What an interior design project really costs
We break the price down — what you are paying for, why a rate per square metre tells you little, and when the design pays for itself.
The question about price usually comes in the first minute of the conversation. It is a good question — the answer it normally gets is the poor part. "So many złoty per square metre" sounds precise and means almost nothing until you know what is included.
A rate per metre is not a price
Two quotes with the same rate can differ twofold in what you actually receive. One covers a concept and visualisations. The other adds full construction documentation, drawings for every service, joinery made to measure, and supervision on site.
The difference is not cosmetic. A design without construction documentation is a set of attractive images that the contractors still have to improvise around — and every improvisation costs.
That is why we quote in floor-area brackets and say plainly what each option contains. The larger the area, the lower the rate per metre: the work does not grow in proportion to the number of square metres.
Three things you pay for
Design time. The layout does not come from a catalogue. It comes from a long conversation about what an ordinary day looks like for you — with specific appliance models and the actual dimensions of your mattress, not general assumptions.
Documentation. This is the part no visualisation shows and the part that takes the most hours. Drawings for electrics and Smart Home, plumbing, ventilation and air conditioning. Every made-to-measure element drawn to the millimetre — including the fixing of a balustrade and the junction where stone meets brass.
Supervision. Billed separately, as a monthly retainer. We are on site once a week, order materials six to twelve months ahead, and plan the works two months in advance.
When the design pays for itself
On three things: no reworking, better prices on materials, and avoiding the mistakes that cost most — those in the services and in the layout.
Moving a wall on a drawing takes fifteen minutes. Moving it on site costs several thousand złoty and two weeks. A badly routed service that has to be chased out of a wall costs enough to make the whole difference between a cheap design and a good one irrelevant.
There is also something that never appears in a cost estimate: we specify only materials and furniture that are genuinely available, and we check dimensions and prices at the concept stage. The design does not drift away from reality halfway through the build.
What to ask when comparing quotes
Three questions separate offers more sharply than the rate per metre:
- Does the price include construction documentation, or does it stop at visualisations?
- How many revisions of the concept are included?
- What happens if the build runs six months late — is supervision then charged extra?
Why we do not quote over the phone
Because we would not know what we were quoting for. A hundred and twenty square metres in a pre-war building with crooked walls and a hundred and twenty in a new development are two different jobs at the same floor area.
We quote after a conversation. The first one is free and commits you to nothing.