Is Interior Design Stressful?

What stresses me most is being responsible for the client experience of things that I can't control. I placed a custom sectional order in late September. The vendor confirmed a 10-week lead time, which would have it arriving the first week of December, which is what I told the client, a woman named Sandra. Sandra has a Christmas party every year in mid-December and she really wanted the new living room ready for it. I tracked that order every week. In week 8, I called to confirm delivery scheduling and found out it was coming from a manufacturer in Portugal and there was a production delay. The earliest delivery was now mid-January.

I had to call Sandra and tell her the sofa wouldn't be there for the party. She was disappointed, and I understood, but the thing that stressed me was that I'd done everything right. I placed the order in time. I confirmed the lead time with the vendor. I tracked it. And it still didn't work. What am I supposed to do differently? My supervisor, a woman named Kay, told me to always add four weeks of buffer when quoting timelines to clients. Which I now do. But I'd wish someone had told me that before Sandra's Christmas party happened without a sofa.

Cash flow. That's my honest answer. Not the design, not the clients, not the vendors. The money rhythm of running a design business is genuinely stressful in a way that never fully goes away. We work on retainer and milestone billing. A project might have four payment milestones over 14 months. Between milestone one and milestone two, there are eight weeks where I'm doing full-time work on the project and no money is coming in. That's fine in theory. In practice, if two projects are in that gap at the same time and I have payroll for my co-owner Fern and whatever subcontractors we're using, the months between milestones get tight.

I had a client last year, a couple doing a full home renovation, who paid the first milestone on time, went quiet for six weeks, then emailed to say they were "reassessing the budget." They didn't cancel. They just stopped responding for a while. I didn't know if they were going to continue or not. I had $18,000 in furniture orders in process for their project. I couldn't put new work in that slot because I didn't know if I had a slot to fill. I couldn't stop the orders because some were past the cancellation window. Three weeks of genuine uncertainty, and during that time I was also doing a kitchen project for another client that hit a structural issue, so I was handling two major stressors simultaneously. The couple eventually came back, they'd just been going through some family stuff. But I aged a little during those three weeks, I think.

The thing that stresses me most is the expectation that I'm always reachable. Hospitality projects move fast, there are a lot of moving parts, and my clients and contractors are used to getting answers quickly. Which I understand. But I've had project managers text me at 10:30 PM with questions that are not urgent and expect a response that night. I've had a contractor call me during a site visit on a different project because he had a measurement question. I had a client, the director of development at a hotel group, send me an email at 7 AM with seventeen questions. Seventeen. Numbered. I counted.

I don't blame any of those people individually. Each of them had a reasonable need in the moment. Collectively, across three active projects, the always-available expectation is exhausting. My colleague Adrian, he left a year ago for an in-house design role at a furniture retailer, and the thing he said he missed least was being the on-call person for everyone simultaneously. He described it as "being the hot line for other people's urgencies, most of which weren't urgent." I keep waiting to develop the kind of boundaried response style that my senior colleagues seem to have. I think it might just take time.

The most stressful part is when a contractor or vendor fails and the client thinks it's me. Not because I take it personally, exactly, but because I'm the person in front of them and the relationship damage lands on me whether or not I caused the problem. I had a painter named Steve on a project last spring. He'd done good work for me twice before. On this project he had a crew change and the new crew painted the living room the wrong sheen. The client had specified eggshell throughout. The crew used flat in the dining room. The client caught it at her walkthrough. She said to me, in a tone that was not warm, "I thought you were overseeing this."

I was overseeing it. I had checked in with Steve at the two-day mark. He'd confirmed eggshell. The mistake happened between that check-in and the walkthrough. I fixed it, obviously, Steve repainted at no charge to the client. But I spent four days managing the client's frustration over something I didn't do and couldn't have caught earlier without being present for every brush stroke. The relationship recovered. She refers clients to me. But the experience of being the face of someone else's mistake, and having to absorb the client's disappointment without being able to fully explain the situation without sounding defensive, that is the specific kind of stressful that this job has plenty of.

Honestly? At this point in my career it's managing the studio. I didn't become a designer to be a manager. But I have six people working for me now, and what that means is that I'm dealing with personnel questions, reviews, the occasional interpersonal conflict, the person who's doing good work but not great work and I have to figure out how to help them improve. Last month two of my designers had a disagreement about how to handle a procurement error on a shared project. I spent two hours mediating something that had nothing to do with design and everything to do with two people who communicate differently under pressure.

Earlier in my career the stress was external: clients, vendors, contractors. Now a lot of the stress is internal: making sure my studio is running well, that my junior designers are developing, that the culture is one I'm proud of. My business coach, a woman named Petra, asked me once what I'd tell my 30-year-old self about running a studio. I said: the design was always the easy part. Running the business was always the thing I had to learn. She said that was true for almost every principal she'd worked with. Which made me feel better and worse simultaneously.

The documentation burden is what stresses me the most right now. I'm working on a 28,000-square-foot office renovation for a technology company in South Lake Union. The project has a construction document set that's currently at 147 sheets. I am responsible for the interiors sheets: finishes, furniture layouts, interior elevations, specifications. Every time there's a design change, and there are always design changes, I have to update multiple sheets and make sure everything is coordinated. If the reflected ceiling plan shows a pendant in one place and the furniture plan shows a workstation underneath it, that's a coordination error. If it goes to the contractor unresolved, I get a question. If it goes to the city unresolved, I get a comment. Either way, it comes back to me and I have to fix it.

There's a specific kind of anxiety in knowing that your work is going to be reviewed by a contractor, an architect, a building department, and an MEP engineer, all of whom will find any errors. I'm careful. I do coordination checks. I use Revit which has some built-in clash detection. And I still miss things sometimes. My project manager, a man named Philippe, caught a clearance issue on the stair landing last week that I'd missed. He wasn't unkind about it. He just marked it up and sent it back. But the specific feeling of someone finding something in your work that you should have caught is a low-level hum that I carry on active projects. I don't think it goes away entirely. I think you just get better at catching more things before they get caught for you.