I am an interior designer, on a mission to help designers like you clearly communicate their designs through detail. I hope to give you useful tools & information you can use in order to provide the highest quality interior design details possible for your projects and save you, your client, the GC and all subcontractors time & money building your project.

Do any of you designers out there remember the Time Savers Standards book? Yep, that big silver expensive reference book for interior designers, with all kinds of information and details that were pretty much non-legible. But that didn’t keep you from finding a magnifying glass or squinting your eyes in desperation of hopefully finding the answers to drawing the perfect detail or just any detail for that matter. I thought I had figured it out and even though my details were no where close to right nobody seemed to ever say anything or correct me.

I must laugh when I look back at these drawings as I had little to no idea how to actually build anything I had imagined in my head or even 3d modeled. My models were just beautiful looking blocks with no concept of what material would be used or how it would be put together.

Does any of this sound or feel familiar?

These days we have so many wonderful tools and resources for modeling our ideas and even pulling in pre made models into our drawings to make everything easier. However, even with all these tools I am not convinced they are teaching us how to communicate our designs into the proper level of detail.

When I began my career in Hospitality Design, I was so confident in my abilities to use AutoCAD because I was one of the first groups of students at my school to graduate with any experience with this program. I soon realized that, just because I know how to use CAD doesn't mean I know how to draw proper details, however, I am sure nobody at my office knew. We got along fine somehow, not providing any details at all and relying on plans and elevations. I never received any feedback or criticism from anybody about the lack of detail in our drawings, but I am sure now, that the GC probably grumbled a little bit.

As I continued my career working more specifically on restaurants and foodservice design industry I found myself in a position where the interior design work and the drafting/detail work (done by an Architect) were split up into separate positions. This set up required that all of my designs needed to be communicated to the drafters through sketches and design boards, verbal conversations, or internal emails. I would review the drawings, but when I think back on these drawings now, I realize that I have no idea whether the information I handed over to the drafter/architect was complete. How would they know if my design was missing information and or properly coordinated. To be honest I received many many many emails and RFI’s from the GCs on projects with questions, I felt good about my ability to communicate and respond to their questions quickly but I also remember thinking that the GC should be able to figure this out, isn’t this all just standard stuff? I don’t have time to explain this to everyone? This was quite naïve of me at the time, but I was very frustrated about all the overtime I used to make sure we didn’t hold up the project. I remember cringing every time I filled out my time card as I knew we were over budget every time and all the extra time I spent at the end of a project was extremely stressful for the owner as it sucked all our profits from the job. Now I look back and realize that there was poor communication and that if we had clearly communicated all the necessary information in our details, we would have been able to save the company lots of time & money.

As I moved on, and began work in Los Angeles I found myself working on some of the most exciting projects, and back in an environment where I was responsible for all aspects of a project. This meant all the designers were responsible for the design, drafting and coordination of the project as a whole.

This is where I really learned what an interior designer's responsibilities are for a project and what I called at the time felt like designer boot camp. I learned so much in such a short amount of time, and the mentorship we received was unparalleled to any I had received previously.

This was exciting and scary at the same time, immediately starting to design custom millwork pieces and then asked to detail it. What? thinking I don’t know how to do this. However, my mentors and owners of the company pushed me, supported me and gave me the proper resources to complete the project. This was the beginning of my quest to push myself to provide the best possible package of interior design construction documents possible. It was so empowering to know how to do this and feel confident of my work at the same time.

Although I am quite proud of the work done there I look back now with all my experience and realize how many things I didn’t know. I learned so much from my time here, providing me with the building blocks for helping other designers in the future.

After Graduate school I went on to work for a millwork manufacturing company who specialized in Hospitality projects. The owner of the company really took a risk for hiring me, I had and still have so much to learn when it comes to wood manufacturing and metal fabrication. I started with one project and overtime worked on a handful of projects designed and developed by designers and architects across the United States and England. Through this process I realized how different each package of drawings and details were and how drawing standards varied across firms. I would say there are good and bad drawings, but really I saw no gold standard. My job then became deciphering the intent of the design and then redrawing everything, not even to the level of engineering. I would go through the drawings, verify scope based on the bid, fill in all the missing or incorrect information and then send out lots of requests for information RFI’s to verify.

I have learned you don’t need to know how each detail works, but it does take some flexibility, problem solving skills, and proper communication to get it built the way you imagine.