Many people thinks what interior designers do are just more decorative types of things such as selecting paint, fabrics, lamps, or furniture, but what we can do are far beyond that, but because many clients do not fully understand interior designers’ specialties, they tend to hire us much later in the game, usually after the houses are built or the space planning are done which limited our creative involvemet to only the decorative items without knowing we also can contribute to many other aspects of design such as lighting, plumbing, structural elements  and such.

Being brought into a project late also brings us another charllenge which is clients are expecting interior designers to get their job done quickly. Unreasonable time frame requirement pushes many high end residential interior designers to manage the projects like a commercial design space. The results? low quality furniture and fixtures purchased for quicker shipment, errors on designs and poor craftsmanship on installation and detail handling due to unresonable fast paced, long hour work. Limited creativity on designs or copying of other people’s designs also were often seen. This kind of situation happens in daily basis, especially in Asian markets, and even many American and European designers start to do shitting jobs in Asian markets in order to compete and survive.

Sometimes when I saw the furniture, fixtures, and the materials used in the high end residential projects in Asian countries, I felt sorry for those clients because all of the high end residential grade money they spent, they only got commecial grade stuff, that is sad.