Your Interior Designer

3 Tips to prepare for your first meeting

Congratulations! You’ve decided to hire an interior designer or decorator to give your San Antonio home the beautiful polished look that only a professional can provide. By now you’ve selected a designer, seen their gallery of work on their website, you’re confident they’re perfect for the job, and you’ve picked a date for your first meeting. But you’ve never collaborated with a home design professional before and you don’t know what to expect. These simple tips can make your first meeting fun and productive, which will save you time and money as you move ahead.

1. Let go and let your Designer!

It doesn’t help the process if you’ve single-handedly decided every decorating detail ahead of time. So, relax and take joy in the fact that your designer will have ideas you never thought of. A professional designer has a vast understanding of design principles such as balance, rhythm, emphasis, scale, unity, variety and harmony. They pay attention to details like the flow and proper function of a space, materials, texture, lighting, color, patterns, lines and mass. This is what you’re paying them for. So let them wow you! This doesn’t mean your ideas will not be considered or heard. On the contrary, your input is necessary and crucial in achieving the well-designed home of your dreams.

2. Know Your Needs

It’s fun to anticipate what the final outcome of your re-design will look like, but first things first. Consider how you need the space to best serve you. Are you big on entertaining? Are your guests mostly family and friends or clients you’d like to impress? If it’s a bedroom remodel, do you read in bed? Is seating desirable? Do you need to incorporate a home office?

For a living room, will art be displayed? Is intimate conversation important here? Also give some thought about what you want to “feel” when inhabiting the space as well as how you’d like visitors to feel. Warm and cozy? Exhilarated and look forward to returning? Take time before your first visit to ask yourself the questions that will help your designer get more out of the finished space than just what it looks like.

3. Picture this!

Your designer has spent hours creating drawings based on your request for “minimalism” only to discover that you thought minimalism meant a little de-cluttering and you find you actually hate the minimalist style. Let’s just say that probably won’t make for a great start. Using design or style terms may throw your designer off, so it’s best to have a few pictures (found online or in magazines) that reflect what you actually want.

Once you’ve selected photos (hardcopies or saved on an online idea-book), determine what features you like and which ones you don’t. This will greatly cut down on misunderstandings and enable your interior designer to give you exactly what you want and make things easy for you both all along the way.