10 Shocking Discoveries I Made After Becoming an Interior Designer

By Robin Callan

Like many other people who’ve spent the better part of their lives watching interior designers like Candice Olson on television or reading home decorating magazines cover to cover, I lived and breathed interior design. Imagine what a lightbulb moment it was for me when I realized at 36 that I should be doing this for a living. Two months after that epiphany, I started my own interior design firm and started channeling my graphic design and home improvement experience into interiors. I expected to enjoy this new career, but I had no idea the extent to how personally rewarding and creatively fulfilling it would be… and I was surprised by a few pitfalls along the way as well.

Here are the 10 shocking or surprising things I've discovered since starting my business:

1.  You will meet more people and develop more intimate relationships than ever before. Over the thirteen years I spent in Corporate America, I worked for three different businesses and would say that I bonded with an average of ten to fifteen co-workers at each company. As an interior designer, I meet ten to fifteen new clients every few weeks, and since I primarily practice residential interior design, I get to know my homeowners on a very intimate level. When it comes down to it, every element in a room is rife with symbolic meaning—projecting whether or not the homeowner is casual or formal, modern or traditional, whether they place more value on fun or sophistication, etc. If you don’t know all of these aspects of your client’s personality, you won’t be able to design a space that is a true reflection of them.

2.  You might as well call yourself a practicing therapist. Fifty percent of your job as an interior designer is to mediate between people in a relationship, whether it’s a couple, parents and children, or colleagues in a commercial space. In these situations, you have to help people merge what may be conflicting tastes, and you’re also the referee of every power play between them. Most situations aren’t some kind of full-out War of the Roses battle, but compromise can be challenging for anyone. When a qualified designer—a.k.a. a disinterested third party—weighs in on a dispute, most people trust the expertise behind that opinion and are able to move through the decision-making process more quickly than if they were going It alone.

3.  You are also a professional hand-holder. Understandably, many people want a design expert’s seal of approval on choices they’ve already made, before they spend a boatload of money and things get cemented in place. In these instances, I’ve helped homeowners avoid costly mistakes, and they sleep better at night, knowing that their furnishings and finishes coordinate well.

4.  On top of all that, an interior designer has to be part FBI profiler. If you can mentally gather information about a client through context clues, you’ll be an ace designer. Everything about the client—from their art, books, car, wardrobe, housecleaning and personal grooming habits—conveys valuable information to a designer about how the client likes to portray themselves, their likes and dislikes, as well as their personal interests. For example, a couple I met with recently who were buying a unit in a hotel converting to condos asked me point blank how I would define their style…but I wasn’t in their existing home, their future condo was still an ‘80s disaster, and they’d arrived casually dressed in their “day off” clothes, so I had few visual clues to go on. All I knew about them was that they’d both lived in New York and Hong Kong—which told me they probably favored solid, neutral colors over prints—and I knew their occupations. I looked around their very distinctively designed development, and knew anyone who was attracted to this particular property had to have been lured in by the design of its exterior. “You prefer your foundation pieces, like flooring and major furniture, to be somewhat subtle and borderline traditional,” I told them, “but you like periodic pops of intense color and unexpected details.” I based that split-second assessment on the façade’s neutral-toned bricks and inset panels in vivid colors, which I saw as a metaphor for their relationship—he was a financial advisor (traditional, neutral-toned bricks) and she was a personal shopper at Nordstrom’s (vivid pops of bright color). Their jaws on the floor confirmed I was right, and this insight helped me cut to the heart of their style in a New York minute.

5.  It’s better to be personally involved in—but not personally affected by—the design. If you and your client disagree on any part of your design plan, it’s important to share the rationale behind your recommendations. That’s part of the job—helping clients make informed design decisions. But ultimately, you’re talking about their money and their living or working environment, so it’s better for everyone involved if you can retain a bit of professional detachment and not take a client’s preferences or changes personally. One client told me a previous designer refused to take her project because she wouldn’t agree to eliminate marble flooring that was original to her historic home. Sure, it was butt-ugly, but taking out that marble should’ve been her prerogative. Getting pouty over a design element will neither serve a designer nor a client well. Imagine how talented you will look if you can, instead, create a design in the space that looks great despite that ugly tile—all of your clients’ friends will marvel at your creativity and hire you in a heartbeat to transform their own trash into treasure!

6.  Do yourself a favor and invoke the Chemistry Clause. Have you ever heard a woman say that she could tell if she wanted to date someone after spending as little as five minutes with them? The same is true in a designer-client relationship. You know in your gut if it’s going to work out or not pretty soon after you meet them, and you owe it to yourself to spend your billable hours on jobs where there’s good chemistry with the client. If you don’t feel some kind of connection with a person, chances are good you’re not going to be able to anticipate their needs very well—or their likes and dislikes—and that is the essential key to great interior design. Even in a slow economy, when it becomes harder to walk away from the income a particular job might offer, it’s actually more fiscally responsible to stick with clients you’re on the same page with and walk away anytime you feel bad juju. Why? Because if you aren’t able to get inside a client’s mind and provide them with a design they’ll be happy with, your confidence will take a hit and you won’t get the referrals that help you grow your business…and if the job really goes south, you’re even worse off. Unhappy clients just loooove to vent their frustrations out on any of the plethora of review websites out there, and that’s bad for biz too.

7.  Good designers embrace criticism. Bad juju aside, in the beginning of your interior design career, it’s natural to not want to hear criticism from a client. However, as long as it’s not abusive, that kind of open dialogue makes for better working relationships. Sometimes clients are too afraid of hurting a designer’s feelings, so they’ll refrain from sharing dissenting thoughts. If this happens, the designer leaves without having the opportunity to offer alternative design solutions and the client remains unsatisfied. Likewise, you do a disservice to a client if you greenlight something you know will lead to functional or aesthetic problems. They would much rather hear that selections they’ve made don’t work before they throw a chunk of change at a home improvement project or an expensive sofa.

8.  Your website’s design trumps your design chops. Before I became an interior designer, I was a graphic designer and branding expert. Intellectually, I knew my website would be one of my best marketing tools, but I was still shocked to hear a recent client tell me, “Even though I knew you’d won ‘Best of Austin’ twice and liked what you did at my friend’s place, I still wouldn’t have hired you if your website sucked.” Wha? That’s a pretty powerful statement, but it’s also a logical one. “If your website’s design screams, ‘design-challenged,’” says web designer Karen Barry, “it’s hard to convince potential clients that you can solve their design dilemmas. You will get a much higher rate of return on your investment if you spend the money to create a well-designed web presence that showcases your portfolio and draws people in.”

9.  You can easily go bankrupt without spending a single dime on yourself. Let’s say you want to project that you’re a big, fancy interior design firm, so you use your credit card to purchase merchandise for a client…you’re buying pillows here and paint there, expecting it all to come out in the wash when your client reimburses you. The trouble with that is, by the time you collect all of your receipts, invoice the client, receive payment, make your deposit, wait for the check to clear and pay your credit card company, you could be carrying those charges for at least a month or two, if not longer. In the meantime, there’s a credit meter running and you have the potential to rack up some serious interest fees, not to mention how stuck over a barrel you can get if a client doesn’t pay at all. Over time, this practice can add up to a substantial amount of debt and you’ll have nothing to show for it. It makes better financial sense to have a client pay for materials in advance, or to allow you to use their credit card for these purchases. I learned this the hard way!

10.  Good interior design may not cure cancer, but it sure does cure a lot of other ills. One recent client of mine is an accomplished painter and sculptor who hadn’t picked up a paintbrush or welding torch in nearly a decade and she’d lived with Builder Beige walls forever. Once the paint palette I selected appeared on the walls, my client felt creatively inspired for the first time in ages. Since then, she’s pursued professional photography jobs, started painting again, and has even started singing. When you transform a client’s home into something they find more attractive and functional, it has ripple effects that lead to positive changes elsewhere in their lives. Taking part in that, and seeing how it changes people, is one of the most fulfilling aspects of this job.

To be a successful interior designer, you have to be a good detective and armchair therapist, trust your instincts, play referee, don't take it personally when your clients don’t take your advice, invest in well-designed marketing materials, and don’t buy housefuls of furniture for other people with your credit card. If you can do all of that, then getting your creative energy out on someone else’s dime, while helping people in the process—that’s what I call a great way to make a living.

Robin Callan is the founding design guru of Room Fu, an Austin, Texas interior design firm and long-time defender of affordable design. Her blog, Fu for Thought, features steals and deals, design-related musings, and interviews with celebrity designers. For more information, email her at robin@roomfu.com or call (512) 797-5821.