As requested on our last post for an interior designer we can now confirm that we have found a freelancer with suitable experience and qualification. We had some interesting responses with a lot of people calling themselves interior designers when I would actually call them interior stylists.The main difference is that interior design for me is when an individual or a company can take a brief to change a space from being one use to another and produce designs and drawings that show how that interior will go together. This will include plans, sections and detailed orthographic drawings as well as mood boards, visuals and samples.An Interior stylists will generally be able to work up a plan and a mood board / samples but do not have the skill base to do the rest.
There is a place for interior stylists but it is not in my company. Interior design, especially at the commercial end of the scale takes a degree in Interior Architecture / Design and some relevant experience. Unfortunately because of the small nature of our practice it is very hard to be able to give up enough time to be able to train anyone up fresh out of university.
There is a real craft to producing competent technical drawings and although the way they are produced has changed over the years, from hand drawn on tracing paper with Rotoring pens, to the CAD systems of today the end result is pretty similar to when I started drawing in my first practice in 1995.
To make the difference clearer between Interior Architects / Designers and Interior Stylists it might be simpler to call ourselves Interior Architects and distance ourselves but the I feel the public are not very familiar with the term and Architects feel it is treading on their name tag.