Short answer: Hiring a high-end interior design studio is a decision that will shape years of your life. These are the signals that distinguish an exceptional professional from a merely competent one.
· Guides · 8 min
When a client first calls us, they have usually spent weeks — sometimes months — searching for a studio that fits their project. They have seen portfolios, read interviews, made comparisons. And almost always end up asking us the same question: what should I look at to get this right?
The answer is not in the number of awards or the size of a social media following. It lies in subtler signals, only visible to those who understand how a high-end project is built from beginning to end.
A solid studio has a recognisable voice. Their projects can be very different from each other — a city penthouse, a restored farmhouse, a family apartment — and still feel part of the same sensibility.
If, when reviewing their work, each project feels like it belongs to a different studio, you are probably looking at a team that simply executes what the client asks for, without bringing their own judgement. In luxury, judgement is precisely what you pay for.
What should vary is the character of each space: a family home cannot have the same temperature as a bachelor's apartment. The voice stays; the tone changes.
Ask them to walk you through a project in detail. A serious studio will talk about the surveying phase, the briefing, lead times for bespoke furniture, coordination with trades, the unforeseen issues that came up and how they were resolved.
If the conversation stays in the realm of pretty things, there is a problem. Luxury interior design is 70% management and 30% inspiration. Anyone who only shows you renders is selling you a postcard, not a project.
A high-end project is not made at IKEA or at big-box retailers. It is made with cabinetmakers who turn wood by hand, with marble specialists who know the vein of every block, with upholsterers who understand both technical and natural fabrics, with metalworkers who work brass the way their grandparents did.
Ask directly: who do you work with? An established studio will give you names, specific workshops, relationships built over years. If they answer with vague generalities ("we have several suppliers"), they are telling you they improvise on every project.
In luxury, financial transparency is a value in itself. A good studio explains clearly:
Be wary of budgets that are too tightly closed at the start. A luxury interior project refines itself as it progresses, and definitive budgets require detailed measurements, prototypes and final material selections. What any professional studio can — and should — give you is a realistic range from the very first meeting.
Perhaps the most revealing signal. A reputable studio will say no to a material that does not work in your space, to a layout that would compromise the light, to a piece of furniture that breaks the proportion of a room. And they will argue it.
A team that says yes to everything is not respecting you: they are prioritising not making you uncomfortable over the final result. In three years' time, when you live with those mistakes every day, the easy yes will have been very expensive.
Ask to see an executive project dossier. Not the pretty renders: the drawings. The materials specification. The construction sections. The bespoke joinery details.
The quality of that documentation predicts exactly the quality of the result on site. If the drawings are confusing or incomplete, trades will improvise; and improvisation on a high-end project is always expensive and almost always visible.
You will have an intense relationship with the studio for 6 to 18 months, depending on the project. You will open the doors of your home to them, tell them how you live, what bothers you, how you sleep, where you welcome friends.
If in the first meeting you do not feel heard — if they interrupt you, if they impose without arguing, if they are condescending — it will only get worse. Chemistry is not a whim: it is the necessary condition for the project to reflect who you are and not who the designer is.
When we take on a new project, we devote the first weeks exclusively to understanding the client: how they live, what moves them, what they avoid, what their life will look like in five years. Only after that do we start to draw.
Our network of Catalan and Spanish artisans is one of our most important assets; many have worked with us for over a decade, and you can see it in every drawer adjusted to the millimetre and every marble vein chosen at the quarry.
If you are thinking about a project and would like a first, no-commitment conversation to see whether we are the right fit, write to us. We take on only a few projects a year precisely so we can give each one the care it deserves.
Look for a recognisable voice across its portfolio, a clearly explained process, its own network of artisans, transparent fees and the willingness to say no. Those five signals predict the experience far better than awards or follower counts.
A clear scope by phase, the fee model (percentage, per square metre or fixed), what is excluded, the number of design revisions included and how site supervision is billed. Ambiguity at this stage almost always becomes conflict later.
Construction drawings, joinery details and finish schedules are what make a design buildable. A studio that only shows renders is transferring the hardest decisions to the contractor, and the result rarely matches the images.