In any case, not a good idea. How much influence is the right amount for you to accept from your professional interior design team? Of course, it depends on what is under consideration.
What you and your interior design team do not want is to get to the end of your project and realize that you deferred when you really should have been clearer and stronger concerning your choices and decisions. One of the worst things your team could hear goes something like: “Well, that really wasn’t my choice; but that’s what the designers wanted, so I went along with it. After all, that’s what I was paying for — wasn’t it?”
No. So, let’s take a look at where the line is drawn for when it might be prudent to defer, and where you never, never should.
First, let’s reinforce something. It’s your vision. Your interior design team is there to make that vision happen, as you imagine and want it to be. It needs to reflect your tastes, your feelings, your favoritisms, your needs, wants and goals. That does not mean that you know exactly how to be sure that your choices and decisions will all accurately serve those ends.
There is a critical balance point where what you want, and your designers’ understanding of that must coalesce. It is not rocket science, but it is the important juncture for successful end results. That is one reason why, at the beginning of your project, your designer must investigate as thoroughly as is necessary to determine that crucial point where everything clicks. You may be impatient to get that horse out on the racetrack; but, your design team wants to know that the horse has what it takes to run the race, challenge your marketplace competitors and bring home the winning installation.
Your professional designer will help you sort out the choices and decisions that are exclusively, comfortably, accurately and securely yours, from the ones where you need professional guidance and insights. Even those are yours — once you are on secure footing from which to choose and decide.
Your design team has the skills, experience and the necessary information you need in unfamiliar areas, concerning materials, processes, resources and unexpected results that come from wrong combinations or dysfunctional expectations. Those are some of the situations and circumstances where you ought to defer —± in the interest of education — before you choose or decide.
Some clients, who may be new at working with outside assistance from professional services, sometimes believe they must defer almost entirely to those professionals to make their decisions for them and for things to turn out right. For most professionals such total deference — and flattery — is really a big red flag. It clearly signals the need to clarify roles, and assure and assist that client that all choices and decisions are ultimately theirs; and, that when they make each choice and decision, they will be fully informed and confident.
Go along just to get along? You know you have the right team when they do not let you go down that path.
Robert Boccabella, B.F.A. is principal and founder of Business Design Services and a certified interior designer (CID) in private practice for more than 30 years. Boccabella provides Designing to Fit the Vision in collaboration with writingservice@earthlink.net. To contact Boccabella call (707) 263-7073; email him at rb@businessdesignservices.com or visit www.businessdesignservices.com or on Facebook at Business Design Services.
