Great interior design starts with finding a great home or apartment to work with. Here's how to do that...

2011-10-24T15:21:00.000-07:00

Over the years we've been asked constantly about the secrets to great interior design for the homes people buy or the apartments they rent in cities around the world. And the truth is there are several factors that determine whether your living space, whether it's in New York city, Brooklyn, Paris, or London, will be comfortable and satisfying to you.

More than anything we encourage people to understand that design is a process that is unique to each individual. Why you choose to buy the home you buy, or rent the apartment you rent, is completely personal and driven by a myriad of different criteria. The design process is no different.

Each interior design exercise is unique to a space, a client, a budget, a city, a neighborhood, and more. Frankly, the designer is more like a facilitator or, in some cases, a therapist, whose job is to recognize all of the above factors, and extract the client's deepest desires from within to provide a solution that simply works in light of the various foregoing considerations.

And trust us when we say this isn't always easy...

For many clients, there isn't necessarily a vocabulary at the outset of a design process with which the design vision, be it for a home, apartment, condo, co-op or townhouse, can be expressed. If we as designers do our jobs properly, we help clients figure all of this out. And we attempt to do so in a way that is respectful of their budget and timing needs.

Consider this: Often clients have spent a lot of time and money looking for homes to buy or apartments to rent well before they've contacted a designer. Thus, the design process should ideally be sensitive to these realities, rather than being an additional drain after a person has already spent so much time and energy searching for a place to live.

All which takes us to the point of this post: There is one crucial aspect of the interior design process that is not not so subjective, and which we encourage everyone to be mindful of. It is arguably one of the most important features of the design process because it is one which interior designers seldom have any control over whatsoever: the very process of searching for - and choosing - a home to buy or an apartment to rent.

While a talented interior designer should be able to transform any space into her client's vision, the unvarnished truth is that the space being designed can often impact the end product/experience as much or more than all of the actual time, money and effort that ultimately gets sunk into designing that space.

Plus, it must be noted that the process of searching for a home or apartment often gets done well before the designer is brought on board. This is a huge bane to designers; were they only able to consult on the initial househunt, they might be able to provide a better and perhaps less expensive interior design solution later on. Not always, but sometimes.

In light of this, we wanted to dedicate this blogpost NOT to the specifics of design per se, something we've blogged about at length elsewhere, but to the one major aspect of the design experience that goes unspoken all too often: the process of searching for a home, condo, or co-op to buy or finding an apartment to rent.

Of course, the act of finding and investing in real estate is not our specialty by any stretch, and we do not pretend to be experts in this field. However, we do know a thing or two about finding great spaces in great neighborhoods, and it is worth mentioning that there are a few tools that will help you with your home or apartment search, so that you can ultimately choose the best space to buy, move into, design and live in.

It may be worth mentioning first that there are some not-so-good websites in the online real estate space, and that in our initial search, we were rather disappointed by the poor state of union in terms of quality and user experience for many of the well known real estate websites (eg Trulia, Zillow and others). These sites are often complicated, clunky, difficult to use, and feel like they came from a previous era on the web.

This is why when we came across a very new, very nascent site called Blockhawk (www.blockhawk.com), we were impressed to find that someone was starting to take a cleaner, more simplified approach to designing a website for people searching for homes to buy and apartments to rent.

In reviewing this site, we got a hold of the folks involved with Blockhawk and learned a little about their ambitions. Now, before anything, a few disclaimers: the site is currently limited to providing real estate data (including property records, photos, maps, streetview details and more) for just about every residential address and some commercial addresses in the New York real estate market. This includes addresses for homes and buildings in New York City and Brooklyn.

One of the things we really liked, for example, is that the site provides a healthy number of photos and descriptive information about living in just about any neighborhood community in New York (for example, find a wealth of information about real estate in TriBeCa or about real estate in Battery Park here).

Now, as we began to really go through this website, we did find ourselves wanting for more real estate information than we found for certain neighborhoods, such as more new home listings, information for additional cities or regions, superior search and more. However, the Blockhawk team has informed us that they will be rolling out all kinds of useful real estate features, like new listings for sale, for rent, and much more very soon. We were excited to see some pre-launch features that will be rolling out soon and given how user friendly we've found their product to be thsu far date, we're confident that these features will be packaged in a nice, user friendly way when they eventually land. We're told this will happen in the next few weeks.

For us, the discovery of Blockhawk.com has kicked off an interest in finding resources that could be useful to consumers who are looking to buy or rent homes. If we can help them do this more efficiently and effectively, it will make our jobs as designers significantly simpler and more straightforward. It'll also be more fun, since a happier client, better budget, and nicer space can all make our days go by faster and more stress free :)

Thus, we'd encourage you to use tools like Blockhawk (and even though we don't love the user experience, sites like Trulia, Zillow and others) to make the most informed buying decisions you can when choosing a home to live in or an apartment to rent. This is your duty, and if you can find a solid space, we in the design community will work with you to make it ideal for your living needs.

As we come across more tools like Blockhawk et al, you can be sure we'll bring them to your attention and provide similar reviews to that herein. Happy house hunting and good luck with all of your home and apartment design activities!

Firefly Hill Designs

Great interior design starts with finding a great home or apartment to work with. Here's how to do that...