What Interior Design Is Actually Like

When someone pictures an interior designer's day, what are they getting wrong?

They picture someone walking through a beautiful half-finished space, pointing at things, saying "move that there." And that moment does exist. It's maybe 8% of the week. The other 92% is emails, phone calls, procurement tracking, vendor follow-ups, client presentations, and trying to figure out why a furniture order placed in October hasn't shipped yet in February. I have one project right now, a full primary bedroom suite renovation in Belle Meade, where I've spent more time chasing a custom headboard from an upholstery workroom in Atlanta than I have on anything else. The client, her name is Claudine, keeps asking when it'll arrive. I've called the workroom four times. They keep saying two more weeks. It has been six weeks of two more weeks.

People don't picture the procurement side at all. And procurement is enormous. For a full-service residential project, I'm sourcing furniture, fabric, lighting, hardware, tile, wallcovering, window treatments, accessories, rugs. Each of those categories involves multiple vendors. Each vendor has lead times, minimums, COM requirements, freight terms, damage claims processes. When a sofa arrives and one leg is cracked, I'm the one who photographs it, writes the damage claim, arranges for the vendor to send a replacement leg, and coordinates with the installer to come back out. None of that is design. All of it is my job.

Walk me through an actual recent day.

OK so last Thursday. I had a site visit at 9 AM at a new project, a full-house renovation in Green Hills. The clients are Dan and Roberta. They bought a 1980s colonial and they want it completely updated, new kitchen, new primary bath, paint throughout, furniture in six rooms. It's about a $280,000 project on my side, not counting contractor costs. I'm there to do a walk-through with their general contractor, a guy named Marcus from Precision Builds, who I've worked with twice before. He's good. He's also always running 20 minutes late. So I'm standing on the front porch at 9:18 looking at paint swatches when he pulls up.

We went through the kitchen first. There's a question about whether the island is going to be large enough once the HVAC duct gets rerouted. Marcus thinks it'll be fine. I'm less sure. I took photos and measurements. I'll need to pull up the floor plan in CAD and verify that the clearances work before I finalize the cabinetry order, because if we order and it doesn't fit, that's a real problem. The cabinets are from a semi-custom line and the lead time is 12 weeks. There's no margin for error.

Then we looked at the primary bath. Roberta wants a freestanding soaking tub, which we've already selected, but the plumber Marcus uses, a guy named Terrence, flagged that the floor joists may not support the filled weight. A cast iron tub filled with water weighs about 500 pounds. Marcus says it's probably fine. I said we need a structural engineer to confirm it before I order the tub. They pushed back a little because bringing in a structural engineer costs $400 and delays the timeline by a week. I said I'd rather delay a week than order a $4,800 tub and then have to return it. Marcus agreed eventually. That argument took 25 minutes.

Then what?

I got back to my studio at noon and spent two hours on procurement stuff. Followed up on the Claudine headboard situation again. Called the tile vendor about a backsplash order for a different project that was supposed to arrive last week. The tile came in short by 14 square feet, not enough to complete the kitchen. The vendor says it's on backorder. I have an installer scheduled for next Wednesday. Called the installer, Marcus's brother-in-law actually, different Marcus, explained the situation. He said he could work around it but would charge for the partial day. I said fine. Then wrote a note in my project management software, I use Studio Designer, updating the status of both those open items.

At 3 PM I had a client presentation with a couple, the Whitfields, for their living room. I'd put together a full concept board: a sofa in a warm ivory boucle, two accent chairs in a terracotta linen, a rattan cocktail table, a large jute rug, artwork sourced from a gallery on 12th Avenue, window treatments in a cream sheer with a silk drapery panel. I'd spent about 14 hours on that concept over the previous week, selecting fabrics, pulling samples, building the boards in Canva. Kyle Whitfield walked in, looked at it for maybe 90 seconds, and said "I was thinking more modern. Like, concrete floors, black metal, that kind of thing." Which is the exact opposite of everything we discussed in the intake meeting three weeks ago. His wife Patricia looked like she wanted to disappear. I smiled and said we could absolutely explore that direction. Inside I was doing the math on how many hours I'd spent that I couldn't bill for.

Do you charge for that re-do?

Depends on the contract. I work on a flat fee for the design phase, with the fee calculated based on my estimate of how many presentations it will take to get to an approved concept. The estimate is usually 2 to 3 presentations. If we go beyond that, I have a clause that allows me to bill additional hours at $175. The Whitfields are in their second presentation window. If they reject the next concept too, I start billing hourly. That conversation is uncomfortable and I hate having it, but if I don't, I end up doing eight presentations and making $30 an hour on a project I quoted for two. That has happened to me. Not anymore.

The thing about high-end residential is that the clients are paying for certainty. They want to walk into a room when it's done and love it. They've never done this before, they can't read floor plans, they can't visualize how a fabric swatch becomes a sofa. My job is to translate their vague feelings about a space into something specific. And sometimes they can't articulate what they actually want until they see what they don't want. Kyle saying "no, more modern" is actually useful information. The problem is it cost me 14 hours to get there.

What keeps you doing it?

Honestly? The install days. When a room comes together, when all the pieces are in and the light is hitting the rug and the pillows are right and the clients walk in and go quiet before they say anything, that feeling doesn't go away. I finished a living room for a family in Brentwood two months ago. The husband had been doubtful the whole process. He's a software executive, very analytical, kept asking me to justify choices. On install day he walked in and stopped. His kids were running around the room. He looked at his wife and said "this is our house." That's it. That's what I'm doing it for. And no amount of backordered tile or brass hardware frustration makes me forget that it exists.

What's yours?

How much the job asks you to absorb clients' anxiety about their own home. Renovating your house is stressful. There's money, there's living in construction, there's the fear that it won't look right when it's done. That anxiety lands on me. I'm the person they can call. When Claudine texts me at 9 PM wondering if the headboard is actually going to match the rug, she's not really asking about the headboard. She's asking "is this going to be OK?" And I have to answer her like she's just asking about the headboard, because what she actually needs is reassurance that the money and the disruption will result in something she loves. That's not in my contract. It's in the job.

My boyfriend Theo thinks I'm talking to clients about furniture. I'm actually providing a certain amount of continuous emotional support to people who are spending more money than they've ever spent on a single project and have no way to evaluate whether they're getting it right. The furniture is almost beside the point.

How does commercial design differ from residential?

Scale, process, and stakes. On a commercial project, you might be designing a 40,000-square-foot corporate office. You're not picking a sofa because someone likes it. You're specifying furniture systems for 200 workstations, selecting carpet tile that has to meet LEED requirements, choosing finishes that are durable enough for thousands of people walking through daily, and making sure everything complies with ADA accessibility standards and the local fire code. You're producing actual construction documents. Your work goes to a building department. If you get the egress clearance wrong, someone will catch it, and it'll be expensive.

There's also a lot more coordination. On my current project, a headquarters buildout for a fintech company here in the West Loop, my team is working alongside an architecture firm, a structural engineer, an MEP engineer, and an AV consultant. We have a project coordination meeting every Tuesday at 10 AM with all parties. It's 90 minutes, minimum. That's 90 minutes of my week where I'm not designing anything. I'm making sure the lighting placement we specified doesn't conflict with the HVAC diffusers the MEP engineer placed. That kind of thing.

What does your team look like?

On this project I have two designers working under me: Priya, who's been at the firm four years and does most of the finish and material specification work, and a younger designer named Weston who's in his second year and handles a lot of the furniture research and vendor coordination. My manager is our studio director, a woman named Harriet, who oversees all the interiors projects at the firm and is the one who talks to clients at the senior level. I'm in the middle, which means I'm doing real design work and also managing Priya and Weston and also attending client meetings and also writing specifications. It's a juggling act, and what I juggle depends entirely on where each project is in its lifecycle.

What's a week look like right now?

The fintech project is in what we call design development, meaning the concept has been approved and now we're finalizing every material selection and preparing drawings for the contractor to price. It's detail-intensive. Monday I spent six hours reviewing Priya's finish schedule, which is basically a spreadsheet that lists every surface in the building, what material is specified for it, the manufacturer, the product number, the lead time, and the cost per square foot. She had 312 line items. I found four discrepancies where the material she specified in the schedule didn't match what was shown on the plans. Two were minor. One was a flooring switch in the main conference room that would have cost an extra $14,000 at scale. I caught it before it went to the contractor. If I hadn't, either the contractor would have caught it and we'd look like we didn't know our own documents, or nobody would catch it and we'd have a $14,000 change order down the line that the client would be unhappy about.

Tuesday was the coordination meeting. An hour and forty minutes. I learned that the pendant lights we selected for the cafe area are 14 inches lower than the MEP engineer's duct layout allows. We have to either select a different pendant or request a duct reroute, which the MEP will charge for. I spent Wednesday afternoon with Priya looking for a pendant that has the right aesthetic but can hang 14 inches higher. We found three options. I'll present them to the client's facilities manager, a woman named Corinne, next week. She will probably pick the one I like least. That's been my experience.

What does the design lead role actually mean, title-wise?

In theory, it means I'm leading the design direction. In practice, it means I'm the person who knows the most about the project and is responsible for everything being accurate and on schedule. The "lead" is as much about accountability as it is about creative direction. I still do a lot of hands-on work. I'm in Revit, I'm doing space planning, I'm selecting materials. But I'm also reviewing Priya's work, managing the project schedule, writing the meeting notes that go out to the client after every call, and making sure Weston isn't ordering samples that are out of budget.

The honest version of this job is that it's project management with design expertise. The people who struggle in lead roles are the ones who got into design because they loved the creative work and find the coordination, documentation, and personnel management exhausting. I don't love the administrative side. But I've made peace with it because I know that the creative work is only possible if the process behind it is disciplined. If Priya's finish schedule is wrong, the room doesn't get built right, and none of the creative choices matter.

What do you wish you'd known coming in?

How political client relationships are at this level. On a $3 million interiors project, there are multiple stakeholders on the client side: the CEO who approved the budget and has opinions, the facilities manager who has to live with the space after we're done and has different opinions, and HR who wants the office to look a certain way because of recruiting. They don't always agree. And they're all communicating with us, sometimes with conflicting direction. Learning to navigate that, to figure out who is actually the decision-maker on any given question, took me three years. I've had projects derailed by the CEO overruling the facilities manager on a finish selection in week nine that the facilities manager had approved in week three. My laminated card didn't save me that time. I still have the email chain from that week. It's not good reading.

What's yours?

How much of commercial design is compromise. You start a project with a concept, something you genuinely believe in, a material palette that works spatially and experientially, a lighting strategy, a furniture plan that actually reflects how people work. And then over eight months of design development and contractor coordination and value engineering, the concept gets worn down. The $240-per-yard fabric becomes a $90-per-yard option to save the budget. The sculptural pendant becomes a standard commercial fixture because the duct conflict was too expensive to resolve. The curved reception desk becomes a straight one because the millworker quoted $18,000 more for curves.

You deliver the project. The client is happy. The space functions. But you're standing in it knowing where the original concept is buried. My colleague Brandon, he left the firm two years ago and went to work for a furniture manufacturer because he said the compromise was making him feel like a procurement coordinator who used to have ideas. I don't feel that way. But I understand why he did.

Why hospitality? What's different about it?

A restaurant or hotel is a public space. Hundreds of people are going to sit in it, eat in it, have their anniversaries in it, fight with their spouses in it, celebrate job offers in it. The stakes of getting the experience right are different from a private residence. And the design has to work at 7 PM on a busy Thursday when the lights are down and the music is up and every seat is occupied, not just in a photograph on a bright Tuesday morning. I think about acoustics, about how surfaces age under constant use, about whether the lighting at table height flatters faces or washes them out. A lot of residential designers think about those things. Hospitality designers can't not think about them.

What does a project look like from start to finish?

My current project is a 70-seat wine bar and small plates restaurant called Tessera that a couple, Obie and Diane, are opening in the Sellwood neighborhood in April. They came to me last August. We started with a concept phase, which is essentially me spending two to three weeks developing the story of what the space wants to be before I touch a single material. For Tessera, the concept is "the inside of a working cellar, but one that someone lives in." Which sounds abstract but it translates into very specific choices: hand-textured plaster walls, raw oak millwork that's oiled not lacquered, an antique zinc bar top, industrial pendant lights with warm filament bulbs, concrete floors with an area rug in the dining section to soften the acoustics.

From there it's documentation and procurement. I draw the layouts in AutoCAD. I specify every material, every fixture, every piece of furniture. For Tessera I have 14 custom furniture pieces, six of which I designed myself and had fabricated by a shop in Southeast Portland, a guy named Raul who I've worked with on three projects. The other eight are sourced from commercial hospitality vendors. I have 47 line items in my procurement tracker right now. Each one is at a different stage. Some have arrived. Some are on order. Two are delayed. One, a set of wall sconces from a lighting house in LA, has been "processing" for nine weeks and every time I call them they say the same thing.

What does being solo mean for how you operate?

It means I'm doing everything. I'm doing the design, obviously. I'm doing the drawings, the specifications, the procurement. I'm also doing my own accounting, my own contracts, my own proposals, my own invoicing. I use QuickBooks. I hate QuickBooks. But I have to know where every dollar is going because I'm not just a designer, I'm a one-person business and if I don't invoice correctly I don't get paid correctly. I had a client last year, a small hotel project, where I underinvoiced by $8,400 because I lost track of some change orders during a particularly complicated phase. I didn't catch it until the project was done and I was doing the final reconciliation. That money is gone. That will not happen again.

The solo part also means no backup. If I'm sick, the project doesn't move. If I'm having a slow creative week, there's no one to cover. I've learned to build buffer into my schedules because I know some weeks the work just doesn't flow and I need the slack. But there are also weeks where I'm working on something that I care about, something where the material choices are exciting me, and I'll work until 11 PM without noticing. Raul called me once at 9 PM because he had a question about a joint detail on one of the custom benches. I was already in my studio looking at fabric samples. He laughed. He said his wife thought designers were strange people. She's not wrong.

What's the most stressful part of hospitality work specifically?

Opening dates. A restaurant has a lease that starts paying on a specific date. There's staff hired. There's a PR campaign in motion. The opening date is not flexible the way a residential project's move-in date might be. If a sofa is delayed for a residential client, we push the install and the client is disappointed. If the seating isn't ready for a restaurant opening, there's real money at stake, because every week the restaurant doesn't open is a week of lease and payroll with zero revenue. The pressure of that timeline is different from anything else I've worked in.

For Tessera, the booth seating for the main dining room was supposed to arrive from a fabricator in LA three weeks before the opening. It arrived ten days before, damaged. Eight of the 16 booth cushions had a dye transfer from the fabric being packed against something during shipping. The color was off, not drastically, but enough that under restaurant lighting it would be visible. I had two options: send them back and wait for replacements, which would take three weeks, or have a local upholsterer recut and recover them. I called five upholsterers. One could do it in six days. The cost was $2,200 that wasn't in my contract and that I'm going to eat, because arguing about it with the client two weeks before opening is not a conversation I want to have and the situation originated with the fabricator's packing, not Obie and Diane. I'll put in a claim with the fabricator afterward. I may or may not recover the $2,200.

What's yours?

How much the work lives in your body after it's done. I walk into spaces I've designed and feel them physically. The acoustics in a room I miscalculated, where I didn't put in enough soft surface and the room is louder than it should be, I feel that as a kind of low-level nausea. There's a restaurant I did four years ago, before I really understood commercial acoustic design, and every time I walk by it I cross to the other side of the street. Not because it looks bad. It looks fine. But I know what the sound is like in there at capacity and it's not what I wanted.

And the rooms that work, really work, those live in me differently. There's a hotel lobby in the Pearl District, my third project, where I got the light right. The way the afternoon sun comes through the west windows and hits the plaster wall at around 4 PM, it changes the room from a functional space to something that makes people stop. I've gone there just to sit in it. Kasimir thinks I'm a little obsessive about this. He's right. But it's also why I do it. I want to make rooms that make people feel something they didn't expect to feel when they walked in. And when it works, it really does work.