Dear Desert, i was in the trade for years, and underneath your uncertainty, I hear a very understandable and natural fear of spending a pile of money and being given less than you wanted, or something you don't love, or getting stuck in a contractual relationship that feels more like a bad marriage! Letting a stranger inside your tenderest dreams of home is a leap of faith - but it doesn't have to be blind faith. I am rarely in favor of using in-store design services for general concept and/or whole house projects. Good in-store designers can help tremendously in matching what they offer to your well-defined scheme, but the fact is that their job, established by the people who sign their checks, is to keep you in the store for everything they offer. Nothing in the world wrong with that model, so long as you understand its benefits and its limitations. So here are Mother Bronwynsmom's steps toward a happy life with your designer, which I believe to be equally important, no matter what the size of your project is: 1. Make your book. The first thing that does is to educate YOU in the nuances of what you love and want, and also what you don't like or want. (This should be easy for you, because you already know a lot about your own tastes and desires - you just need to refine your way of communicating it.) Pack it with samples and photos and drawings that can serve as visual clues to color, texture, style, sense of space and light, and specific objects. Write all over it. Stick in some things you hate and write helpful things like "Yow!" and "Yuck!" and "NO NO NO." 2. Figure out your scope of work. What exactly do you want a designer to do for you, and what are the limitations of the scope? This is critical both to you and to him/her. Make notes as though you were going to write a Request for Proposal, which outlines what you are asking your prospective designers to do. This can be informal, but it should be as specific as you can make it, so that any designers who don't like to work that way will eliminate themselves. 3. Establish a budget. This can be a range, with an upside limit. Without a knowledge of your budget, a good designer can't help you work out how to spend it to get the most bang for the buck. Be brutally honest about what you can spend. So many people are afraid to do that, because their worry is, "If I tell him how much, he will spend it all, and how will I know if I'm getting my money's worth?" (We'll get to the references in a minute...) 4. Make a list of designers to interview, and make appointments. If the job is small, offer to come to their studio, which is a nice gesture toward someone whose essential living usually comes from the use of time. It also gives you a sense of how they function in their own space. If you go to them, take lots of photos of the places you want transformed. And make sure you understand whether or not there's a charge for an initial interview. If there isn't, don't ask a lot of specific questions about what he/she recommends - we've all been burned by clients who interview ten designers, get all their ideas, pay nothing, and then take all the ideas and do it all themselves, and it makes us wary... 5. Here's the key at this point...Pay Attention to Your Instincts. Look for warmth, respectfulness, gentleness with what you're unsure about, and first-class listening skills. If you don't have a strong positive feeling about this person, then don't choose him or her. Does she seem tired or bored? Does he sneak looks at his watch? Does he rush to tell you what you should do? Does she make you feel that you should know more than you do? 6. For everyone you are considering, get, and meticulously check, references. Three is best. And ask not only about the work, but about whether or not the designer stayed responsive through to installation, whether your questions were taken seriously and answered clearly, how well schedules were maintained, whether the trades subcontracted to do things were reliable and respectful of your house, and how well the designer spent your money. It's like dating. Weed out the unpromising ones. You want your designer to want to work with you, and to do the things you want done. Don't go home with him if you don't want to see him over the breakfast table! If you do all these things, you will know at some point in the process who is right for you, and then you are ready to start on a lovely, rewarding experience. Once you have made a choice, and it's time to talk turkey, be confident. It always amazes me that competent, mature people are sometimes intimidated by design, as though it were somehow a mark of human value to be able to do it. It isn't... :>) Ask everything you want to ask, don't agree to things you really don't like. DO be prepared to accept things when your designer explains why her idea about something is right. And don't hesitate to be honest about things you don't know.

I am sorry this happened but IMO a contract needs to be spelled out in detail before any work is done and any good designer knows removing walls in condos is rarely going to happen. The furnitre IMO would have been the last purchase .The budget was up front and should have been adhered to and if not possible all purchases should have been approved by you. I hate to say this but you gave her too much freedom I charge differently than lots of designers so can’t comment on what is usual for your aea. I have never dealt with designer show rooms and I take my clients shopping at my hourly fee but they pay for what we buy . The place to have put on the brakes is when she refused to show you the engineers approval for the wall removal. Some of this is on you clients need to keep on top of things too there are many dishonest people in every profession so always a bit of buyer beware. I bill my clients for my hours every month and if that bill is not paid all work quits at that point this is written in the contract along with other items that i feel need to be spelled out. Every contract has some different caveats .

Several things: Inspo boards/feedback versus shopping locally " together" : This is absolutely THE most "efficient " way for any designer to get a feel for the FEEL you want in your home and it takes VAST amounts of time to even create the inspo boards, without putting a fanny in the car and driving hundreds of miles over days . ( The reason I put efficient in quotes ). You're in Boston area. You live in an area surrounded by the same stuff every single mid to large city has. Ethan Allen , Pottery Barn, West Elm.......maybe an RH . You also have a design center, and still to some degree, the antique stores that have met a demise in most other cities. In no way do these represent an entire market of what IS available. The local design to the trade venue? Even THAT will not show all that is available!!! Brick and mortar furniture ? Same thing , as many have had a hard time keeping doors open as the public clicks a mouse for cheap junk in a hurry. Couple this, with the fact you are adapting to a bit more traditional feel. GOOD LUCK. This exists at the high and LOW end of the market. The look has been literally driven out by "farmhouse crap" and mid century crap. . Quality? Antique stores, 1st Dibs, Chairish........etc. . New goods? Baker furniture, Hickory Chair, Century, some Hickory White. After those? A minefield of not much, and not much tradition. Budget: The price of a particular piece? It means next to nothing in case goods. A three k dresser can be Restoration Hardware. Is it quality? No, not really. " Another 1 k would have gotten you dovetail joinery."..............no, not necessarily. And dovetail drawers can be found on junk furniture, believe it or not. She saw the dresser it in a showroom....she showed it to you. Did you ASK to go see the piece in person? Apparently not, yet you were willing to "go shopping together".! I'm sorry, but you confused her. Yes, you did. You told her your priority was the living room, and it never occurred to her that the dresser would equal the IMPORTANCE of the selections for that living room. You asked her to drag the budget information out of you. What you never said, and she did not ask, was this: "I can spend __________$ This YEAR. I can spend __________ next year. I must have now, these things --------------------" . I can wait on these................" Yet you said "no to things that were more than you wanted to spend" .........which IS it??? And on what? ! You were vague, and as you typed above? It's still vague to us. To me. Every designer is tasked with getting the budget answer, to which we generally get this reply, essentially. ........ " I just want the best looking home I can have, for the least amount of dollars." Every piece? "How much is it?!" So......walk a mile in our shoes. Couple ALL of this with the fact that a new home rarely needs a total re furnishing. In fact? I would resist that. Traditional homes can successfully marry both tradition and more contemporary looks. They are more interesting, more collected, than a boatload of "it's all new" Here's Suzanne Kassler Buckhead, outside and inside... Look at the art and the STAIR......... Which of these appeals in traditional "bones"??? Such as below... Look at the cocktail table, below, and the more modern relief to the obvious tradition. Or........... more below. The point is as the pictures reveal : ) While it's important to "listen" to a house? It's not the dictator. Look at the moldings, chair rail , windows etc and the lighting in both, below........and the furnishings.

20 out of 50 states require certification to call oneself an interior designer rather than an interior decorator. ASID lobbies continually to increase the number of states where certification is required. There is actually a lot of technical education that goes into the designer degree although I feel like a lot of residential practitioners don't use a lot of the technical training and technically do a lot of decorating. One of my design instructors in interior design school was not an interior designer, he only called himself an interior decorator, because his degree was in some other allied arts. But he worked in an architecture firm and did a lot of technical design actually, but I think he got a lot of on the job training because he was married to the principle architect. Although I have the credentials (and don't use them) I don't think the degree makes any difference on your esthetic sensibilities, you don't usually get graded on your esthetic choices in school. So if you are primarily involved in decorating completed interiors I don't think the degree is all that important. If you are designing lighting, electrical, millwork, built ins, and floorplans, I think the training is important. We spent a lot of time doing actual interior architecture in the program I went to.