What makes up the price of a design project: what you're really paying for

What makes up the price of a design project?

If you break a design project down by the nature of the work, four parts emerge — and mostly only one of them ends up in the portfolio.

The analytical part: measurements, photographs, a survey of the building services and the technical brief. The design part: layouts and the concept. The visual part: 3D visualisation or collages. The technical part: technical documentation, specifications, and drawings of junction details and custom pieces.

On a typical project of around 100 m², analysis and issuing the technical documentation take up a significant part of the overall timeline, yet none of it makes it into the presentation. That's why the same words “design project” can mean a different set of drawings at different studios.

The analytical part: what determines everything else

A project starts not with a picture but with facts about the property. Measurements and photographs give the real geometry, which often differs from the developer's plan even in a new-build apartment. In a new-build, the typical picture is a discrepancy of a few centimetres along a wall and corners that aren't quite square; in an apartment with a history of renovations, the configuration itself may differ: a boarded-up niche, a removed partition, boxing that appears on none of the plans. A survey of the building services shows where the risers run, where ventilation can be routed and what power supply is allocated to the apartment. The technical brief translates the client's way of life into spatial requirements: how many people live there, how they cook, where they work, how much storage is needed.

There's nothing to show for this part as a “result” — it's all figures and diagrams. But it determines whether the layout will actually be buildable. A two-centimetre error in the measurements surfaces, at best, at the manufacturer's control measurement, and at worst, once a built-in wardrobe has already been assembled. In that case, the cost of redoing it can end up comparable to the cost of the piece itself.

More detail on this stage is in the article “The Stages of a Design Project”.

The design part: layout and concept

The layout solution — the part of the project where a few days of work decide more than all the remaining weeks. It determines how the space will function every day: where one area ends and the next begins, which way the doors open, whether there's enough storage, whether you'll have to walk through the bedroom to reach the walk-in wardrobe.

The Basic package has one layout, Standard has 2–3 options, Extended has 3–5. The options aren't there to pad out the deliverable — they show a fork in the road. The same floor area can be arranged as an apartment with a large living zone and compact bedrooms, or the other way round — and it's easier to see which one suits you by comparing them than by describing them.

Space planning on its own costs €15/m², with a minimum of €800 per project. It's ordered when you need to assess an apartment's potential before buying it or before starting renovation.

The visual part: what you're paying for in visualisation

Photorealistic 3D visualisation costs €20/m², with a minimum of €400 per room. It seems like the most expensive part of the project because it's the most visible one. In reality, its share of the total cost is smaller than that of the technical documentation.

The scene is built to test the design: a questionable decision should fail on screen, not on site. Here you can see what a plan can't show: how the proportions relate to each other, how the chosen colour behaves under light from that particular window, whether the textures clash, whether there's enough light in the far corner. A revision at this stage costs hours of work. The same revision after the materials have been bought costs a batch of material.

The Basic package uses collages instead of visualisation. It's a deliberate trade-off: faster and cheaper, but with less testing. A collage conveys materials, colour and mood well, but is far less useful for judging volume, proportions and how decisions work together in the space, so some visual decisions have to be made with less advance testing.

The technical part: the largest section

Technical documentation costs €35/m², with a minimum of €3,800 per project. This is what the builders work from: demolition and installation plans, floor and ceiling plans, electrics with socket and switch positions, ventilation, water supply, elevations of every wall, junction details, and specifications for materials and equipment. The per-project minimum applies when documentation is ordered on its own for someone else's concept; within your own project, it's charged at the package rate.

This is usually the largest section of the project by number of sheets. And there's no “roughly” here: a drawing either answers the question, or someone on site will answer it instead.

The client almost never reads the whole technical documentation set cover to cover — and that's fine, it wasn't written for them. But its thickness determines how many times the site calls with the question “how does this go here?”. Every such call is a decision made without you.

The Extended package adds drawings for custom pieces on top of this: built-in furniture, surrounds, non-standard ceiling details. Each piece goes to its own contractor with its own drawing: sometimes that's four different workshops, sometimes one furniture maker for the whole apartment. Without a drawing, the maker will work to their own template, and they always have one.

How these shares are distributed in the cost estimate

The studio prices a design project not by type of work, but by stage — that's how the payment schedule and the sequence of delivery are structured. These are shares of the package's cost, not of labour hours or calendar weeks: stages carry a different weight in the price regardless of how many days they take. For the Extended package, the weights are:

• Technical brief and concept — 15%. Measurements, analysing the brief, the layout and the styling direction.
• Concept design — 40%. Layouts, the interior concept and visualisations of the key rooms.
• Technical documentation — 35%. Drawings for the builders: plans, junction details, electrics and lighting scenarios.
• Schedules and specifications — 10%. Lists of finishing materials, equipment, furniture and the lighting plan.

Concept design carries more weight than the other stages not because it takes the most weeks, but because it combines the design and visual parts: the layout and the 3D visualisation. Technical documentation and schedules together, at 45%, make up the technical part described in the previous section: the set with the largest number of sheets.

The Basic package has three stages, not four: there's no separate schedules stage, as the package doesn't include furnishing and procurement, so its weight is absorbed by technical documentation: 45% instead of 35%. The shares for each package add up to 100%.

What makes a project more labour-intensive

The package's per-metre rate doesn't change because of these factors. But they determine how much depth of work a property actually needs: sometimes the Basic scope is enough, sometimes a deeper package or separate additional sections are needed.

• The number of rooms, not just the floor area. A 100 m² apartment with six rooms is more complex than a 100 m² apartment with three: more layouts, more elevations, more details.
• The number of custom-made pieces. Each bespoke piece needs its own development in drawings and its own approval with the manufacturer.
• The complexity of the detailing. An interior with many mouldings, surrounds, decorative patterns and material transitions needs more development than a space built on simple planes. Interior styles are compared in the guide to interior styles.
• The condition of the property. An apartment with a history of layout changes and hidden utilities needs exploratory openings, requests to the management company and a separate demolition plan — that's both time and sheets that a bare new-build simply doesn't have.
• Engineering complexity. Supply ventilation, humidification, multi-zone air conditioning — areas where interior decisions have to be tied in with specialist engineering sections.

How to compare studios' proposals

Comparing by the final sum is almost always misleading. You need to compare by scope:

1. How many layout options are included.
2. Whether there's photorealistic visualisation, and how many views per room.
3. Whether technical documentation is included — and how extensive: just plans, or also elevations, details and engineering sections.
4. Whether there are schedules for procurement — on top of the drawing specifications.
5. Whether there are sketches and drawings for custom pieces, and to what stage they're developed.
6. Whether design supervision is included, and for how long.

If two proposals match on these six points and the totals still differ, the question really is about price. If they don't match, you're no longer comparing totals but volumes of work. The next question is simple: do you need the missing part? If you do, it will have to be done anyway, either paid for later or left to the crew's discretion.

The full rate structure is in the article “How Much Does an Interior Design Project Cost”. And if you already have another studio's proposal, send it to us with the floor plan: we'll cost out your property and we'll show you what it includes and what it doesn't.