Luxury interior design when your designer is on the other side of the world

What people mean by luxury interior design

Ask ten owners and you get ten answers. The useful definition is a narrow one. Luxury interior design is design where the plan, the joinery and the finishes are drawn for one house instead of picked from a range. The cabinet maker builds to your drawings. The stone is chosen off the slab, not off a sample chip in a folder. Nothing arrives as a standard size that everyone else also has.

That is also why it survives a border. A studio does not have to live near your house to draw it well. It needs a good survey, a clear brief, and enough contact with your builder that the drawings can actually be built.

Working inside a heritage listing

Old houses come with rules, and the rules change by country. Scotland grades listed buildings A, B or C, and category A is kept for buildings of national or international importance. England and Wales use grades I, two star and II. In each case, work that affects the character of a listed building needs consent from the local authority first, and that consent covers the inside of the house as well as the front of it.

Luxxe delivered the interiors of Duddingston House, the Category A listed Palladian mansion in Edinburgh designed by Sir William Chambers in the 1760s. Chambers is the same architect who designed Somerset House in London.

On a listed house, luxury interior design starts with the drawings much earlier than owners expect. You settle what may be touched before anyone falls for a scheme that cannot be built.

• Which parts are original and which are later additions
• Which walls, cornices, panelling and fireplaces are protected
• Where new wiring and pipework can run without cutting protected fabric
• Whether the work has to be reversible for a future owner
• How long your consent authority usually takes to answer

Seeing the house before you fly

Every luxury interior design project runs through 3D renders and virtual reality walkthroughs before anything is ordered. For a client down the road that is a convenience. For an owner overseas it is the whole basis of the job. A render settles arguments that photographs cannot. You stand in the drawing room at eye height, look back at the door you came through, and see whether the sofa is too big for the room.

Owners change their minds at this point, which is the cheap point to change them. Once joinery is in production, a change costs money and weeks.

• Concept plans and material palettes reviewed on a video call
• 3D renders of each room from the spots you would really stand in
• Virtual reality walkthroughs to test scale and sight lines
• Drafting packages issued straight to your builder or cabinet maker
• Site visits timed for the moments when being in the room changes the answer

Sourcing and shipping between markets

The design is the easy part. Getting the pieces into the house is the part that eats the calendar. Sea freight between Australia and Europe or North America runs in weeks, and air freight costs real money. So the sourcing plan gets split in two. Anything heavy, fragile or slow is bought in your market wherever a good version exists. Anything your market cannot supply is ordered early and put on a ship.

The schedule is then built backwards from the installation date rather than forwards from the order date. That one habit prevents most of the delays that overseas projects are known for.

• Power differs: 230 volts in the UK, Europe and the UAE, 120 volts in North America, and the plugs differ again
• A light fitting bought in one market may not carry certification in another
• Appliance sizes and cabinet modules are not the same on both sides of the Atlantic
• Textiles face different fire rules country by country
• Duty and customs clearance need a named party at the destination

Working with your trades in another time zone

Edinburgh, Dubai and New York each sit a different part of a day away from the studio, and from each other. That gap reads worse than it works: the offset is fixed and predictable rather than shifting week to week, so it only moves when your own clock moves.

In practice the studio works into your morning. Questions asked at the end of your day have answers waiting at the start of the next one, and site meetings are booked inside your working hours rather than ours. The builder and the trades stay local to the house. What comes from the studio is the design, the drawings, the specification and the decisions.

How the engagement is structured and priced

No studio can quote a figure before seeing the house, and any that does is guessing. What you can ask for is the model. Fees for luxury interior design are usually built one of three ways. Some studios charge a fixed fee for each stage. Some charge a percentage of the value of the works. Some bill an hourly rate for smaller pieces of advice. Whole home projects tend to use fixed fees per stage, because that lets you stop at the end of a stage if you want to.

The work runs in four stages. Discover sets the brief, the survey and the constraints. Define fixes the plan and the material palette. Create is the render, drawing and specification stage where you sign off. Complete covers procurement, delivery and installation.

The studio offers interior architecture, full service interiors from concept through to installation, and furniture and styling. An owner abroad can take all three or stop at the drawings and hand them to a local team. Either way, the luxury interior design decisions are made and approved before the first invoice for materials is raised.