12 August 2026
What an interior designer actually costs
The question everyone asks on the phone and nobody wants to ask first.
The most common thing said to us in a first phone call is some version of “we probably can’t afford you.” It is said apologetically, usually before anyone has mentioned a number, and it is wrong about as often as it is right.
What you are actually paying for
A design fee buys three things: the decisions, the drawings, and the ordering. The decisions are the expensive part to get wrong: the wall that comes down and shouldn’t have, the sofa that is four centimetres too deep for the room, the kitchen laid out around a door that is about to be moved.
None of those mistakes appears on an invoice. They appear as a second delivery charge, a restocking fee, or a job that stops for three weeks while something is remade.
Where the money actually goes
On a typical whole-home scheme, design fees are a small fraction of the total. The overwhelming majority is furniture, joinery, lighting and labour, and that is exactly where a designer earns the fee back, because we are specifying to a budget rather than shopping to a wish list.
The cheapest room we have ever designed was the one where the client told us the budget in the first meeting.
The honest version
If your budget is genuinely tight, a single room design or a remote scheme will get you further than a whole-home project you have to stop halfway through. We would rather tell you that at the start than take a deposit and find out together in month three.
Our fees are on the services page. There is no version of working with us where you find out what something costs after you have committed to it.