How do you choose the right interior designer for your home renovation?

Most advice on this starts with matching a portfolio to your taste — see enough rooms you love, and it's natural to assume the fit will follow. But it isn't the only way to start, or even the best. Here are a few other considerations.

1. Decide what you actually want from an interior designer. Some clients want to buy a designer's signature style. Others know exactly what they want their home to look like and are looking for a designer to do the leg work to execute it precisely. Others want a genuine partner, someone who can get to the core of what you love and why, then build a style that's uniquely yours in ways you'd never imagined. All three are legitimate approaches. They're just different relationships, and it's worth knowing which one you're actually looking for before you start comparing portfolios.

2. Look for process — but the right amount of it. Pragmatism, transparency, clarity, and real attention to detail all matter. I once saw a process pack from a nearby practice so long and elaborate it would have taken longer to read than most of the actual decisions it described. The right process is proportioned to what a client needs to feel informed and in control — not to what makes a designer look thorough, or the process complicated, on paper.

3. Ask how the designers prioritise spend. Not what things cost, but how they decide where the budget actually goes. That answer tells you far more about how someone makes decisions under real constraints than any number quoted at the outset ever will.

4. Ask who's actually working on your project, and how many other projects are running alongside it. A senior name in the room for meetings doesn't guarantee a senior hand on the design. Sometimes that's delegated further down. Neither approach is automatically better, but it's worth knowing what you're paying for, and whether the answer changes once a practice gets busy.

Ask the right questions, and you find not just a good designer, but the right relationship for building your home.