The floors are down. The kitchen’s in place. And somehow, it doesn’t feel the way you’d imagined. That’s usually the moment people realise what was missing from the start: a plan. When you’re thinking about hiring an interior designer, the question most people ask is whether it’s worth it. A more useful question is what it costs you if you don’t.
Is hiring an interior designer worth it?
Yes. But the answer only becomes concrete once you look at what goes wrong without one. An interior designer is more than a guarantee of a good-looking result. They’re a guarantee of coherence: a plan where every decision supports the next one, rather than limiting it. That’s what stops a series of individual choices from adding up to something that costs you far more, later on, than the advice would have in the first place.
The decision you can’t take back
A renovation or new home comes with dozens of decisions. Most are reversible, but a handful aren’t: where the drainage goes, which way the floor runs, how the kitchen is laid out. These choices are made before a single piece of furniture is in place, and they shape how you’ll live in that space for years.
People rarely make these decisions badly. They make them without the full picture, and that’s the real problem. A contractor asks where you want the light switch. You answer based on how the room looks now, not how you’ll actually move through it once you’re living there. A designer sees that difference. They know the switch belongs on the other side, because the natural route through the room isn’t what you’d assume from an empty floor plan.
In an unfamiliar market, with contractors asking questions on tight timelines, that pressure is even sharper. The most expensive mistake is the one you can’t undo, and it’s almost always made in the first weeks of a project, when everything still feels open and the urgency to decide is at its highest.
What a proper plan actually saves you
The costs of not hiring a designer are rarely the result of one big mistake. More often, it’s a run of smaller ones: the sofa that’s just slightly too large, the lighting that needs replacing six months later, the paint colour that looks completely different in daylight than it did in the showroom. Individually, none of these feel catastrophic. Together, they add up to more than good interior design would have cost.
There’s something else that’s harder to put a price on but just as real: you can’t see the space the way a designer does. In a home you’ve lived in for years, you’re too close to see it clearly. In a new build, you’re making decisions about a space you’ve never actually experienced. A designer bridges both. They spot opportunities that aren’t visible from the inside, simply because you’re too close to see them yourself.
That’s exactly what happened for Cristina and Jan when they bought their new build in Bloemendaal. “With their clever ideas, they turned our house into a home,” says Cristina. “We never could have done that ourselves. We’re still amazed by the result.”
When is hiring an interior designer the right call?
Almost always sooner than you’d think. For a new build, the ideal moment is during the specification stage, before irreversible decisions have been made about pipework, switch positions and floor layouts. For a renovation, it’s when the contractor starts asking questions you can’t answer. Those questions tend to come earlier than expected.
The later you leave it, the less freedom a designer has to work with. They’re working from within the constraints already in place, rather than from a blank canvas. That makes the process more complex. But later doesn’t mean too late. A good designer will still get more out of the space than you’d manage alone, and will at the very least make sure the decisions still ahead aren’t made without a plan.
The same applies when there’s no building work involved at all. Most costly mistakes happen when buying furniture, more often than during the renovation itself. The wrong sofa doesn’t disappear with time. You just learn to work around it, and a bad choice doesn’t improve with familiarity.
The correct approach
An interior project at Choc Studio runs through three phases: design, preparation and realisation, always in that order. That sequence isn’t a preference, it’s a necessity. Start preparing without a design, and you prepare the wrong things. Start furnishing without a plan, and you buy the wrong things. How much of each phase Choc Studio takes on isn’t decided upfront in general terms. We set that per project in a fixed quote after the introductory meeting.
about Choc Studio
At Choc Studio we combine solid expertise with personal attention. Since 2007 we have guided interior projects from concept to completion from our studio in Bennebroek, previously located in Haarlem. We think along, look ahead and make sure our clients end up with an interior that truly fits the way they live.