Sharing My TOP DESIGN TIPS with YAHOO MAKERS

Continuing on the same theme from my last post on "Why You Should Hire and Interior Designer",
I was thrilled to be able to share my top design tips and advice to homeowners with YAHOO MAKERS', Sid Lipsey.

read the full interview here

Some of my favorite quotes from my Interview

"WE SOLVE PROBLEMS YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW YOU HAVE"

"I’ll give you an example from a house I did. It was a second home for this family with young children. When they bought the home, they thought it was perfect the way it was. But the house had what I call “ghost rooms”: the formal living room that no one uses or the formal dining room that no one uses, but they both look really pretty.
So I decided to take the formal dining room and turn it into the husband’s man cave. And turn what would be the formal living room space into a really great home theater. So now it’s a house that actually accommodates the way that this family lives.
I think that’s probably my favorite part of my job: it’s finding solutions to problems that sometimes  the clients don’t even know exist and creating solutions for them. .."

"WE NEED YOU TO TRUST US"

The most difficult part of an interior designer’s job is when your clients start to doubt you. That’s really hard to deal with. In every single project, whether you’ve worked with that client before or not, there’s what I call a “leap of faith moment” — where you have to convince them to jump off the bridge with you into a place where they’re not sure if they’re comfortable. It’s usually in the creative phase of the project when the client has to actually make a decision to let you wallpaper their ceiling, or put fabric on the windows, or do this and that. You’re pushing them a little bit beyond their comfort zone. And you’re making them trust you 100%, even though they’re not able to visualize or understand fully what the end result is going to be.
I get that that’s scary. But I think homeowners forget that if they’ve done their due diligence in the beginning when they hired you, they need to trust themselves. I try to remind them that they’ve researched me, they went to their friends’ homes and got a referral about me. Or we’ve been working together to that point where I’ve proven myself to be trustworthy and that they can believe me when I say, “I know what I’m doing; let me lead you to where you want to be.” And there’s always a moment where they have to just hold their breath and jump.

For the rest of the interview, make sure to head over to Yahoo Makers now - would love to hear your thoughts on how designers bring value to your table!