When to Bring in Your Interior Designer
Walk through a room you love and everything wonderful about it feels inevitable. The sconces sit exactly where the light should be. The pendants hang at just the right height over the island, and the whole kitchen seems to have been arranged around the way you actually make coffee. That feeling of inevitability is one of the great pleasures of a well-designed home, and it has a lovely secret. Most of it was decided while the walls were still open.
That's why the answer to this question is earlier than most people guess. The right time to hire an interior designer is while the architectural drawings are still in progress, ideally close to when your architect comes on board. Not because the furnishings take that long to choose, but because so many of the details you'll love living with become part of the house itself, and it's a joy to get them right the first time.
When everything is still possible
The early months of a project are the ones where every door is open, and there's real pleasure in walking through them together. The furniture plan and the floor plan get to grow up side by side. The lighting lands where your evenings will actually happen. The plumbing behind every shower wall matches the beautiful fixtures arriving a year later, and the kitchen cabinetry gets drawn around appliances you've already fallen for instead of the other way around.
Your architect stays the author of the house, and that authorship deserves every bit of respect. What a designer brings to those early conversations is the life that's going to happen inside the drawings. On our projects, Ashley sits alongside the architect and builder from the beginning, so the way you live flows into the plans while the plans can still welcome it. Everyone does their best work this way, and you can feel it in the finished rooms.
There's a practical sweetness to it too. When selections happen early, they happen calmly, chosen from everything beautiful rather than everything that ships in three weeks. Long-lead pieces get ordered while the calendar is still generous, and the whole project keeps an easy rhythm from there.
Already mid-project? Come on in
If you're reading this with construction already underway, there's genuinely good news. A project in motion still holds more open decisions than it looks like from inside the dust, and a designer who joins now starts by making the most of everything that's still ahead. That usually turns out to be plenty.
The same is true at every scale. A renovation carries these early decisions on a shorter timeline, and even a furnishing project in a finished home rewards a head start, because time is the most generous ingredient in any of this.
So if you're interviewing architects right now, or holding drawings that feel nearly final, this is a wonderful moment to say hello. The best conversations we have with new clients happen while everything is still possible, and there's a particular happiness in starting there together.