The first meeting with an interior designer decides more than most people realise. It is where the brief is set, where expectations are either aligned or quietly diverge, and where you learn whether this is a practice you want in your house for the next year.
Here is what a good first meeting with an interior designer should cover — what to bring, what to ask, and what the answers tell you.
What to bring
You do not need to prepare a presentation. Five things genuinely help:
- The floor plan, and the structural drawing if you have it. This determines what is possible and saves a whole round of speculation
- Photographs of the property as it is now, including the unglamorous bits — the utility, the electrical board, any damp
- A rough budget range you are comfortable committing. Not a precise figure, a range
- Your timeline, particularly any fixed date — a wedding, a move, a lease ending
- Images you have saved, even if you cannot articulate what connects them. Working that out is a useful first conversation
On budget: being open about it is not a weakness and it will not inflate the quote. It is what allows a practice to tell you honestly whether they can do what you want. A firm quoting without knowing your range is guessing, and the gap surfaces later.
What a good designer will ask you
This is the real signal. A first meeting that is mostly them presenting usually produces a house that looks like their last one. A good one is mostly them asking:
- Who lives here, and who will in five years?
- Who cooks, how often, and what kind of cooking?
- Where does everyone actually sit in the evening?
- How many people eat together on a normal weekday, and at a festival?
- Do you entertain formally, or is that aspirational?
- What do you own that has to be accommodated — furniture, art, anything inherited?
- What irritates you about the home now?
- What did you like and dislike about any previous renovation?
- Does anyone in the household have mobility needs, now or likely?
- Do you follow Vastu, and how strictly?
Those questions produce a house that works. Questions about your preferred style produce a house that photographs.
What you should ask them
- Who will actually run my project day to day? Get a name, and ask how many other projects that person is carrying
- What drawings will I receive? The most revealing question of all. Ceiling plans, electrical layouts with switching, joinery sections with internals, specification schedule — or renders and a material board?
- What is excluded from the fee?
- How do you charge, and what triggers each payment?
- Is site supervision included, and how often?
- How are changes priced and approved once work starts?
- Can I visit a built project, and speak to a client whose work finished two years ago?
- What usually causes delay on projects like mine?
What the answers tell you
Specificity over reassurance. “It depends on the project” is a non-answer. “It depends — for a home your size, typically this, and here is what would push it higher” is a real one.
Willingness to disagree with you. If you describe something that will not work and they simply agree, that is not good service. A designer who says “that will look wonderful and here is what it will cost you in practice” is worth considerably more.
Honesty about the budget. The most useful thing anyone can tell you early is what your budget cannot buy.
A straight answer about delay. Any practice claiming nothing ever gets delayed is either inexperienced or not being straight.
What should not happen at a first meeting
- A quote. Nobody can price a home responsibly before seeing it properly and agreeing a scope. A number offered in the first meeting is a hook, not a quote
- Pressure to sign, or a discount that expires
- A design. Any practice presenting a scheme for your home before understanding how you live is showing you their template
- A request for a large advance before any scope is written
- Free detailed design as a pitch. Firms that give work away before appointment have to recover it somewhere, and usually do
What should happen afterwards
Within a week or so you should receive a written proposal setting out scope, deliverables, fee structure, payment stages, programme and exclusions. That document is what you compare between practices — not the conversation.
If what arrives is a single-page fee note with no scope, that is informative in itself.
Meet three
One gives you no comparison. Five wastes everyone’s time. Three is enough to see the difference in how they think, and the differences become obvious fast once you have asked all of them the same questions.
And weigh fit alongside fee. These people will be in your house making decisions with you for the better part of a year. Whether they listen, and whether they tell you when something will not work, matters more than a ten per cent difference in cost.
If you would like to meet us
Pochē Aesthetics — also written Poche Aesthetics — is an architecture and interior design practice in Greater Kailash, New Delhi, founded and led by architect Niyati Satsangi. First conversations are free and carry no obligation, and we will tell you honestly if we are not the right practice for your project.
Tell us about your home. See also how a commission runs with us, stage by stage, ten questions worth asking any firm, and how to find a designer in Delhi.
About Pochē Aesthetics
Pochē Aesthetics — also written Poche Aesthetics — is a luxury residential architecture and interior design practice based in Greater Kailash, New Delhi, founded and led by architect Niyati Satsangi. Over more than twelve years the practice has designed private homes — farmhouses, villas, builder floors and apartments — across Delhi NCR and India, handling architecture, interiors, materials, lighting and styling as one connected commission, alongside select restaurant and commercial work. More about the practice.