What Wealthy Clients Are Buying From a Designer

Many designers believe that a wealthy family is paying for the rooms. By that they mean the floor plan, the finishes, and the furniture schedule. Those took years to learn to do well. What the family is buying is a house that says who they are, in the most private place they have.

Imagine a designer named Lisette Brannock who is hired for a full renovation of the Quayles’ house. The family has lived there for 12 years, and their three children are teenagers now. The house needs everything, from the wiring to the curtains.

Lisette has two installations that month, so she works the way she usually does. She asks about the budget, the number of bedrooms, and when the family needs to move back in. Six weeks later, she presents her plan for the whole house. She brings floor plans, a board of finishes, and a furniture schedule. The dark paneling in the library is painted a pale gray. The dining room gets a new table for 14, and the old farmhouse table in the kitchen goes to auction. Mrs. Quayle says it is beautiful, and the family approves the plan.

Fourteen months later, the house is finished, and it is the best work Lisette has done. By spring, the family eats at the kitchen island most nights. The leather reading chair that belonged to Mr. Quayle’s father has come back up from the basement into the gray library. The new dining table is used twice that year. When a friend asks Mrs. Quayle about her designer, she says, “It’s a beautiful house. We just don’t use half of it.” The Quayles hire someone else for their house at the lake.

Suppose instead that Lisette spends the first meeting walking through the house with Mr. and Mrs. Quayle. In each room, she asks who uses it and when. Mrs. Quayle says the family eats at the farmhouse table in the kitchen every night, even when friends come over. The dining room is used at Thanksgiving and hardly ever otherwise. Their middle child practices piano in the front hall, where the whole house can hear. Mr. Quayle reads in the library every evening, in the leather chair that was his father’s.

Then Lisette asks what they want to keep. Mrs. Quayle names the farmhouse table, the chair, and the paneling. “The kids did their homework in that library,” she says.

Lisette’s plan makes the kitchen big enough to seat 12 around the farmhouse table. The old dining room becomes a music room, with the piano by the window. The paneling stays, cleaned and oiled, and the chair is recovered in leather the color of the old one. The family uses every room. Two years later, they hire Lisette for the house at the lake.

Lisette’s drawings were just as good both times. In the first version, the plan started from her idea of a beautiful house, so the Quayles had to live around it. In the second, the plan started from how the Quayles live and what they want to keep. The house fit them, so they used all of it.

So a wealthy family hiring a designer is not buying a floor plan or a set of furniture. They are buying a house that fits who they are. Here is why the house carries so much weight, and what three designers found.

A family’s house is where they live with the people closest to them

A designer hands over drawings, finishes, and furniture. What the family keeps is the house they live in afterward. Every day, that house either fits them or it does not.

Here is the course’s view of why the house weighs more than most work a family pays for. A family spends more of its life at home than anywhere else. The children grow up there, and the people closest to the family sit at its table. So a house planned around someone else’s idea of the family feels wrong every evening, for years.

Only the family knows how they live in the house. So the plan has to start from what they tell you about it.

A San Francisco designer heard months later what her rooms had changed

Emilie Munroe is a designer in San Francisco. In 2019, Business of Home asked her and two other designers for the best lesson they ever learned from a client.

Her answer starts with how the work feels from the inside. “This business is so full of details, numbers and logistics that it can be hard to see the forest for the trees,” she said.

What changed her view came later. In the months after an installation, her clients told her stories. A new fire pit led their teenagers “to invite their friends over more and stay longer at family gatherings.” The layout of a kitchen led to “more shared cooking experiences.”

Munroe concluded that these stories were “about our designs affecting their relationships and values.” In her words, the real impact of the work is “not just pretty, functional rooms, but spaces and moments that change the life experience of those inside.”

The fire pit and the kitchen layout are what Munroe drew and ordered. What her clients talked about was their teenagers bringing friends home and their family cooking together. That is the part of the work a family keeps.

A Utah designer told a family to stop living in their house like a museum

Meta Coleman is a designer in Provo, Utah. In 2022, Business of Home interviewed her for its 50 States Project. She described a client with a historic house. Before Coleman, the family lived there “like a museum and a monument to the previous homeowners.” She told them, “You need to live in the home as if it’s yours, because it is yours.”

For Coleman, a house tells “a story about who you are in your home and what you love.” She starts every new client with “a very detailed questionnaire.” It asks “who they are, their background, the era of the home, what they want, the problems they have in the home.”

She also builds on what the family already owns. “I think we can utilize your grandmother’s favorite chair along with maybe some modern pieces and other antiques or vintage pieces that you have,” she said. “If it has meaning to you, then it has meaning.” Her question to clients is short: “What pieces do you want to keep? What do you want to transition out?”

Coleman’s first questions are about who the family is and what they already own. The new pieces come after, chosen to sit beside the old ones.

A London designer for ultra-wealthy clients fits each home around the person

Charu Gandhi, an architect by training, runs an interior design studio in Chelsea, London. Its projects include apartments in One Hyde Park and townhouses in Belgravia. In 2018, she told Spear’s how she works with ultra-wealthy clients.

Many of her clients collect jewelry, art, or objects from the country they come from, and they want those pieces on show. One client’s daughter had a whole room set aside to display her Barbie dolls. Another client wanted storage where they could see all their sunglasses.

Collections like those could get in the way of a designer’s plan. Gandhi sees them the other way around. “My ethos is that the space is for them,” she said. “Fundamentally, the space should celebrate the particularity of who my client is.”

She also said what the client brings to the work. “I think private clients know how they use their homes,” she said. To her, the ultimate luxury is “when someone takes the time to understand that detail of how to fit a house around you.”

Gandhi’s clients can afford any furniture they want. What they hire her for is a house that fits around them, down to the sunglasses.

Why designing from a client’s saved photos goes wrong

Imagine a designer named Carys Sefton who is renovating the ground floor of the Szells’ house. At the first meeting, she has a site visit at two. So she asks the question many designers start with. “How would you describe your style?” Mrs. Szell opens her phone and shows Carys 40 saved photos of white kitchens and pale oak floors.

Carys designs the ground floor to match the photos, and it does. In the old living room, two shelves held the blue pottery that belonged to Mrs. Szell’s late mother. The new plan has no place for it, so the pottery goes into boxes in the basement. A year later, Mrs. Szell has put a few pieces back on the kitchen counter, where they look out of place. When her sister asks about Carys, Mrs. Szell says, “She did exactly what I showed her.”

Carys’s mistake was taking the photos as the brief. They showed what Mrs. Szell liked in other people’s houses. They said nothing about her mother’s pottery, because nobody asked about it.

The version that works treats the photos as a set of questions. Coleman has her clients look at pictures of rooms and tell her why they do or do not like each one. So Carys asks what Mrs. Szell likes in three of the photos. Mrs. Szell says she likes the light, and that nothing is cluttered. Then Carys asks what she wants to keep, and Mrs. Szell names the pottery. The plan has white walls, pale oak, and one wall of open shelves for her mother’s pottery.

Designing around the family still takes your eye

Many designers have spent years building a look of their own. A lesson that says the house is for the family can sound like a lesson in doing what you are told.

One of Gandhi’s clients saw it differently. At the end of her interview, Gandhi read from that client’s letter. “It’s pure genius how you’ve interpreted what was often very vague feedback and ideas,” the client wrote, “into something so perfectly aligned with what we wanted.” The client also wrote, “we didn’t really know what we wanted.”

Coleman will not copy, either. When a client shows her another designer’s room and says, “I want this exactly,” she says no. Instead, she offers, “We can take the spirit of it, what we like about it.”

So the family brings who they are, and often they cannot put it into words. Your eye turns what they tell you into a house. That is the skill they hired you for.

How to plan a house around the family who lives in it

1. At the first meeting, walk through the house with the client before you show any of your work. In each room, ask who uses it, when, and for what. Write down their answers in their words. For example, a designer renovating a townhouse can ask, “Who is in this room at seven on a weeknight, and what are they doing?”
2. Ask what the family wants to keep, the way Coleman does. Write down each piece, who it came from, and where it sits now. Plan those pieces into the house before you choose anything new. That order is the course’s suggestion, because the new pieces have to sit beside the old ones. For example, a designer working on a farmhouse might hear that the hall clock was built by the client’s great-grandfather.
3. When a client shows you photos of rooms they like, ask what they like in each one, and what they do not. Design from the answers, not from the photos. For example, a decorator might hear that the client loves the deep sofa in one photo and dislikes the bare walls.
4. Present each room by what it will be like for the family, before you show the finishes or the furniture. Use the family’s own words. For example, a designer presenting a finished basement can say, “This is where the boys watch the game on Sundays, and the bar is where your husband wanted it.”
5. Rewrite the first sentence about your work so it names the life a family has in the house. Cross out the floor plans and the furnishings. For example, a designer’s “full-service residential design, from floor plans to furnishings” becomes “I design houses around how a family lives, and around what they would never give up.”

Next: You will see why an hourly rate holds a designer back, and what to charge instead.