Knowing what an Interior Design Client doesn’t want is almost as important as discovering what they do want.
Maybe, more!
It is not unusual to learn a Client’s preferences, then, have them shift focus as they learn more specifically how many options are available to them. Being an expert listener is high on the list of skills and capabilities when you decide to work with a professional Interior Designer for your Interior environment project.
Learning the ups and downs of product quality, how light and color interact and affect human moods and perceptions and realizing the balance in textures and materials, along with many other factors — all make up the path to a successful installation.
For your Interior designer, offering balanced menus of choices at every stage of your Interior design project is de rigeur. Making series after series of choices may be – probably is – new territory for most Clients immersed in an Interior design project. Although, we all have similar challenges in our own venues as we run businesses or households day after day.
It’s not unlike acquiring an understanding of the very broad and varied spectrum of any one color! When we were children, red was red, blue was blue and the rainbow was finite. As adults, we soon learned that color is a complex of nuance and subtleties! So – when your Client says they “love green and want that color to be the glue that holds their entire design in magical harmony” – well, all your Interior designer has to do is divine which family of greens will please the client and do the magic.
Choices! First, your Interior designer listens, asks questions, investigates and begins to understand and perceive the Client’s vision of their finished project. Choices menus begin to develop from their Client’s information. Those developing choices include new ideas, suggestions and alternatives – perhaps not previously known, realized or considered.
Everything – all the components of the proposed Interior design project — will involve choices that lead to decisions. It’s your Interior designer’s responsibility to guide, discern and develop choices with you that will each lead to good decisions that will serve the Client’s vision.
OK. But, sometimes the process works in the exact reverse! Sometimes, a Client has certain factors, elements, components and/or fixed ideas with which other choices and decisions must cooperate.
Situations like that can cause a unique conundrum! Creating an Interior environment reactively to certain fixed factors is an acid test of your Interior designer’s flexibility, creativity and expertise. Maybe that “green” is already present and everything else must react to it. Obviously, such situations are limiting factors to other new and creative choices.
Knowing the preexisting character, fixed factors and preference circumstances of a Client’s Interior space, at the front end of the planning process, is so important that it cannot be overstated! (Repeat! Repeat!)
If Aunt Martha’s chifforobe is destined to remain an important element, tell your Interior designer. If Uncle Joe’s antique dinosaur of a big wooden desk must remain in the company’s executive office – tell your Interior designer; now.”
Your professional Interior designer knows how to construct choices menus that best serve your end goals. Sometimes, when the water gets a little rough, the ideas a challenge to keep afloat, the problem a little harder to solve – providing distinct (even odd) contrasts can help clarity go: thud! And there it is: “Well, I know I don’t want that.”
It’s an inside joke that’s no secret: “Give them something to hate!” Then, what they really want will stand out like a sore thumb.
Choices menus should reflect how elements interact with each other. Color, light and texture – when handled by an expert – are like a perfectly choreographed dance or a wonderfully delicious gourmet meal! Each part smoothly enhances the next. It takes skill to make it work, and sometimes it takes a little push.
“Giving them something to hate” (…good advice I got from a wise college professor) is just a really good way to amplify the differences and accent what’s appropriate.
Robert Boccabella, B.F.A. is principal and founder of Business Design Services and a certified interior designer in private practice for over 30 years. Boccabella provides Designing to Fit the Vision© in collaboration with writingservice@earthlink.net. To contact him call 707-263-7073; email him at rb@BusinessDesignServices.com or visit www.BusinessDesignServices.com or on Face Book at Business Design Services.
