How to Brief Your Interior Designer (And Get the Best Results)
Most first meetings start the same way. The client opens a folder of saved images on their phone, or a Pinterest board containing forty kitchens in it and nearly all of them white, then apologises for not really knowing what they want.
They almost always know more than they think. The difficulty is that saved images describe a look, and a designer needs a great deal more than a look before it can be made to work in one particular house, in this climate, for the people who live in it.
Learning how to brief your interior designer is less about arriving with answers and more about bringing the right raw material to the conversation. After thirty years of first meetings, we have a fair idea which pieces of information change a project most, and they are rarely the ones clients expect.
Start with how you live, not how it should look
Tell us that dinner happens in front of the television four nights a week. That homework gets done at the kitchen island and never at the desk upstairs. That fourteen people come for Christmas lunch and the table has to accommodate them. That nobody has sat in the ‘formal’ lounge since 2019.
These sound like small domestic confessions, but they are the brief. A room designed around the way you wish you lived will irritate you for years. A room designed around how you actually live gets used, and the rooms that get used are the ones that age well.
Be specific about what you dislike
Likes tend to be broad. Dislikes are precise, and much more useful.
I can't live with clutter on open surfaces. I don't want a sofa I'm afraid to spill red wine on. I hate cold-feeling rooms, and our winters are colder indoors than visitors ever expect. Each of those sentences rules out hundreds of small decisions before we get anywhere near making them, which is why we ask about them in the first hour.
Give us a real number
Budget is the part of a brief most often left vague, usually out of politeness, sometimes in the hope of seeing what things cost first, but this will work against you. A designer that is given a figure designs to it, sourcing and specifying accordingly. A designer working without one is guessing, and the guess lands wrong in one direction or the other.
Naming a figure is not a commitment to spend all of it. It sets the boundary that makes every choice after it meaningful.
Bring images, and tell us what you like about them
Keep the folder and the Pinterest board. Annotate it. “I love this room” tells us very little, because forty people would love that room for forty different reasons. “I love how low that sofa sits” or “I love the depth of that green” gives us something to design with.
Save a few rooms you dislike as well. A scheme takes shape as quickly from what has been ruled out as from what has been chosen.
Name the constraints early
Constraints give a brief its shape, and the earlier we have them, the better the answer tends to be.
The pieces that are staying: your grandmother's yellowwood table, the rug that came out of your mother's house, the piano nobody plays and nobody will part with. Tell us before we plan around the gaps they leave.
Pets and small children: they change fabric, flooring and finish choices more than almost anything else in a brief.
The building's rules: estate architectural guidelines, body corporate approvals and heritage restrictions all run on timelines of their own, and they do not move for anybody.
Your dates: a wedding, a new baby, family arriving in December. Made-to-order furniture and finishes are measured in months rather than weeks, so a fixed date changes what we can realistically specify.
What you have already bought: the taps ordered last year, the light fittings that seemed like a good idea at the time. We would far rather design with them than around them.
Decide who is deciding
If two of you are commissioning the work, the most useful thing you can tell us is where you disagree. We are not going to referee, but we can put two directions in front of you instead of one, or find the finish that satisfies both.
In the projects that run most smoothly, couples have said out loud which decisions sit with whom. The study is his. The bedroom is hers. The kitchen gets decided together, in one meeting, rather than by relay over three weeks.
What to bring to a first meeting
Photographs of the rooms as they are now, if we aren’t there in-person, including the corners you would rather not photograph.
Your annotated images, the ones you love and the ones you don't.
A figure, and what it needs to cover.
Your dates, and anything fixed around them.
A list of what is staying.
Clients often ask what happens after the brief. It becomes the reference point for everything that follows: the concept, the drawings, the samples we put in front of you, the suppliers we approach and the decisions made on site months later. When a brief is honest, those decisions are quick. When it is polite and vague, they are slow and expensive.
None of it needs to be polished. A brief scribbled on the back of an envelope, with honest dislikes and a real number on it, is worth more to us than a perfectly curated board of forty white kitchens.
