By Cheryl Clendenon
Recently, I sat down and counted every single decision involved in specifying a sofa for a client. Not the broad strokes, but the actual individual choices a designer navigates to get from one task, “sofa selection,” to a piece of furniture that is right for that room, that family and that life.
Often, the client’s experience of all that work is usually something like, “Oh, you found a great sofa.” Read on to find out why it matters more
than they think.
The Anatomy of “Just a Sofa”
Client and Project Foundation
1. Lifestyle assessment of the family needs 2. Price point evaluation against the overall budget 3. Vendor selection and vetting 4. Warranty review 5. Quality needs. 6. Lead time relative to the project timeline 7. Delivery access: will it fit through the door, up the stairs, around the corner?
Space Planning
8. Scale to room proportions and ceiling height 9. Scale relative to other furnishings in the space 10. Orientation and placement in the room 11. Relationship to traffic flow 12. Distance from the coffee table and adjacent seating
Style and Design
13. Overall silhouette 14. Arm style: track, rolled, slope, flared, or armless 15. Back style; tight, loose cushion, pillow-back, tufted 16. Leg or foot style 17. Material and finish 18. Skirt or no skirt.
Scale and Proportion
19. Consideration for comfort, overall height, and seat depth 20. Overall length relative to the room 21. Seat height and factoring in the coffee table and other seating in relation. 22. Potential mobility issues. Construction 23. Frame construction. 24. Materials
used 25. Spring system: sinuous or eight-way hand-tied
Cushion and Comfort
26. Type of fill: foam core, down wrap, all-down, poly blend. 27. Density and firmness 28. Number of seat cushions and configuration 29. Loose versus attached seat cushions 30. T shape or boxed cushions and seat backs.
Fabric
31. Category and price point 32. Color story 33. Pattern/Texture 34. Performance versus natural
fiber based on lifestyle 35. Durability rating for kids, pets, use level 36. Pattern placement and match 37. Fabric repeat 38. Repeat’s impact on yardage 39. COM or graded in fabrics
Detailing and Finish
40. Welt detail: self-welt, contrast welt, none 41. Welt cord size and decorative nail option 42. Size of nails and placement 43. Bouillon fringe 44. Tape or contrast banding detail 45. Throw pillow size 46. Arrangement of throws 47. Pillow fabrics
— and each one is its own decision!
I am pretty sure I missed a few. Every single one of those decisions draws on training, experience, product knowledge, trade relationships and an understanding of that specific client’s needs that took years to develop.
Now, multiply that sofa by everything else in a living room: Flooring, paint, window treatments, lighting, rug, additional seating, tables, accessories, art placement and the spatial relationship between all of it. You are easily looking at 300 to 400 decisions in that room alone.
Think about a primary bathroom. Layout, client needs, vanity, storage, countertop, tile for the floor, walls, shower and niche, fixtures, hardware, mirror, lighting, grout color, glass treatment, paint and accessories. That is roughly 250 to 350 decisions on selections alone, without considering the multitude of decisions in the actual schematic aspect of design!
A kitchen — cabinetry alone can involve more than 100 decisions before you ever get to countertops, backsplash, flooring, appliances, plumbing, lighting, hardware and layout. Easily 500 or more and the most important decisions cannot be planned out or listed because they revolve around your judgment during the process of design and execution.
A whole-home project. You are looking at thousands of individual decisions, each one informed by the ones before it, each one requiring expertise the client does not have. No wonder we are all so exhausted!
This is the value conversation
Too many designers struggle with the pricing conversation because they are trying to justify their fee in terms of time. How many hours will this take? What is my hourly rate? But time is not what the client is really paying for. They are paying for the quality of those decisions, the pacing of those decisions and the confidence behind every one of them. They are also paying for the hundreds of bad decisions they will never
have to make, or recover from, because you eliminated them before they ever became a problem.
Think about what happens when a homeowner tries to make even a fraction of these decisions alone. They spend months going back and forth. They order the wrong fabric. They buy a sofa that does not fit through the front door or looks completely wrong next to the fireplace. They choose a tile they saw online and realize too late that it clashes with the vanity they already installed. Every wrong decision costs time, money and stress.
Your fee is not just for what you select. It is for every mistake you prevent. When you understand your value in terms of decisions rather than hours, you stop apologizing and start presenting your fee as what it actually is: an investment in expertise and more importantly, judgment that saves your client from a cascade of costly mistakes they do not even know they are about to make.
Ways to put this to work
Do the exercise yourself.
Sit down with your last completed project and count.
Choose one element, whether it is a sofa, a vanity, or a lighting plan and list every decision you made. You will run out of patience before you run out of decisions.
Keep the list. It will change how you talk about what you do. Build it into your initial consultation before you present a scope of work.
Say something like: “To give you one example, specifying the right sofa for your family involves more than 47 individual decisions. I will make hundreds of these across your project, so you do not have to.” Let the numbers do the heavy lifting. Better yet, create a one-page visual for your client introduction that illustrates this. Clients remember what they can see.
Use it to reframe your proposals.
Instead of presenting your fee as a line item, frame part of your proposal around the scope of decisions involved. Do not be brief when it comes to a comprehensive scope of work. This is where the conversation changes. Revisit it when you feel shaky about pricing. Every designer has moments of doubt. Am I charging too much? Could the client just do this themselves? Pull out your decision list. Read it slowly. Then ask yourself honestly whether the client could navigate even half of it without you.
That answer will give you confidence every single time.
The real point
We work in an industry where the finished product looks effortless. That is by design, and yes, the pun is intended. A beautiful room is not supposed to look like it involved 4,000 decisions. It is supposed to look like it simply belongs. But looking effortless and being effortless are two very different things. The distance between those two is where the value of interior design lives and breathes. Do not sell your talent and, importantly, your judgment, short.
Cheryl Clendenon owns In Detail Interiors, a full-service design-based retail showroom in Pensacola, Fla. She is also a business and
sales strategist working with interior designers and others in the industry and is a regular contributor to Home Accents Today. [email protected]
