How to Hire an Interior Designer for a Luxury Home
Updated: 2 days ago
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. When a design project goes wrong, the cause is usually a mismatch: a designer who does beautiful work but doesn't produce construction drawings, manage vendors or come to the site. 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, plan on about 12 weeks from hire to installation with quick-ship pieces, or 6 to 10 months with custom work.
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. When a designer is brought in late, the fix often means redrawing millwork and revisiting plumbing and lighting plans that were set without them.
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.
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:
Can you walk me through a recent project like mine, from the first meeting to installation? A designer who has run projects at your scale can describe each phase, what went wrong and how it was handled. A vague answer tells you more than a polished portfolio.
Who will I work with day to day? At some firms, the principal leads the first meeting and a junior designer runs the project. Ask who will make the design decisions and who will be on site.
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 renovation, expect 10 to 16 months from design kickoff to installation, and 14 to 24 months for a full-gut house or new construction. 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 four fee models you'll see across the luxury residential design market. Ask which one applies to your project before you get to a proposal, because how a designer charges tells you a lot about how the studio operates.
Fixed fee based on scope. The designer estimates the work your project requires and quotes a single design fee before the project starts. You know the full design cost on day one, and it only changes if you choose to add to the scope, through a change order you approve first.
Hourly. The designer bills for time as the project goes. The rate is clear, but the total isn't: it grows with every meeting, revision and delay, and you won't know the final design cost until the project is over.
Percentage of budget. Some designers charge a percentage of the construction or furnishings budget. It's simple on paper, but it ties the designer's income to how much you spend.
Cost-plus on FF&E (furniture, fixtures, and equipment). Separate from the design fee, some studios buy furniture, lighting and materials at trade price and resell them with a markup. Depending on the markup, you can end up paying more than retail for the same piece. Other studios sell at retail and keep the trade discount as their procurement margin, so you never pay more than you would buying the piece yourself.
How Studio Kestrel charges. Our design fee is a fixed fee for your scope of work, set in a proposal before the project begins. We calculate it from the hours the project will need, at $250 per hour for creative and strategic work and $125 per hour for administrative support, so the fee reflects the actual mix of work. Fees start at $100,000 for design and furnishing with light or no renovation, $140,000 for renovation projects, including full-gut apartments, and $350,000 for full-gut house renovations and new construction. Furniture and furnishings are sold at retail, with the trade discount as our margin. In the rare case a vendor doesn't offer trade pricing, we add a 20 percent coordination markup on that item only, itemized so you can see it. The full breakdown is in what a full-service interior designer costs in NYC.
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 runs 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 (up to 14 to 24 months on a full-gut house). Site visits, RFI responses, change order review, procurement tracking, and final installation.
If a designer proposes to skip a phase — "we don't 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 are worth watching for:
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 explain who does what. If it's unclear who makes the design decisions, who manages procurement and who comes to the site, you'll find out in the middle of construction.
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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