What makes a good client – and why it's more important than you think

Renovating your house is one of the biggest financial and emotional commitments most homeowners will ever make. You’re spending serious money, living with uncertainty for months, and making decisions about a space that shapes how you feel every single day.

But here’s something that doesn’t get said enough: the outcome of your project isn’t only down to your designer. It’s also down to you.

Many clients have never worked with an interior designer before, and there’s no reason to know what makes a project run well or badly. That’s partly on us – designers have a responsibility to communicate the design process clearly, explain what’s needed and when, and make sure you never feel lost or unsupported. But this is a reciprocal relationship, and the quality of the collaboration genuinely affects the quality of the result. I’ve seen it too many times to think otherwise.

Good projects start with good relationships

It starts before we’ve even met

The first decision you make – who to work with – is also one of the most important. I’d encourage you to treat those early conversations less like interviews and more like the beginning of a relationship. You’re not just assessing whether someone can do the job. You’re assessing whether you trust and like them.

That matters enormously, because the point will come in every project – usually more than once – where the space is half-built, nothing looks finished yet and you’re second-guessing a decision you made three months ago. In those moments, what you need isn’t certainty; it’s trust in the person guiding you.

I’ll have those moments too, if I’m honest, and then of course it comes together. It always does. I worked with a client recently who told me he'd had to make a conscious decision to trust me, even when he felt uncertain. That kind of self-awareness makes everything easier. 

You're not just looking for a designer who can do the job. You're looking for someone you can trust.

So before you choose, talk to a few people and trust your instincts about the chemistry. Then, once you’ve chosen, let them get on with it.

A practical side note: be prepared to pay for an initial piece of work before committing to a full project. A site visit, a briefing conversation and a fee proposal – that’s typically a day’s work for an experienced designer and it’s worth paying for. Designers who respect their time enough to charge for it tend to be the ones worth working with.

A floorplan and a rough budget - that's really all I need to get started

Bring the basics, not the blueprint

Clients sometimes worry they haven’t done enough preparation – that they don’t have a clear enough vision. Please don’t. A good brief develops through conversation, not before it.

What I do need from a first contact is the practical basics: a rough budget, a sense of timescale, photos of the space, a floor plan if you have one. The nuance – how you live, what matters to you, what you’ve always wanted your home to feel like – that comes out as we talk.

My approach is responsive and collaborative. I’m interested in what your home is telling me, and what you’re telling me, and finding the design that emerges from both. The clients I do my best work with leave some room for that.

The more a client understands the design process, the better the project runs

As a client, one of the most useful things you can do is understand that design projects run on decisions. It’s a deliberately phased approach: concept before detail, layout before finishes. At each stage there’s a point where we sign off and move forward. That sign-off matters. If we’ve agreed a layout and four weeks later you want to revisit it, that isn’t a quick conversation – it can unravel decisions built on top of it, and costs time that wasn’t budgeted for.

I’ve worked with clients who were wonderful people and genuinely poor clients, purely because of indecision. Not because they were being difficult, but because nobody had explained that the moment you agree something, other things follow from it. That’s not their fault – it’s a communication failure, and one I try hard to avoid.

What I ask is this: when a decision is in front of you, make it. If you’re uncertain, say so – “I’m not sure” is a perfectly good answer, and far better than a yes that becomes a no down the line. A good designer will always tell you which decisions can wait and which really can’t. And if you’re really stuck, it comes back down to trusting the designer you’re working with.

The moment before it all comes together - which it always does

Respecting the client's scope

When you pay a significant amount in design fees, it can feel like nothing should be too much trouble and I understand that completely. But those fees represent a defined scope of work and that scope has edges.

I’ll always be transparent about what’s included – that’s my job. But I also appreciate it when clients understand that large project costs don’t mean unlimited availability and scope. The dream is to have a working relationship where I can say, “That’s outside what we agreed, shall we add a half day?” and the answer is, “Yes, of course.” That’s healthy. The alternative – where I absorb it and quietly feel the strain – serves nobody.

So here’s my side of that agreement: I’ll always be clear about what’s included, flag anything that falls outside it before absorbing it, and tell you honestly when something is going to cost more. 

The best spaces are made by more than one pair of hands

Be genuinely interested

The clients I find most satisfying to work with are curious about design and interested in the process. I don’t mean I expect them to be super knowledgeable, but if I send a photo from the site of some tiles that have just arrived, it’s great to get an excited response. Or if I suggest something unexpected, they’re willing to sit with it and, again, trust the process. 

The most important thing is that this doesn’t feel like a transaction. You’re collaborating on something that’s going to change how you feel about your home every day. Getting that right, together, is genuinely one of the best parts of this job.

If you're thinking about starting a project and want to understand more about how we work at Kinder, you can find out more about how I work from my FAQs.