Hard Times, Desperate Measurements

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Visual artist Sharon Smith-Jones was accustomed to choosing bright colors to bring life to her abstract paintings and colorful mosaic glass sculptures and drawings she created. But when it came to painting her newly remodeled ultra modern kitchen in her 1940s Tudor style home in North Portal Estates in Northwest, Washington, DC, she was stumped about color. So she painted a bunch of patches of various gold and yellow colors on the kitchen wall and called up an interior designer, Sherry B. Ways, to come take a look and help her decide what worked best.

She called up Ways again a few weeks later after browsing the Chevy Chase mall and finding a sectional sofa in Crate and Barrel that she thought would work well in her family room, but needed a second opinion. They hopped in her black Lexus together and traipsed to the store. Ways advised her that the sectional sofa wouldn’t work because the room was oddly shaped and it would jut out too far. She ended up purchasing a neutral colored sofa and lounge chair that worked perfectly.

Jones isn’t a celebrity with a slew of personal assistants at her disposal. She is a participant in a growing trend where interior designers, once only associates of the elite, are courting customers with diverse needs and tighter budgets. The seesawing housing market has motivated many designers to diversify their clientele and their methods of serving them—designing rooms instead of entire homes, working via the Internet rather than person to person, coaching rather than doing full scale designs, offering trunk shows, and giving workshops helping clients to find the “designer within.”

Ways, a principal designer, has three components to her business, Design Scheme Interiors, LLC, that cater to reduced priced packages—decorator coaching, workshops for do-it-yourselfers, and trunk shows. What she did with Jones is what she calls decorator coaching. For a flat rate she will come to see the space of her client, give them suggestions on places to shop, sizes and styles of furniture, and request that they put together a design file. They can call on her anytime during the shopping and designing process for advice.

“It’s a program to assist the do-it-yourself type,” says Ways who says this portion of her business has picked up since the housing crisis. “Like you’re watching HGTV and getting advice from the designers, but you actually have a live designer as your sounding board. I believe in empowering people because my philosophy is that everyone is a designer, everyone is a decorator.”

A generous business model, but Ways insists that she hasn’t lost clients by teaching them how to fish. She has broadened her base by gaining clients that have lower budgets while still keeping her core clientele. She and her partner, Susan Schemms, who has a background in commercial design, started Design Scheme Interiors five years ago with these innovative concepts already in place.

In an industry where personalities and idiosyncrasies can give an intimate window into a client’s style, it’s often beneficial for designers to meet their clients in person. But some designers have taken a leap and gone so far as to work with clients via the Internet, email, and phone exclusively. And they say it has brought a boon to their business, rather than hurting it, expanding their clientele to different geographic areas.

In 1987, designer Cathleen Williams worked at an architectural firm in Dupont Circle as a junior interior designer after graduating summa cum laude from Howard University with a degree in interior design and a minor in architecture. She designed embassies and office spaces, but soon grew stifled by the demands of corporate companies. So she went to work with a Herman Miller dealership, the manufacturer of the iconic designer of Eames chair fame. There she worked as a project manager designing office spaces, before she ended up at Mobili, a high end European furniture showroom in the District, working as interior designer. Here, she started doing model homes on the side, and found her creative niche.

She went to work as a senior designer for Interior Concepts, a firm that worked on model homes. But after six years, with the housing boom, she was so busy that she began to get burned out. Builders were building like crazy.

“I got to the point where I was clenching my jaw at night because of the stress level,” says Williams. “I decided I can’t do this anymore.”

She and three other employees all quit at different times and formed a partnership to create Dream House Studios, a company that designed model homes all around the DC metropolitan area. She worked with them for two years before the housing market crash made her realize that she had to diversify her business. “This is the first time we have ever seen a market where the builders are not building.”

She struck out on her own with her company CW Designs, and found a way to keep her high end clients, who bring in six-figure projects, while creating unique affordable concepts, like “House Candy,” a do-it-yourself interior design package. With House Candy, for $500-$1500, a customer can work with her via phone and email to design a room or multiple rooms. They receive a “House Candy,” box that includes a concept board, scaled furniture plan, fabric and paint samples, furniture selections, accessory selections, and a detailed shopping list of resources.

Janet Shepherd, a native Marylander who recently moved to New York, is a customer that has never met Williams in person. When she bought a condo in New York, she didn’t want to make the same designing mistakes she made when she decorated her condo in Maryland by herself. But she couldn’t afford a full-scale interior designer to come in and design it for her and she didn’t want to try it herself and risk buying the wrong pieces or wasting money on the wrong items. She loved entertaining and wanted to make her home peaceful and inviting.

Looking for direction she found Williams through a referral from an interior design website and contacted her. But when Williams told her that what she was looking for would complement the House Candy concept, she was turned off.

“I felt like she needed to be there and get a sense of the space and I didn’t feel like doing it online would allow for that to happen,” remembers Shepherd. But Shepherd says she searched for other designers and couldn’t find anyone else that fit her sense of style, so she decided, “I’ll take her however I can get her.” She took measurements of the space, sent Williams pictures, filled out questionnaires about her hobbies and personality, checked her references, and sent her $750 in the mail to get started.

They corresponded for weeks via email and phone where Williams found out what her favorite stores were, what she was looking to do with the room, and her favorite colors, among other things. Shepherd sent her swatches of fabrics for her pillows and a floor plan. Williams sent her a grand box that awaited her at her condo in the Soundview area of the South Bronx.

Inside the box, Shepherd dug through piles of stuffing before she came upon a brown briefcase with a logo of a pink and brown chair and the words, “House Candy,” written on the top. Inside was a ring with various pillow fabric covers, another with curtain colors. There was another ring with furniture options, measurements, prices, and contact information to purchase them.

And there was an inspiration concept board and a detailed rendering of her living room, exactly how it looked before, except with new furniture, fabrics, newly painted walls, and accessories. Williams had never seen the space before, nor met Shepherd, but there was Shepherd’s new room, fully decorated.

“There’s only so much you can do online,” admits Williams who says she garners the trust of her clients with her reputation and style and by being unpretentious and a good listener. “I don’t know if you could do a whole house. You can really only do one room at a time.”

Nika Stewart, director of Decorators Alliance of North America, is helping designers to realize the potential available in creating different methods of reaching out to clients and diversifying their client base during this housing crisis.

As a designer and a new mom, she found herself running to customers houses, trying to drop off her baby, then traveling one hour in one direction, only to have to turn around again and pick up her daughter, breastfeed, and head out again to another client’s house. This routine had her crying everyday. She knew something had to change.

She started teaching other designers how to do online and virtual designs and make more money. She still keeps her design business, but now she does the majority of it online. Since she changed her business, she can work while on vacation or in Starbucks via tele-seminars and she has boosted her revenues to six figures.

“If you work one-on-one, you can only work within your driving distance,” says Stewart who sees this as a temporary solution while the housing market is in a crunch. “Now I have clients all over the country and in a few other countries.”

“There was a time when you could take a client to a showroom or show them something out of a catalogue, but now they can research online, there’s a lot of direct buying,” says Dr. Patricia Young, who coordinates the interior design program at Howard University. “They are savvy buyers. They know what they want. Diversifying is no threat to the industry, because at some point, you are going to need a professional to pull it together.”

With a little help from a professional, Jones, at North Portal Estates, has pulled it all together. The walls of her kitchen are a soothing palomino color. She used her Moroccan batiks with jewel tones as window shades giving the room an earthy, organic look. A friend described it as a “happy kitchen.” It’s been a successful artistic collaboration.

“She was able to help me incorporate new pieces into what I already had,” says Jones. “She told me, ‘I like what you’ve done with the space, now let’s work on some areas where you need help.’”

This story is filed under: Lifestyle

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