that the budget is below a million dollars to begign with and that would be a large un-attainable number). This helps people to take the blinders off and think outside the box. Most people when dreaming of an addition or renovation tend to think "just enough". The believe that their true dream would be too expensive or unrealistic that they have already shot down most of the good ideas before they even get to the design process. By removing the blinders we are able to dig deeper and hopefully the resulting design brings their dreams to reality. Clients will come up with ideas that they never had thought possible. Not everything is attainable but there is more than one way to do something so you will suprised with what you can do.

An important design step is to remember that the Client is actually part of the Design Team. As Designers we are interpreting the Clients dreams and expectations and then creating a solution based on their needs and wants. With all of todays TV reality based design programs I would love to see the true reactions of the homeowners. One third of the design process is the Preliminary Design stage where we come up with possible solutions and some are embraced and some are rejected (some more emphatically then others). With true design being a reaction to your presentations how can the evolution of the project exist without having the full design team present.

Love and Hate are two extreme human emotions - on either end of the spectrum. Immediately upon seeing something you get a response either positively or negatively. You might not know why you like or dislike something but you just know that you do. In the design process I ask Clients to start two folders and put images or concepts in each. You can probably guess what the names on the folders are. As we go through the design process these image folders help to shape the resulting design solutions. If you don't like glass blocks and everytime you come across an image of a glass block window it is filed in the hate file I better not come back to you with a design that has glass blocks as a predomenant design feature.

Back to our project, like I said it should be easy to design our addition. Well... maybe not. When you aren't constrained by an outside source like design fees and you have some time to really dream - what would you do.