When you engage with the services of an established interior designer the most important thing you can expect is that the outcome is going to be personalized to your specific needs. On top of that, is the one of a kind modern luxury touch applied to your bespoke home redesign. But what goes behind the scenes also requires a lot of specific project planning and coordination with various other subcontractors and vendors to make all separate parts of the home come together to create the final look of your home. What may those subcontracting and sourcing work be? This article aims to let you understand better the undertakings of an interior designer to realize the end product of a well-designed home. We use our Stars of Kovan project to illustrate the typical interior renovation journey for most residential developments.
Renovation Journey: from Design to Starting Work
After all of the 3D and layout designs are reviewed and confirmed with the client, work starts with any basic change of original layouts, such as hacking and/or building of walls, flooring and tiling work, and other surface treatments on floors, walls, and ceilings. Besides hacking and building of walls, the other complicated renovation work could be if your home redesign features false ceilings and cove lighting installations as well as feature walls.
Flooring and Tiling Works
As mentioned above, flooring and tiling work is amongst the first initiated as they usually consist of the modification and treatment of surfaces before custom fixtures, movable furniture, and soft furnishings such as bed headboard, couches, and curtains come in. At this stage, the installation of kitchen and bathroom countertops that use slab surfaces or large format tiles can also be initiated.
False Ceiling and Cove Lighting
Nowadays a lot of our living room design work features false ceilings as cove lighting is one of the more popular design features that adds interesting detail along with accent lighting to a residential living room design. False ceilings can be made in materials such as gypsum, wood, glass, plaster/drywall, PVC and so on. These days another more streamlined option for low ceilings are recessed LED lights with flushed setting into the ceiling, while more adventurous false ceilings would have asymmetrical and organic lines.
Wall Treatments from Hacking to Painting and Wallpaper
Another major renovation work besides attaching the false ceiling is changing up the layout of the existing space either through hacking or building of walls. For hacking of walls, you can even play safe and build a doorway instead of demolishing the whole thing if you merely want to connect between two rooms. After the walls are then prepped — checked for holes, washed, irregular surfaces sanded down and walls prepped with white primer, then it is time to paint or apply adhesive and install your wallpaper.
Designing a Feature Wall
Feature walls are when the walls on any particular room have treatments more than your regular painting or wallpapering. They also tend to stand out more than your regular walls. Typically feature walls could come in a myriad of designs — feature flushed detailing in the walls or panels of different materials or textures, and in the most dramatic designs, they could also feature protruding panels to create depth on top of the layered textures.
Carpentry Works
Carpentry work most likely starts during the creation of unique feature walls but there is also more than that as woodwork allows us to create functional spaces within homes such as custom cabinetry and hidden storage spaces behind feature walls. When the project reaches the stage of installing cabinets, get excited as you will know your home is already at a later stage of renovating and about to be ready!
Air-Con Installation, Electrical Wiring, and Plumbing
Likely subcontracted and with work done in between the other major renovation works, air-con installation and electrical wiring could be basic to get your home ready for live-in conditions or could include smart installations function to integrate and set different routines such as wake up routine to ease waking up in the morning with gentle switch-on of lights, pulling back of blinds, and turning off air-conditioning. The same thing goes with the plumbing of pipes, and faucets, services can start with the basics to get your home ready for move-in conditions and are likely done in between other major renovation works such as wall, floor, and ceiling treatments but these days you can also integrate toilet systems to your smart home integration such as water monitoring (in case a leak might occur), smart purification system, voice control faucets, touchless toilets, the opportunities to convert your home to a smart home is endless.
Furniture and Appliances Sourcing and Setup
Furniture and furnishings sourcing will be covered further at our Luxury Styling and Furniture Curation pages. Please head over there to read more but generally, we also source and recommend pieces of furniture upon customer request. We also have a range of mid to high furniture companies that we partner with and regularly work together to supply from their existing collections or work on custom design pieces. Furniture and appliance needs will be discussed and tailored upon contact with our Interior Designer. Similarly, with air-conditioning, electrical, and plumbing systems, electrical appliances could have smart options to make them more intuitive and seamlessly integrated into your daily home lives as well and the level of integration could be adjusted to your individual preferences. Typically, for home appliances, we would recommend clients to first convert the appliances that get the most usage and would benefit from having smart: automated, voice control, and/or remote control functions.