7 Reasons You Need an Interior Designer When Building a Custom Home
Are you building a new home in Victoria or considering a massive renovation on an existing home? An interior designer can save you time and money in both cases! Here’s how.
Your custom-built home or fully renovated home should not only look amazing, but it should also be functional and reflect your personality and style.
When building a custom home in Victoria, you need someone on your team with the ability to take your vision and create a plan for the builders from the get-go. Your needs and wants should work for you and all the occupants of your home, but they also need to work with the geography of your lot, the building restrictions in your neighbourhood, your municipal bylaws, and the neighbouring homes near you.
This is where the help of a skilled and knowledgeable interior designer comes in.
What Is an Interior Designer?
Interior designers sometimes get mistaken for interior decorators, but interior designers do much more than pick out decorations for a home. They are building professionals involved in many stages of the build process, helping to design spaces that are functional, safe, and beautifully finished.
Your interior designer’s role is to help you create a space that meets all your needs. They work closely with you to present your wish list to the engineers, architects, and the general contractor on your project’s build team.
Along the way, an interior designer can help you envision how different colors, textures, furniture, lighting, and spaces work together to enhance the experience of a building’s occupants.
Interior designers read blueprints, know about current trends, and are aware of local building codes, municipal building bylaws, and universal accessibility standards.
Why Hire an Interior Designer?
While an interior designer is an asset to anyone completing a renovation, when it comes to custom built homes, they become an essential part of the process. That’s why, when you hire LIDA Construction to build your home, you get highly skilled interior designers assisting you every step of the way. Your LIDA Construction interior designer acts as a liaison between you and our build team, which makes the whole build or renovation process smoother and less stressful.
Here are 7 additional ways interior designers are crucial to the home-building process:
1. Interior Designers Keep Things on Budget
Interior designers are no strangers to the importance of budgets and helping their clients stay within them. Your designer is going to be able to save you money thanks to their knowledge of things like building codes, what’s best for eventual resale, and the average material cost of the fabrics and finishes you’re eyeing up.
With years of experience, our interior designers can help you save costly mistakes because we know what materials and features work best in Victoria’s geography and climate. Finally, as a LIDA Construction client, you will have access to our online budgeting software, which keeps track of where every dollar is spent.
2. Interior Designers Save You time
With the help of an interior designer during a custom home build, you can rest assured that nothing in the design process will be overlooked or need re-doing. When decisions and choices are made correctly the first time, the project keeps moving forward and stays on budget. Acting as a liaison between you and the general contractor and sub-trades, an interior designer asks you the pertinent questions at the right stages and can flag any obstacles that can come up.
3. Interior Designers Keep Things Marching Forward
They will also help make sure things are being done as they were decided from the start. This type of person on your design team helps keep the project marching forward while keeping everyone on the same page. Likewise, they are the ones communicating any hold-ups and change orders to the builders, so you don’t have to worry about returning multiple contractor phone calls during your lunch break.
4. Interior Designers Provide Honest, Professional Opinions
When it comes to interior design, many people become overwhelmed with the amount of choices there are and can end up second-guessing every decision they make. This can easily happen if you spend too much time consulting family members, friends, and magazines over what ‘looks the best’.
An interior designer is a one-stop approach to helping you make key decisions in the custom-home building process. They are educated, skilled, neutral third parties when it comes to things like paint colours, and they aren’t afraid of giving you their honest opinion about when a colour is the wrong shade for your chosen flooring.
5. Interior Designers Prevent You from Getting Ripped Off
This goes along with our first two points, saving time and money. If you’ve ever gone out to select your own building materials, it’s easy to get too attached to luxury materials that just aren’t practical for your budget. At this point, you run the risk of spending too much on something that might have a cheaper alternative – maybe something you weren’t shown at the store.
You can avoid this by funneling the many building material choices through an interior designer instead. It’s easy to get carried away when designing and decorating your home, and sometimes what we see on the shelves is out of our budget. An interior designer will be able to show you how to achieve what you want, within budget. They are full of innovative solutions in all aspects of design.
6. Interior Designers Can Get You Rare Materials and Better Deals
Interior designers like the ones on the LIDA Construction team have spent years building relationships with suppliers, contractors, and sub-contractors in Victoria. This alone makes them an excellent resource to have on your team. They have the expertise, knowledge, and contacts to find whatever it is you want for your custom home.
7. Interior Designers Know All About the “Wow!” Factor
Your interior designer is skilled at creating that “wow!” factor for your home, which can be achieved through things beyond the glitz and glamour. You might not have even considered things like textured accent walls, an indoor waterfall, a grand staircase, floor to ceiling windows, or a show-stopper light fixture. However, your interior designer knows all about these features and knows how to place them in a way that aligns with your furniture and your desired floor plan.
An interior designer is an integral part of making your dream house a reality. Their wide range of skills will help you make your house functional, beautiful, and one-of-a-kind. You’ve purchased the land and you’ve dreamed about the perfect layout – now let our interior designers take that perfect layout one step further.
The team at LIDA Construction knows that for most people who chose to build a custom home, boring and predictable just isn’t good enough! Our interior design team ensures our homes are never boring and never predictable. We design stunning, functional homes that flow, have that wow factor, AND work for you on a day-to-day basis.
LIDA Construction is a custom home builder in Victoria, BC with and award-winning interior design team (drop “on staff”). They will assist clients from initial space planning to designing custom cabinetry, choosing finishes and furniture, creating lighting plans and selecting light fixtures, and developing an overall scheme. If you’re thinking about building a custom home and want access to a team of interior design professionals, contact us today and let us help make your dreams a reality. Together, we’ll make your new home a space you’ll love to live in and be proud to call home.
