Interior Scheme Review Preparation Checklist

Read your written brief again shortly before the presentation, since otherwise you will judge the scheme against how you feel that morning rather than what you asked for.

A brief is written carefully and forgotten quickly, and a designer has been working to it in the meantime.

Mark the parts of the brief you no longer stand behind and say so at the start, rather than letting the designer defend something you have quietly abandoned.

A great deal of review time is spent arguing about requirements the owner has already dropped without saying so.

Bring the list of constraints you recorded earlier, including fixed elements and things that cannot move, and keep it in front of you during the review.

Constraints are easy to forget when looking at something attractive, and easy to check against when written down.

Note which requirements you stated as essential and which as preferences, because a scheme often satisfies one at the expense of the other.

If the distinction was never recorded, the designer has had to guess, and now is the moment to say whether they guessed right.

Agree with the rest of the household, before the meeting, which few things matter most, so the review does not turn into a negotiation between you.

A designer cannot resolve a disagreement inside a household, and watching one is not a good use of the meeting.

Decide in advance which decisions you intend to keep for yourself, since a scheme review is where that quietly stops being possible.

Once a scheme is coherent, taking one decision back out of it is harder than reserving it beforehand.

Ask, element by element, which are actual proposals and which are placeholders standing in for a decision that has not been taken yet.

Commenting hard on a placeholder wastes the review, and accepting one as settled causes trouble later.

Ask whether the images were drawn from the real room dimensions or assembled to convey a mood, since the two invite completely different comments.

A mood image cannot be tested for proportion, and testing it anyway leads everyone somewhere unhelpful.

Ask whether the colours on a screen or in print can be relied on, and treat any colour reaction taken from an image as provisional.

Screens and printing shift colour considerably, and colour rejected from an image is often rejected wrongly.

Judge colour and finish from physical material seen in the room itself, and confirm final appearance with the supplier of that material.

Ask which furniture shown is being proposed, which is already yours, and which is only there to convey scale.

Owners regularly fall for a piece of furniture that was never part of the proposal at all.

Ask what has deliberately not been shown yet, because the missing parts of a scheme are usually where the difficulties are sitting.

Presentations understandably lead with the resolved areas, and the unresolved ones need naming.

Ask which parts of the scheme depend on something being confirmed at the property before they can be relied on at all.

Some proposals are conditional, and knowing which ones prevents an early decision built on sand.

Anything conditional on the property itself must be confirmed by qualified people on site rather than resolved in a meeting.

Walk a normal day through the proposed layout out loud, from waking to the last person going to bed, and note where the scheme stops describing your household.

Saying it aloud exposes assumptions that reading a plan silently never does.

Test the arrival routine specifically, since coats, bags, shoes, post and deliveries defeat more interiors than any other daily habit.

The entrance is where a considered scheme most often collapses back into clutter.

Check where each person would sit to do the thing they actually do in that room, and whether light, a surface and a power point are within reach.

Seating positions that lack any of the three end up abandoned in favour of somewhere else.

Ask what happens when the room holds more people than usual, since occasional use often drives furniture choices that sit unused the rest of the time.

It is worth being explicit about how much of the room is being given to the exceptional case.

Look at where a door swings, where a drawer needs clearance in front of it, and where two people would pass each other in the proposed arrangement.

These are checkable on a plan and are among the things most regretted afterwards.

Note anything in the scheme that assumes a habit the household does not have, and say so plainly rather than quietly agreeing to reform.

Schemes built on intended behaviour rather than actual behaviour tend to disappoint very quickly.

Ask to see physical samples of every material covering a large area, and hold each one in the orientation it will actually occupy.

A material laid flat and the same material standing vertically can read as two different things.

Take samples into the room and look at them in daylight and again after dark, since interiors are chosen by day and lived in by evening.

Artificial light in the room, not in the showroom, is what most surfaces will be seen under.

Look at samples in something like the proportions they will appear in rather than as equal squares, since a board makes every material look equally important.

The material covering the most area is the one that will set the room, whatever the board suggests.

Check every sample against the things you are keeping, including floors, joinery, stone and anything fixed that is not being changed.

Schemes are usually designed against what is proposed and checked too late against what remains.

Ask whether a sample represents the finished appearance or whether something further is needed to reach it.

Sealed, oiled and polished versions of the same material differ enough to change a decision.

What a material looks like once finished should be confirmed with its supplier rather than judged from an untreated sample.

Note which materials you could not judge from a small sample, and ask what larger piece could be seen before anything is committed.

Patterned and heavily figured materials are the ones a small sample most misrepresents.

Look for the parts of the property you know are difficult and check whether the scheme addresses them or simply avoids drawing them.

An area shown from one angle only is usually the area nobody has solved yet.

Check what is proposed where the new work meets an area that is not changing, since that edge is where schemes most often fail.

The transition between new and existing gets designed last and noticed first.

Ask what the proposal assumes about level, flatness or squareness in an older property, and what happens if the property does not oblige.

Fitted work has to absorb irregularity somewhere, and it is better to know where in advance.

What the property actually offers must be established by measurement and qualified assessment on site rather than assumed from a drawing.

Look for services you know exist, including pipework, meters, controls, vents and stopcocks, and ask where each one appears in the proposal.

Services rarely appear on a presentation image, and they will certainly appear in the room.

Where services can and cannot be moved is a matter for the relevant qualified trade, confirmed at the property.

Ask what the scheme assumes about storage that existed in the room before, since storage removed by a scheme rarely reappears anywhere else by itself.

This is the most common source of regret after an otherwise successful redesign.

Check whether anything in the scheme depends on work by a trade nobody has yet spoken to, and ask when that conversation is expected to happen.

A proposal resting on an unasked question is a decision waiting to be reopened.

Work implied by a scheme must be assessed by the relevant qualified trade before it is treated as settled.

Describe what a proposal does rather than whether you like it, since a designer can respond to it feels dark but not to it is wrong.

Naming the effect gives the designer something to work with instead of something to argue against.

Separate a reaction to colour from a reaction to shape, proportion or the amount of a material, because these get confused constantly in a review.

Many rejected colours were really a reaction to how much of the colour was shown.

Say which parts you want kept, not only the parts you want changed, or a revision may lose something you never thought to defend.

Revisions move more than the thing complained about, and what stays has to be stated.

Give feedback once as a household rather than in separate messages arriving at different points and contradicting each other.

Contradictory comments produce a compromise nobody in the household actually wanted.

Ask what the consequences of a requested change would be elsewhere in the scheme, before asking for the change to be made.

Some changes are local and some unpick the whole arrangement, and only the designer knows which.

Rather than asking for further options endlessly, say what a further option would need to answer for it to be useful.

Options requested without a question attached tend to arrive without an answer attached.

Write down at the end of the review which elements are settled, which remain provisional and which have been rejected outright.

Without these three categories, everything drifts towards being remembered as agreed.

Record what you were told about anything still depending on somebody else confirming it, including who is expected to confirm it.

Conditional answers are the ones most often remembered as unconditional.

Anything conditional on a qualified opinion stays conditional until that professional has given it at the property.

Note which decisions have a point after which changing them causes real disruption, and ask the designer to name those explicitly.

Owners rarely know which decisions are quietly closing, and designers rarely volunteer it unasked.

Send your record back to the designer and ask whether it matches theirs, since two people always leave a meeting with two different versions.

A mismatch is easy to resolve while the meeting is fresh and painful to discover much later on.

Keep every version of the scheme rather than only the latest, since it is often an earlier version that answers a question raised much later.

Superseded material is the only record of why something was changed.

Note the questions raised in the review that nobody could answer, and agree who is going to find out.

An unanswered question with no owner simply reappears at a worse moment.