How to Hire an Interior Designer for a Luxury Home
Updated: Sep 22
Most homeowners hiring an interior designer for the first time make the same mistake: they choose the designer whose portfolio they like the most, without evaluating whether that designer can actually run a project the size of theirs. Portfolio and process are two different questions. A designer whose work you love may not have the team, the drawings, the vendor relationships, or the site presence to deliver a full-home renovation across eighteen months of construction. This piece is about how to hire an interior designer for a luxury home the right way — the timing, the questions, the fee structures, and the red flags — so the project you end up with matches the one you signed up for.
I've been designing interiors since 2014 and running Studio Kestrel since 2019. Most of the projects that come to us after a bad first experience share a common story: the client hired a designer who does beautiful work but doesn't produce construction drawings, doesn't manage vendors, doesn't show up to the site, or doesn't have the capacity to take on a whole home. That mismatch is preventable at the hiring stage.
When to start looking for an interior designer
Start looking for an interior designer the same month you start looking for an architect, or the same month you go into contract on a home you plan to renovate. On a full renovation or new construction, the designer needs to be in the room from schematic design onward. On a pied-à-terre or refresh, the designer needs to be hired before demolition. On a turnkey furnishing project, the designer needs 4 to 6 months from hire to installation, minimum.
If your project is in the Hamptons, the construction calendar there drives everything — see our specific timing guide for East End projects.
The most common mistake is hiring too late. If you hire the designer after the architect has produced construction documents, the plans have already been drawn without designer input — furniture layouts, plumbing rough-in, lighting circuits, and millwork openings are all fixed before the designer can influence them. That sequence adds cost. On the projects we take over mid-stream, the recovery work almost always includes redrawing millwork, re-routing plumbing, and re-framing walls that were built to the wrong dimensions.
The right window: 3 to 6 months before you plan to start construction. That gives the designer time to program the home, produce drawings, coordinate with the architect and builder, source long-lead materials, and get you through permit.
For projects that also involve an architect, read our guide on hiring a designer who works with architects.
What full-service actually means
"Full-service interior design" is used loosely. Before you interview anyone, get clear on what the term should include when you use it. A full-service practice — the kind that runs a whole home from start to finish — delivers all of the following:
Programming — a room-by-room analysis of how you live, how you entertain, what storage you need, and how each space gets used day-to-day
Space planning and furniture layouts — dimensioned plans for every room
Reflected ceiling plans (RCPs) — lighting circuits, sprinkler heads, HVAC diffusers, ceiling millwork, speaker locations
Millwork elevations — dimensioned drawings for every piece of custom cabinetry, built-ins, wall paneling, and trim
Finish schedules — every paint color, wall covering, floor material, tile, and stone specified by room
Plumbing fixture schedules — every faucet, toilet, tub, showerhead, and drain specified with dimensions and rough-in requirements
FF&E specification and procurement — every piece of furniture, lighting, rug, drapery, and accessory sourced, ordered, tracked, and delivered
Project management and site supervision — visits to the site on the same cadence as the architect and general contractor
Installation and styling — final delivery, placement, and photograph-ready staging
If a designer's scope skips any of these, the missing pieces will land on you or on the general contractor. Both outcomes cost more.
The questions that matter in a consultation
Portfolio questions are easy. Process questions separate the designers who can run a whole home from the designers who can't. Ask these six:
What projects have you completed at this scale in the last three years? You want a designer who has finished — not started, finished — at least three projects the size of yours in the recent past. A designer who's done six pied-à-terres and one whole home is not the right pick for a whole home.
Who on your team will be on my project, and what percentage of their time? Small studios sometimes assign the principal to sell the project and a junior designer to run it. If the person selling is not the person managing, ask why.
Walk me through your drawing set. A designer who runs a whole home produces a full set of construction documents — plans, RCPs, millwork elevations, finish and fixture schedules. If the answer is vague, the drawings are probably vague too.
How do you handle procurement? A full-service designer procures directly — meaning the studio purchases the furniture, tracks it, receives it, and delivers it to the site. A designer who hands you a shopping list and expects you to order everything is not running full-service.
What's your typical timeline from hire to installation? For a whole home renovation, expect 14 to 24 months from design kickoff to installed and photographed. Shorter timelines usually mean the designer is skipping steps.
How do you charge? See below — the fee structure tells you a lot.
How interior designers actually charge
There are three fee models used across the luxury residential design market. Ask which model applies to your project before you get to a proposal, because how the designer charges tells you a lot about how the studio actually operates.
Hourly. The designer bills at an hourly rate against a projected total. This is the most transparent model — every hour worked shows up on an invoice, and the client can see exactly what they're paying for. Some studios bill at a single principal rate; others split by task type, with creative and strategic work billed at a higher rate than administrative and clerical work. What matters more than the rate itself is what's included in an hour and how carefully the studio documents its time.
Flat design fee. The designer quotes a fixed price for the design scope, usually based on square footage or as a percentage of construction budget (commonly 10 to 15 percent for whole-home projects). Works well for pied-à-terres and refreshes with predictable scope. Less common on true full-gut renovations because scope shifts during construction and the flat fee has to be renegotiated.
Cost-plus on FF&E (furniture, fixtures, and equipment). In addition to the design fee, some studios mark up furniture, lighting, and materials over the trade price they pay to vendors. Markups typically range from 15 to 35 percent above trade. Other studios don't add a markup on top of trade at all — they sell FF&E to the client at retail value and keep the trade discount they receive from the vendor as their procurement margin. The end price to the client is the same as retail either way; the difference is whether the studio is stacking a markup on top of trade or simply keeping the trade discount as its margin.
How Studio Kestrel bills. We use hourly billing on two rates: Creative and Strategic Direction at $250 per hour (design work, drafting, rendering, sourcing, client meetings, project management) and Administrative and Clerical Support at $125 per hour (scheduling, documentation coordination, PO generation and tracking, warehouse liaison). On FF&E, we sell items to clients at retail value in nearly every case — the trade discount is our margin, not an added markup. In the rare instance a vendor doesn't extend a trade discount, we add a 20 percent markup on that item, itemized on the proposal so you can see it.
What matters, whichever model a designer uses, is that the fee structure is disclosed in the proposal in language you can actually read.
What a good process looks like
A well-run design process moves through five phases in this order:
Programming (3 to 6 weeks). Interviews, site visits, and a written brief that defines what each room needs to do.
Schematic design (6 to 10 weeks). Preliminary floor plans, furniture layouts, mood boards, and material direction. The client sees the design's overall direction and signs off before development.
Design development (8 to 14 weeks). Detailed drawings for every room — RCPs, millwork elevations, finish schedules, plumbing fixture schedules. Long-lead custom items are ordered at the end of this phase.
Construction documents (4 to 8 weeks). Final coordinated drawings issued to the general contractor. Every dimension, every specification, every material is documented.
Construction and installation (14 to 24 months for a full home). Site visits, RFI responses, change order review, procurement tracking, and final installation.
If a designer proposes to skip a phase — "we don't really do a full drawing set," "we can start construction while we're still designing" — that's a warning. Every skipped phase gets absorbed as change orders during construction.
Red flags in a consultation
A few patterns come up repeatedly on projects we've been called in to rescue:
The portfolio is styled but light on construction context. Beautiful room shots with no plans, no elevations, no site photos. That designer may be a great decorator, but decorating a room someone else built is a different scope than running a whole home.
They can't clearly describe their team structure. A designer who says "we're a boutique studio, so I handle everything personally" on a whole-home project is telling you they don't have the capacity to run it well.
Vague answers on fees. A designer who won't explain their fee model in the first meeting will not become more transparent later.
No mention of drawings. A designer who talks about "vision" and "aesthetic" but never mentions RCPs, millwork elevations, or finish schedules is not producing the documents a general contractor needs to build the home.
They talk about "styling" more than "construction." On a whole-home renovation, styling is the last two percent of the work. If it's the first thing that comes up in the meeting, the designer's practice is centered on the wrong end of the project.
How to make the final decision
After you've had two or three consultations, the deciding factor is rarely aesthetic. Two designers whose work you like will both be capable of designing a beautiful home. The deciding factor is process fit — the team, the drawings, the fee structure, and the way they talk about the parts of the project that aren't the fun parts. The designer who spends the consultation asking you detailed questions about how you live is more likely to build you a home that fits than the designer who spends the consultation showing you their portfolio.
Trust the process discussion more than the pitch. A designer who can articulate exactly what happens in month six of construction is a designer who's done this before.
When to hire us
If you're planning a full renovation, new construction, or turnkey furnishing project in New York, the Hamptons, or Miami and you're interviewing designers, we take on a limited number of full-service projects each year. We produce full construction document sets, we run procurement in-house, and we're on site on the same cadence as the architect and builder.
If you'd like to talk through your project and see whether the fit is right, book a consultation.
Paul De Andrade is the founder and principal designer of Studio Kestrel, a residential interior design practice working across New York City, the Hamptons, and Miami. He has been designing interiors since 2014, founded Studio Kestrel in 2019, and has completed more than 30 full-service projects through the studio since. His work is rooted in organic modern principles, feng shui, and a wellness-led approach to how a home is built around daily life. Studio Kestrel has been featured in Architectural Digest, The Wall Street Journal, Homes & Gardens, Domino, and Hamptons Magazine, among others.
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