GLOBE AND MAIL

Interior design for all: Designers are offering to work virtually for a fraction of their standard fee

Since founding her eponymous interiors studio in Toronto 10 years ago, Stacey Cohen has had to turn down many prospective clients. She designs the kind of luxurious houses that get written about in Oprah’s O magazine, Elle Decor and House & Home. The notoriety has resulted in inquiries from homeowners who want her aesthetic, bold modern lines softened by warm, rich materials, but don’t have the requisite five- or six-figure budgets (a necessity for all the brass, marble and pretty fabrics).

“Luxury design is expensive and it’s not for everyone,” she says. “That said, I don’t think that design should always be a luxury service. My studio has declined projects based on budget. But after thinking about it over the years, I realized I was saying no to people who still needed help, who still deserved the expertise they were looking for.”

Much the way high-end fashion designers diversify their costliest creations with mass-market lines – a cashmere sweater from Ralph Lauren’s Purple Label retails for a mortgage payment, Ralph Lauren’s Polo hoodies not so much – Cohen decided recently to start offering lower-priced services. And because this is 2020, she decided to do so digitally with an online tool called Room Edit. Continue below or view the Full Article

Room Edit works by inviting homeowners to upload photos of their abode, specify room dimensions and take a short quiz that determines their aesthetic sensibilities (by, for example, picking out Pinterest images that resonate). The onboarding process takes less than 15 minutes (I tried, it’s very easy), and is followed by a phone consultation with a member of Room Edit’s design team.

Within two weeks, the homeowner gets three renderings depicting design solutions and a shopping list of potential furniture, art and finishes. That it’s “so quick,” is one of the reasons Toronto model and mommy vlogger Valeria Lipovetsky signed up to be among the first to try Room Edit, using the platform to design her new YouTube studio – a hotel suite-inspired set-up decked in creams, whites and greys.

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