[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the interior design business. My name is Geoff Hayward and I'm here with my co host, Susie Rumbold, past president of the British Institute of Interior Design and creative director of Tasuto Interiors, in front of a live audience of designers here at Decorex 2025.
Today we will be exploring whether interior designers are delightful, diva ish, or simply too impossible for contractors to work with.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Outrageous.
[00:00:36] Speaker C: Outrageous.
Interior designers have a bad rep on building sites for being demanding, difficult and disorganized.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: But is this fair?
[00:00:46] Speaker C: Designers have a huge responsibility for delivering complex design information that can be built by contractors. And contractors have a huge responsibility to deliver quality projects that can be used, enjoyed and maintained by their clients.
But in their drive for perfection, are interior designers their own worst enemy? Do designers efficiently provide the information needed by builders? Or do contractors sometimes willfully misunderstand their design intentions? What can designers and contractors do to make each other's lives easier? And who is really to blame when relationships sour and things go wrong on site? Welcome to the interior design business.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: So to help us find the answers, we're joined by renowned interior designer Joanna Wood, founder of Joanna Wood Interiors, and Paul Fitzgerald, who is founder and managing director of Hawksmoor Construction. Welcome both to the show.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Thank you very much.
[00:01:48] Speaker C: So, before we begin, I was hoping you might be kind enough to just give us both a brief introduction to yourselves and your companies and the sorts of projects you do. So, Joanna, would you like to kick off?
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Well, good afternoon everybody. My name is Joanna Wood and I run an interior design company in the heart of Belgravia. But we work throughout the UK and we also work abroad. We're currently running jobs in as far apart as Canada and Saudi Arabia. So we've got a team of about a dozen in the office and we count ourselves as being interior architects as well as interior designers.
Paradoxically, I am the least trained person in my office, but I've been doing it for 40 years.
Large jobs, small jobs, very, very large jobs. Job new build jobs, restoration jobs, listed jobs, stately home jobs. So take me on, Paul, because I can write a mean specification.
[00:02:53] Speaker C: Okay. And Paul.
[00:02:55] Speaker D: Hello everyone. My name is Paul Fitzgerald. I'm the founder and the managing director of the Hawksmoor Construction Group.
Hawksmoor Construction is our main trading business. We specialize in prime and super prime residential construction projects.
We also do lots of eco friendly property development. And more recently this year. I'm not sure if you're aware, Suzie, but started a. I do a lot of business coaching as well. So I've started helping a Lot of other contractors like myself who started coming off site, no idea where to start in construction, and certainly no idea how to run a business, so.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Wonderful. So I'm going to start with a really easy question for you, Paul. How do you feel when you find out there is going to be an interior designer on a project?
[00:03:31] Speaker D: No comment.
No. In my experience, sort of 10 years into running the construction business now, and suzy was probably 10 years ago we met, wasn't it?
I've never really had probably the worst guest here today, but never really had a terrible experience because I think a lot of it comes down to communication.
So ultimately, in a construction project, whether you're an interior designer, an architect, the contractor, or the guys on site, you put these people into this house and all of a sudden everyone expects everyone to get on famously, without being friends or relations or anything like that. So me personally, I'm more than happy when interior designers are there.
I think sometimes the problem comes when there's a crossover between roles and responsibilities.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: You're not just saying that because of the audience we've got in front of us?
[00:04:17] Speaker D: No, no, no. Generally. Generally.
[00:04:19] Speaker C: So I think I can see we might have a lynching party going on.
[00:04:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:23] Speaker D: So for us, as a contractor, we should be a contractor. We shouldn't try to take over the design.
[00:04:26] Speaker C: So do you think it's true, then, that interior designers have a bad reputation amongst contractors? What sort of things do they get accused of?
[00:04:34] Speaker D: Yeah, I can speak for the industry as a whole, from what I hear through the grapevine, if that makes sense.
[00:04:38] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: You're representing all contractors today.
[00:04:41] Speaker D: That's what, you know, I'm fighting the corner here for everyone. But ultimately, I think there can be a lot of ego sometimes on a project, whether it's from a design stage, whether it's a constructor, a contractor on site, and I think sometimes egos get in the way of good quality work, if that makes sense. So.
But I think if you. If you. If you iron out expectations from the start and you work together as a team the whole way through the project, you're going to have ups and downs on every single project. No project is seamless.
[00:05:06] Speaker C: And is there anything in particular that interior designers do get accused of?
[00:05:10] Speaker D: Maybe sometimes.
He's being so diplomatic.
I want to make it out here alive.
No, in my personal experience, when we have had issues, it has been when something is designed and we can't build it for whatever construction reason, whether it's from a structural perspective, a building regulation perspective, shortage of skyhooks, Shortage of skyhooks, whatever it may be. And then there's no give from the design side.
And sometimes it's, I don't care. I want it. And it's like, okay, well, it's not me saying that you can't have it. It's building regulations or the structural engineer. We have to do something a different way. That's when I think the clashes can happen. But as long as you. As long as a design team and a contractor, you stick together and you find solutions together, there should hopefully not be too many reasons to fall out.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: Do you think there are any preconceptions out there about interior designers? I don't know. Maybe because contractors have seen stuff on TV and they think all interior designers dress and behave like Lawrence Dwelling Bowen, for instance. No offense, Lawrence.
[00:06:07] Speaker D: I don't know. I wouldn't say so. No.
I personally don't watch any real. Any construction on tv. And any way I could describe it, it's like, everyone loves grand designs, for example. But when I'm working in construction all day, the last thing I want to go in my downtime is go and watch grand designs and look at other people's problems in construction projects.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: I start shouting at the telly.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:25] Speaker D: So it kind of stresses me out when I see. When I see clients making mistakes that happen all the time, if that makes sense. So, okay, me personally, I don't watch construction on tv. I have enough of that my day job. I hear through other contractors that there's problems on other jobs, but I think that's just down to miscommunication more than anything.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: Fine.
[00:06:40] Speaker C: Okay, so, okay, final one on this little section.
Are all interior designers created equal? Joanna?
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Definitely not. She says immediately. I would like to sort of start with a conclusion, which is that there are good builders and bad builders. There are great contractors who really want to make something work, and there are some really dire ones out there. And I'm sure that the designers sitting in the hall here will have had bad experiences. Contractors. So I'm going to kind of slightly twist this other way. And some really great designers sometimes have to work with some really rubbish contractors.
And I think that quite often problems can occur when you've got inexperienced interior designers trying to throw their toys around and go, yeah, I want that cornice to run around that room. And the contractor goes, well, you know, it's 380 deep. And by the way, you've only got this amount, and the junctions aren't going to work or whatever, and the designer won't then learn and look we're all on a learning curve all the time. I mean, I have been on building sites for 40 years and I still learn something every week, every day, every month. And we've all got to keep our minds open. And that's from both sides of the spectrum, actually.
And at the end of the day, I think contractors are much better off dealing with professionals in, in the middle, because God help them if they're dealing directly with some poor lady who's, you know, the first thing she's done is watch the telly and seen grand designs. And the second thing she's done is spent an afternoon at Chelsea Harbour Centre thinking, you know, a basket full of samples equals a color scheme. The answer is no, it doesn't. And, you know, Susie, you've been president of the British Institute of Interior Design. I've been a member of and a fellow, you know, my whole career.
And my advice is that interior designers need proper qualifications, need proper education, need experience and need to get out there and learn before they get on site and start throwing that kind of weight around. And that on the other side, contractors need to listen and understand that there are gradations of designers. I mean, in another world, in another life, I would have been an architect. So. So construction, building, you know, I can agonize about how a skirting hits a plinth block. I mean, it'll keep me awake. I'm kind of obsessive about it.
But there are other people who just go, no, I want to get the look. And I think that there's a lot of give and take and a lot of working around the problems and the issues.
What I find normally happens when problems occur people is generally when you've got a client that starts changing their mind. And very often that is the interior designer not handling the client expectations or the contractor's being a brute and he's got another job to finish and there's more money riding on it, or the program is, oh, no, we can't do that. And what he really means is, actually the plasterers are on another site and they won't be here until two weeks on Monday. So guess what? We're going to have a program. And it's kind of. Those kind of interfaces can be really annoying.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, you're nodding your head, Paul, in agreement.
[00:10:10] Speaker B: How long have you got?
[00:10:13] Speaker D: I think ultimately, I think I touched on the point earlier.
Interior designers are incredible at their job. Even whether they're juniors, they've got vision, whether they're more seniors. It's the problems in my Experience that I've had when jobs have not gone wrong because we've always finished every single project. And it's when you have a difficult client, an interior designer who is not necessarily experienced in how to manage that client and manage their expectations and set clear, clear boundaries.
And as a contractor, then it's very difficult for us to sometimes operate the site when somebody is moving the goalposts, for example.
But ultimately comes down to regular communication. We have a set structure that we like to follow on projects. You can have all the systems in the world, but ultimately you have to deal with people. As long as you can be a good, you have good people skills and you can work your way through most problems without screaming or shouting or throwing your toys out of pram, nine times out of ten you can get to a successful result on the project.
[00:11:02] Speaker C: Gianna, do you think that contractors have changed the way they operate over the last 20 years?
[00:11:07] Speaker B: Oh, very much so. I mean, much more, the whole industry is so much more contractual.
I was talking to a prime property agent last week about a project that's going into the marketplace and he was saying, you have to understand that this price is reflecting the fact that in central London we're putting down an increase in budget between 40 and 50%, which is utterly staggered. You know, the cost of raw materials, the cost of wages, cost of just coming into London. Thank you, mayor. You know, is a nightmare. I mean, for you guys to bring a van into Central London is 120 quid a day. Now parking, if you're trying to park in Westminster, you know, the whole sort of exponential cost of working in central London has gone absolutely through the roof. So, you know, if us designers are working on things that were budgeted, shall we say, I mean, sometimes with permissions and things. Susie, you will know we can be putting a budget on the table, but we've then got to get listed. Building, planning, whatever, whatever. And we're working on it. A year later, you know, materials, some certain costs have increased. I mean, it was an absolute horror story after lots of lockdown because everything shot up and then went back down again partially.
[00:12:22] Speaker C: I remember Paul having a conversation with you about the price of a sheet of plasterboard that had gone from something like £3 20-13 lb of 12 months.
[00:12:30] Speaker B: Because of the Ukraine war.
[00:12:31] Speaker C: Yeah. And I think a lot of contractors, a lot of contractors actually went, went bust during that period because they were trying to finish fixed price contracts and the price of materials had gone up so much that they simply couldn't do, deliver and stay in business?
[00:12:45] Speaker B: Well, shuttering ply wasn't available for a while. It just, there was none in the.
[00:12:49] Speaker D: Marketplace when plaster wasn't available in the whole uk. So. And you'd only buy five bags at a time. And you imagine a typical site that we do, there might be three, 400 bags that go into a job. So I had my guys in 10 vans every morning going to different supply chain, different suppliers, wife, your mother, your aunt on a daily basis just to get five bags at a time. That was crazy. But thankfully we're through that now, so crazy.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: So let's go to the, the tender process, Paul, because that I think is probably the first engagement you have with the designer. What are the key things that you're looking for in terms of design information when you start pricing a job?
[00:13:21] Speaker D: All our commercial team is in house so we don't outsource any of our pricing. So we like to get a real handle on our costs.
But I think the tendering process is also very difficult for a contractor because we have to, it's part and parcel of the industry. But we have such an upfront cost, even at tender stage and especially if it's open tender, a typical tender can cost me sometimes 4 to 6,000 pound. That doesn't mean we win the job either. So if I'm with labor and my estimator, commercial manager, assistant surveyors, site visits, getting all our supply chain to cost. So the more information we have at tender stage, the better.
Detailed layouts, sections, elevations, a really detailed finishing schedule and stuff like that as well. Electrical layouts.
But that's the perfect world that we, that we don't live in.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: I was going to say. What are you smoking, darling?
[00:14:03] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. We don't, we don't always get information.
[00:14:06] Speaker B: I mean 10 bedroom house, we'd love to do that.
[00:14:10] Speaker C: Sadly, our clients won't pay for it.
[00:14:12] Speaker B: And then the client goes, no, I'm actually not expecting a budget of two and a half million here. You know, get rid of the gold leaf, Joe, you know.
[00:14:20] Speaker D: No, I think for us as well, it's when we price a job, certainly in the last two years it's been very slow to get projects to site. Historically is you price a job four or five week period, you win the job in the next two to four weeks. How quickly can you start? That was kind of the first seven, eight years of my, my running the business the last two years. It's okay, great. We're going to go through this value engineering process because the cost is so high on every single project. It doesn't matter if it's 100,000 pound job or a 5 million pound project. Every single project is getting value engineered back down to a manageable budget that clients comfortable signing up to.
So that sometimes takes three, four, five months.
[00:14:52] Speaker C: All of a sudden the prices have all changed again.
[00:14:55] Speaker D: At which point your prices have changed. Now you we clarify as a contractor that our prices are valid for 60 days in our tender return.
If you then start going and repricing the job, you have this catch 22 situation of am I still going to win this project? So you then might win the job. At that point the project might not start on site for four or six months. It's almost been six to 12 months since you priced it. And some of that work that you've priced at tender stage, like some cornishing for example, which comes in typically pretty late in the project might not start until 75% of the way through the price through the free to project, sorry. So you've priced it almost 18, 20 months ago.
And these guys, you're then trying to make the numbers work at the back end of the project. So it's so hard on fixed price contracts without putting massive buffer in, but also trying to stay competitive to win the work as well.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: So it's like a catch 22, understand?
[00:15:39] Speaker B: Don't you find at the very high end though, fixed price contracts are quite rare or you'll do a fixed price for shell and core and then you'll have more flexibility with fit out. That's what we mostly find.
[00:15:51] Speaker D: So we used to do a lot of cost plus work, fully transparent, fully open book and about 75% of our revenue was open book cost plus. And that just allows us to do our best work all the way through the project.
[00:16:01] Speaker C: Well, that's how we've always worked together.
[00:16:03] Speaker D: When we buy 50 sheets of ply in January, we buy it in November. The client is always getting negotiated trade rate plus our markup and our attendance, if that makes sense.
But almost a lot of that in the last two years has just gone from the market. It's almost impossible to talk anyone into it anymore just for risk management.
So but it's starting almost the conversations because I feel like salaries and investments have started to catch up again. People are starting to open that dialogue again about cost plus work. And there's more people that have a lot of architects and interior designers that we've worked with that have had bad experiences because of budgets. They're now very open to that way of working again because it just allows it Almost de. Risks it for the contractor, but also allows the client to get the best quality work all the time.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:16:42] Speaker C: And do you think it's possible when you get that tender pack from the designer, to predict what the designer is going to be like to work with from the quality of their information?
[00:16:51] Speaker D: As in like a new, a new contact, a new designer?
[00:16:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:53] Speaker C: Someone you've not worked with before.
[00:16:55] Speaker D: I've had great designers that we've worked with, I mean, great people that we work with that have given us maybe less than great information upfront. I've had designers that have given me incredible information upfront that have been very difficult to work with. So there's probably.
[00:17:07] Speaker C: The answer is no.
[00:17:08] Speaker D: Yeah, there's no, there's no sort of set way.
In a perfect world, as I said, you'd have all the information up front and we can, we can cost as accurately as you need, but obviously with the transparent open book way, it doesn't really matter how much you get up front because you guys can release it as we go through the project as well to save you to do all that design work up front. So.
[00:17:23] Speaker B: Well, the, the word that's missing here is quantity surveyor.
And we are, you know, on projects over a certain size, certainly projects over about half a million.
We now like getting a Qs in and we, we like building in contingencies for, you know, when inflation was going through the roof, we definitely needed. We were doing a new build house in Hampshire that we knew was going to take 18 months and we were coming out of lockdown.
So we absolutely needed to have budgeted in and the client needed to have. We needed to make the client aware that we were budgeting in for inflation.
You know, there was a certain time in the, in the industry where costs went through the roof. It was a really lousy moment to be doing your house. You know, some poor clients got really hit and then it went back down again.
Of course, Rachel from accounts has screwed everything up again with all the insurances and the costs of employing everything. In fact, she never obviously got as far as accounts. She wasn't good enough.
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[email protected] As a designer, how do you feel about working with an unknown contractor?
[00:19:18] Speaker B: Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Time will tell.
You know, I've got to be very honest here and I, you know, I wonder what the other designers in the room feel when we get to Q and A. But I like working with, you know, the quote, better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
And I also find that, you know, we do small jobs and medium sized jobs and large jobs as well.
And I like selecting a contractor. And very often as interior designers, we're on the front row. So the client comes to us because they want, you know, a Susie house or a Joanna house. That's why we're in the frame. And you know, sometimes there is already an architect and a QS in place, but more often than not there isn't.
And so we'll go through the introductory process of saying, well, you might want to work with, you know, Architect123 and then pulling their work up on, you know, and presenting, maybe meeting or, you know, if it's depending on what the project is, if it's fit out, if it's London rather than new build country, you don't then need it. We'll use a different sort of architect. We'll use an architect that does exactly what he's told and go, could you, you know, here's the sketches, here's our CAD drawings. Please go away and turn that into a series of working drawings or we'll be working with one of the big ones, the Robert Adams or the Barrett Lloyd Davises or whatever it is.
But then next down the line you then need your Qs. And again, if it's a job over a certain size, a project manager.
But in my time I've acted as a contractor too. Back in the day I had some builders go bust and I picked up a team of Irish guys. My then husband was a property developer. So at one stage I ran about 14 of the boys.
[00:21:12] Speaker D: Did you enjoy it?
[00:21:13] Speaker B: Well, it was quite fun.
The decorators were from the East End, so they were the cockney lads and all the heavyweight were Irish.
It was, it was a laugh, I'll tell you that. But I mean, it was quite something. I mean and it was sort of, there wasn't quite so much elf and safety until we do a risk assessment for climbing that ladder or, you know, opening that pot of paint or whatever it is. And we did quite well for a while. But what we then found very difficult to get past the critical mass was you then needed the infrastructure that you now have in place, which is the pricing, the qs, the in house team on that. And so we let the contractors go or we put them in with a project manager and Cost plus and took it out of sight. You know, professional indemnity was getting bigger and bigger, basically.
[00:22:03] Speaker C: You raise a really good point though that it's hard for the battle, I think sometimes with smaller jobs and therefore smaller contractors is that they might be extremely good builders, but often they just don't have the time to do the paperwork or be paying attention to the details. And that puts an additional burden on the designer then, which obviously they won't have covered off in their fee proposal. So, you know, sometimes you get a client who will dump a contractor on top of you because they've, you know, it's someone that they've been recommended and.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: Perhaps they really like Terry, he saves them before Christmas when they're aging broke, that's the worst.
[00:22:37] Speaker C: And you know, they're not up to the job or they're local or they're local or they're. Yes, it's a real problem.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I know that can be an absolute nightmare. So the answer is I do try and use my tried and tested, you know, the people I like and it's very much horses for courses. You know, like it's what sort of.
[00:22:54] Speaker C: Due diligence do you. If in that situation where you have had you finding yourself in a position where you are going to be working with a new contractor that you've not encountered before, what sort of due diligence do you do on them?
[00:23:05] Speaker B: I go, could you please show me two of your projects and asked to go round something that they've done. And you know, you can't necessarily tell what the mechanical and the electrical is like, but you can certainly see the quality of the joinery. I mean, I'm a joinery nut, so that's very important to me.
And you can see, you can gauge the level, you know, you can gauge whether the level of the finish, the level of the construction, the level of the, you know, the install is what you believe your client's looking for or not. And sometimes it's too high spec. You know, you don't necessarily need the Gucci poochie of contractors just to build a small extension and it ends up Being, you know, too expensive and not right. It's about. It's about a marriage. It's about getting the right team for the right project. I think that's so important.
[00:23:57] Speaker A: Joe, do you ever advise your client not to engage a contractor?
Present company accepted? Of course.
[00:24:03] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:24:04] Speaker D: You do?
[00:24:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:24:06] Speaker D: Do they listen?
[00:24:07] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:24:07] Speaker D: All the time. Do you want me asking?
[00:24:09] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:24:10] Speaker C: Yeah, they do.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: Yeah, they do.
I don't think I've ever been for. It was one of the questions. I don't think I've ever been forced to work with a contractor because if we as a team go in and go, we don't think they're up to your job, it's going to be very expensive. At the end of the day, we'll do everything we can, but we don't think that it's going to be the right finish, the right look.
Then, as a general rule, you know, that's why we're there. That's why, you know, we're professional interior designers. People come to us because we know what we're doing.
Bloody well hope so after all these years anyway.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: Has that ever happened to you, Susan?
[00:24:47] Speaker C: Yeah, it has. It has happened to me on several occasions, actually. Yes. I've been forced to work.
[00:24:51] Speaker B: Is it a disaster?
[00:24:52] Speaker C: Inevitably or extremely not. Not a disaster. We've always finished and we've always got the project delivered. But it has been excruciatingly painful to get there.
[00:25:02] Speaker B: I mean, I think.
And Paul, basically, if an interior designer wants to really screw up a contractor, they can be awful, you know. No, that's not what I meant. You know, I wanted the stripes to be 1 millimeter wider than that or the, you know, it's the wrong this and the other. I mean, you know, designers can be ridiculous, but contractors can, too, especially if they've underpriced the job and they're hunting, hunting for the money. When a contractor is short of money, too low a budget is always a disaster.
You know, if you've got a job that you were expecting it was going to be 100 grand and suddenly it's 70, there is something wrong. There is a right price. But in these difficult days, in this economic climate, what is actually happening?
That contractors are pricing below market rate and sometimes below cost for a job, and that. That can always be very, very dangerous. That's really, really a worry, which is when, you know, as a designer, if one is ever worried about something, that's when sometimes it's worth getting, you know, a qs. Even if you say, you know, I'm going to employ you for six hours.
[00:26:13] Speaker C: To look through an outline cost plan for £1,000 is worth its weight in gold. Totally.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: Paul, have you ever refused to work with an interior designer on a project.
[00:26:22] Speaker D: After working with them for the first time? Yes, for a second time. Because like you said earlier, we're not right for every interior designer and every interior designer wouldn't be worked for us same as clients. Like you said, there's, there's, there's certain, certain level and certain standard of projects and what, where we like to position, position ourselves in the market.
We want clients that value that as a service as well.
And we just recently, literally we've just gone lost out on a project large, large value.
We were loosely told we got it two or three months ago and the contract that has been appointed is a 1, almost a 1 man band. And the value of the project is over two times his biggest yearly turnover ever.
He was about 40% cheaper than us and we were in the middle out of four or five contractors. So the interior design on that project was hawksweller recommended. Let's go with them. But obviously it was a large sum of money that the client couldn't get their heads around. So for me I'm not sure why.
In my experience usually when we tender through the process, we are the preferred contractor from the design team that's putting us forward. But clients don't always listen to interior designers or architects.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: In my experience, 40% is a lot.
[00:27:24] Speaker D: They're usually the jobs that I hear about going wrong a year later, 18 months later, if it even gets that far.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: Sometimes I think that it's also very important, sorry to look at your contractor and see what, what they're registered with, who always check their insurances, you know, if they've only got insurance for half a mil or something and you're in a apartment that's worth God knows what or you know, even, or even a million, you know, you need to be very sure that they're covered, that they've, their standard is correct for the job that you want and that they are a member of some form of organization.
Which is why I come back to the British Institute of Interior Design. Big plug here for our institute, which is incredibly important because to clients and again to contractors, there is a standard of excellence there that is guaranteed within that institution. And I think that that's an incredibly important point.
[00:28:24] Speaker A: Good point, good point.
So Joe, has the designer contractor relationship, do you think changed over recent years? I mean, would you, would you say it's easier now working with contractors or more difficult or.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: I don't know. I've always ended up with really good relationships with my contractors. And I work with some people that I've worked with for literally decades. I mean, you know, if you get a good relationship, if you get a shorthand going from both sides, you know, you can go, we need radiator casings and they're going to look like that, but the grill is going to be different. You know, here's. Do you remember we did them in, whatever it was, you know, bingo. Great. Two and a half grand each, off we go, you know, and it's done. And everybody knows what's expected. So there is a relationship that's really important. And down my team, that's also important.
I need my juniors to get on with the contractors.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: And what do you think, Paul? Do you get on better with designers now than Perhaps you did five, 10 years ago? What's the.
[00:29:27] Speaker D: I think it comes down to a lot down to that.
People management style. So in the early years of running the business, I think a lot more people, a lot of contractors operate on good faith and I certainly historically have done that. And working with Susie and stuff, you can. When people stand by the word of what they say on site, and when you get the email two or three days later, it matches that sort of conversation that you had and then you can proceed in that basis.
But not everybody operates like that. So we've completely changed how we operate. So I was tinkering around with building a project management software for about two years until the situation, the job a couple of years back, and we really went heavy on this project management software just to get everything in writing. So we will never do anything outside the drawings, anything outside the scope without having it in writing off either the designer, the architect or the client, basically just to cover ourselves. Even if something doesn't match in the drawings, we won't build it. We will always raise rfi. It will raise the question externally just to cover ourselves, basically. So.
[00:30:19] Speaker B: God, rfi.
[00:30:20] Speaker C: Well, it slows. Slows things down.
[00:30:23] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, but then, but then I'm a great believer in sorting things out on site and then doing it through multiple RFIs. You know, if. If as a designer you end up with that kind of contractual contractor who, you know, you get 25 RFIs for something that could be sorted out with a. No, just move it quarter of an inch to the left. Yeah, you know, it's. That's, that's. That's kind of. I'm already feeling cross.
[00:30:46] Speaker D: Would that be Fair though, because like you say, because you have the ability to deal on site and resolve them issues on site. As a contractor. If we had someone like yourself, Susie and her team are the very same way, we can resolve it on site. We'd have to go through that process. But not everybody operates that way. And someone will say, well I said this or a site meeting might be. We'll go to the top floor of the house, we'll walk through every single room in the house, we'll be told everything verbally and we'll get to the end of the end of the meeting. So an hour later and there's no person in the world that can remember every last little bit of conversation. We do minutes, instructions. So. But again, some interior designers don't do minutes.
[00:31:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:17] Speaker D: So we kind of minute them ourselves as well, you see. So.
[00:31:20] Speaker A: So always two minutes.
[00:31:21] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that, you know, Susie and I are agreeing. I think one of the questions is, you know, how often do you need to go to site and throughout, throughout the entire process, say you've got a 10 month long project.
We will go to site the team, we will probably have three people in the office working on that job. Might be four. My biggest job had 11 on it.
And we will, we will send the senior to site every other fortnightly and probably the person who's running the job on a day to day basis will go weekly. And what we do is fortnightly minuted meetings. And then we do the interim is a walk, what we call a walk around. And there might be heads or it might be pushed forward to the next RFI or whatever so that there is never more than a seven day period without somebody there to answer queries. And that absolutely pushes the program along, pushes the speed along. And I wouldn't advise anybody to do a job without going at least once a fortnight. When we walk abroad, when we're working abroad and we obviously can't do the walk rounds and things.
We will still do, we'll still do, you know, FaceTime walk around.
[00:32:40] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: Literally. We've just been doing a job in Montreal. We had weekly meeting Thursday afternoon, you know, designated hour and a half, the contractor, the project manager, client, us. And it, you know, it was a super job but worked really well. We went out twice only.
[00:32:59] Speaker C: So then as a contractor, what are the things that designers most often forget in their specifications and documentation or perhaps don't allow for adequately.
[00:33:09] Speaker B: Oh, that's a good question.
[00:33:12] Speaker A: What's your biggest bugbear?
[00:33:14] Speaker D: If there's no M&E designer. And you haven't got M and E plans, you might get design intent. So you might get a lovely layout for lighting, which is fairly easy to follow. But sometimes small power, it's very, very rare. You see few spurs on things. And obviously power for bathroom fans, all that sort of stuff.
Be quite rare that you see that on drawings. Normally, you'll see the bathroom fan labeled M and E can sometimes not be given enough space and plant rooms and stuff.
You might be given a 600 by 600 cupboard to fit a megaflow in. And you need a minimum 750 by 750 as a bare minimum, especially with the pipework and stuff. And underfloor. Heated manifolds can sometimes just get tucked in the corner when they need to be serviceable. They need to be removable.
[00:33:53] Speaker B: Yeah. You learn the access panel. Kind of drama early in your career as a designer.
[00:33:58] Speaker D: You see your access panels. Air conditioning sometimes for everything. Yeah.
[00:34:01] Speaker B: Bathtub, you know, I'm an ax. Aren't you? You know, bitter experience having access everything.
[00:34:07] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:34:09] Speaker B: Clout ringing you up, going, my bath's overflowed. When. How do I turn the water? Water off. You know, as an interior designer, I don't know what you guys find, but I find you are expected to be everything. You're expected to know everything.
Everything you know. Yeah. Specialist in aircon. Specialist.
Absolutely everything.
[00:34:30] Speaker A: And as a designer, Joe, what do you do if a contractor is ignoring what you're setting out or the details that you're specifying?
How do you persuade them of your point of view?
[00:34:41] Speaker B: Kneecaps, elbows, starvation, that kind of thing? Yeah, absolutely. Do you know who I am?
[00:34:51] Speaker D: That's where the diva comes out.
[00:34:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
That's when. Yeah. Listen, it's unacceptable, Paul. You do not go off piste unless.
[00:35:01] Speaker D: You'Re telling me off here. I haven't heard of you yet.
Do you like I'm getting the lecture and haven't been on the site yet.
[00:35:05] Speaker B: You know, that is the most irritating thing. I'm sorry, if you're gonna. If you say this is the proportions of my bookcase and they go, well, it was easier to build this bottom section. 900 die and it's, you know, this too big and the whole proportion's gone. Absolutely. No, not acceptable.
[00:35:21] Speaker A: Do you have, like a traffic light system where you start off green, maybe a bit of charm orange is starting to get a bit angry, and then red, you completely lose it. Is there anything like that?
[00:35:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I kind of try and I try and send in whoever's running it. And I go, no, just you go and tell. I don't try, actually. I never lose my temper. But it'll go like this. It'll go, could you tell them that? Could they have another look at that? Do you know? It would be a good idea. So I'll send somebody off to do it and they'll come back, go, well, it's in now, is it? Okay, that's the classic, isn't it? It's done and it's in. And you go, but I've just checked the drawing and it's here at some 750 and you've made it at 900.
So the proportions are wrong. So probably, you know, one of my in designers will go in and go. Because when somebody goes, no, and I am the last point, I always go tell them I'm going to be really terrifying. If they really mean that, they want me to come down site. So hopefully, hopefully I don't have to get that across.
[00:36:24] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:36:25] Speaker D: Would it be fair to say sorry? So it would be fair to say if you had the right contractor, hopefully that wouldn't happen. It wouldn't have happened because you sign off drawings in advance and you build a workshop. Drawings, for example.
[00:36:33] Speaker B: Having said that, there are times when genuine mistakes have been made and on both sides, if that happens, I would expect a contractor to pull me out of a hole. We make mistakes and vice versa. So if we can make it work. Okay, so the proportion's wrong. Tell you what, let's adjust the skirting. We. We'll pull it down so it'll look right. We'll do a recessed plinth instead of a, you know, 280 skirting, and it'll be fine. And then we've worked and that kind of, you know, that's how you get on on a site. That's how you work. And it looks beautiful and the client never knows.
[00:37:12] Speaker C: I think there has to be a certain amount of pragmatism in some of these things because it, you know.
[00:37:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:17] Speaker C: Paul, do designers sometimes need to let their tiaras slip a little?
[00:37:23] Speaker B: I didn't understand what that question meant, Paul.
[00:37:30] Speaker D: I think it comes back to the point we just touched on there, that when problems happen on site, you have to stick together as a team and collaborate and obviously sit the client. We always sit the client on a pedestal over there. And as much as they're the ones employing us both to give them an amazing house, the way I see it in business is they're going to employ you once, maybe twice in their life. It's the design team that you work with repeatedly, maybe three jobs a year, four jobs a year. So you have to stick together as a team. And when problems happen, like your recess, we're going to make mistakes as contractors and interior designers going to make mistakes. And architect, there's nobody perfect and there's nobody that can envisage every last aspect. So the problem comes when compromise needs to happen from one or both sides. And some people are not very good at compromising. I think as long as people are willing to compromise, sometimes us on affordability and we have to do something that we want, we're not necessarily getting paid for, but maybe sometimes because a mistake has happened, there has to be a design compromise as well. As long as you could deliver something beautiful for the clients. And as you said, the clients sometimes never know. They walk in the house and they're starry eyed, then that's a win.
[00:38:26] Speaker A: What's the funniest, maddest thing a designer's ever asked you to do or asked you for?
[00:38:34] Speaker D: How can I be diplomatic here?
[00:38:35] Speaker A: So diplomatic.
[00:38:36] Speaker D: Paul we were once on a project a couple of years back and there was quite a large delay on the program caused by the joinery company that the design had always joinery.
So the job has increased in scope. Client knew all about client. Client was very happy to increase the scope and that sort of stuff. But because of that, the designer had missed a slot of the joinery company.
So come to the crux of the project and we're kind of, there's only so far we can do our work to the point until the joinery goes in so we can finish rooms and close them out.
So rather than telling the clients that the joinery was delayed again, the designer told the clients that because it was such a hot summer, the paint was drying too fast, so we were having to repaint the whole house. So I got the phone call, yeah, I got the phone call from the said, if the clients ring you make sure you say this. And the clients are top level lawyers. They're very, very smart people. So they rang me and said, don't lie to me, Paul, you've never lied to us yet. Is it the paint? And I said, well, it is hot outside, I'll give them that.
But there might be a few other reasons. If you just have a look on the program, maybe you can work through it. And they were like, is it the job joinery? And I said, look, no comment. I'm not here to manage you guys. So the joinery's coming in Four weeks time, as soon as it's him, we'll do this, we'll do that. So I always think honesty is the best policy.
[00:39:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree.
[00:39:46] Speaker D: You know, sometimes these clients are, especially at the level of projects we work on, they're not stupid, they're very wealthy for a reason, they're very smart, they know what they're doing in life. You can't pull the wool over their eyes. So if there's a problem on site, you just own up. We've made mistakes in the past and you just, the earlier you show accountability and you, you own that mistake or that situation, the easier it is to resolve the problem. Happens situations like that, when the snow, it's like a snow. A lie is like a snowball rolling down a hill. It's only going to get bigger and bigger.
[00:40:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:11] Speaker D: And the further it goes down the hill, the more annoyed the client's going to be.
[00:40:13] Speaker A: So that's great advice.
[00:40:14] Speaker C: And Joanna, what's the craziest thing that a contractor has ever done on one of your sites?
[00:40:20] Speaker B: Well, I was kind of thinking about this as I was driving up this morning, and I actually remember one that really sort of blew me away, which was that we were doing a house in Chelsea which was amazingly, almost derelict and was incredibly damp and had been lived in by a sort of old lady for 150 years. And you went in and I don't think she'd ever been down to the basement. And it was practically earth floors and it was, you know, the plaster was falling off the floor, whatever.
And I remember walking around with the contractor, who was a lovely Polish guy called Pavlos. This is about 15 years ago.
And I had my structural engineer with me because we wanted to open plan the basement, put French doors onto the garden, you know, guys, the normal thing.
And it was so wet.
And the structural engineer went, well, we can do this. But listen, Joanna, we've got a real problem. We've got a load of dry rot here, a load of damp. The thing is absolutely, I mean, look at it. And there was mushrooms and stuff coming off the wall. So I went, okay, this is going to be bigger and worse. And how far has the dry rock gone? And we walked through to the back and we came through to the front again and there was Pavlos picking the mushrooms off the wall and eating them.
And I promise you, Sam. And I looked at him and went, it's not that bad. Don't worry, you know, you do not need to commit suicide yet. We'll, we'll be all right. This is a seriously true story. I mean, you simply could not make this up, could you? And he went, no, darling, it's delicious risotto tonight, okay? And we got rid of the dry rot and the house got built.
It was a worry.
[00:42:09] Speaker A: Yet again, you leave me speechless.
Round of applause, please. Thank you.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:42:18] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Joanna and Paul, for your time today.
Brilliant and entertaining, just as I hoped it would be. Thank you so much.
[00:42:24] Speaker B: It's been fabulous. Thank you. Good to be here.
[00:42:26] Speaker A: Thank you also to decorex for hosting us here today at London Olympia. And a final thank you to you, our audience. We do hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please do get in touch on our social channels. Nteriordesign BusinessPod to share any feedback. The interior design business is a Wildwood plus production. Thank you.
