General Questions
With a paid two-hour consultation at your property. We measure the rooms in question, talk through how you use them and what is not working, and leave you with a written summary of the options. If you go ahead, the fee is credited against the first stage of design.
A single room refresh runs six to ten weeks from brief to installation. A whole-home renovation with permits is more like nine to fourteen months. We publish a stage-by-stage program at the end of concept design and update it every two weeks.
Yes. A single bedroom, a color scheme, or a furniture plan for a room you already like are all perfectly good briefs. For work under a certain size we offer an hourly advisory service rather than a full staged appointment.
We do. Remote projects run on a surveyed measured drawing, video walkthroughs and a physical sample box we mail to you. We travel for the site survey and the installation, and bill travel at cost.
We do, in the studio. Nothing is outsourced to a rendering house and nothing is traced from a catalog. Every plan, elevation and joinery detail that leaves here was drawn by one of the five designers whose names are on the team page, and the person who drew it is the person who answers the contractor's questions about it.
Pricing and Consultations
Design fees usually land between 10 and 18 percent of the construction and furnishing budget, depending on how much custom joinery is involved. We quote a fixed fee per stage once the scope is settled, so the number does not move unless the scope does.
Both. A full service is quoted as a percentage of the construction budget, which keeps our interests and yours pointed the same way. Smaller pieces of work — a color scheme, a furniture plan, a day of on-site advice — are hourly, and we will tell you before we start roughly how many hours we think it is.
The first hour is, and it happens in the room rather than over email. We measure nothing and promise nothing; we look at what you have, listen to what you want, and tell you honestly whether we are the right studio for it.
We re-price the remaining scope and show you the three or four choices that get back to the number. It is a conversation we would rather have in week six than at handover, and we build a contingency into every estimate precisely so it is a smaller conversation.
In stages tied to what has been delivered: a deposit to start, a payment when the concept is signed off, another when the drawings go out to tender, and the balance at handover. No stage is invoiced before the work it covers is done, and the schedule is in the letter of engagement before you sign anything.
Working With Us
No. We are designers, not contractors, which means we can hold the builder to the drawings without a conflict of interest. We tender the work to two or three firms we know, help you read the bids, and run site visits through to handover.
Almost always, and we would rather you did. We photograph and measure everything you want to retain at the survey stage and design the scheme around it. Reupholstery and refinishing are usually cheaper and better than replacement.
We start by keeping what is already there, because reuse beats any specification choice on impact. Beyond that we favor solid timber over veneer, natural fiber textiles, low-VOC finishes, and suppliers who will repair what they sell. Every scheme includes a repair and refinishing note.
We come back at three months and again at a year. Timber moves, paint cures, and a hinge that was perfect in March may need a turn in September. Those visits are part of the fee, not an extra.
Sometimes, and we will tell you honestly which side of the line your project falls on. A single room or a kitchen usually can be phased around you. A whole-floor refit with the plumbing opened up usually cannot, and pretending otherwise turns eight weeks into sixteen. If you do stay, we set the program up so the dust-making trades are grouped rather than spread across the whole job.