WHY I CHOSE...TO HIRE AN INTERIOR DESIGNER

Hiring a professional to help in an area you're not confident with can be invaluable. Ben Adam-Smith did just that by employing an interior designer to inject character into his and his wife Kay's self-build

Creating an energy-efficient home can lead to a building with a simple shape. I have no real problem with this. In fact, I've grown to love simple architecture I dislike sprawling, fussy homes. Hopefully our selfbuild is not seen as boring, but it responded to its location and site constraints, and used age-old materials: brick, lime render, handmade pin tiles. But what about inside? To begin with, it was simply a box.

In the past, I've visited some eco homes that you could assume had student owners. Old furniture was casually arranged around the place, the walls were plain... something about the space didn't work. Contrast that with either an owner who has interior design zest or someone who has hired an interior designer, and there is a distinctly noticeable difference.

Having owned properties before and played around with interior design, my wife Kay (pictured) and I realised that we are hopeless. We'd often decorate rooms and say things like, "Why doesn't it look as good as Catherine's house?" We'd paint a room a colour and then paint it back to how it was before.

So when we built a new home with a blank canvas before making any interior design choices - we decided to hire a professional.

We took a few different routes to source an interior designer. Recommendation is always a good starting point. I compiled some contacts through my work, but what quickly became apparent is the baffling variation of services.