10 red flags to watch for when hiring an interior designer

Hiring an interior designer for your home is one of the biggest financial commitments most homeowners make outside of the property purchase itself. Yet most people spend less time vetting their vendor than they do choosing a refrigerator. Here are ten red flags that should make you pause — or walk away entirely.

The first and most consistent warning sign is an unwillingness to provide a detailed Bill of Quantities. Any designer who quotes you a lump-sum figure without breaking it down by scope, material, and labour is either disorganised or hiding something. A professional BOQ takes time to prepare, and the ones who skip it are often the ones who pad costs later with "variation orders."

The second red flag is demanding more than 20–25% advance before work begins. Legitimate firms need advance payments to procure materials and block their teams. But any designer asking for 40–50% upfront is signalling a cash-flow problem. That money may be used to finish someone else's project — leaving yours half-done when funds run dry.

Watch out for verbal commitments that never make it into the contract. If a designer promises a specific granite brand, a particular hardware grade, or a firm handover date in conversation but the contract says "equivalent" or has no timeline clause, you have no recourse when things go wrong. Everything discussed in meetings must appear in the contract document.

Resistance to a site walkthrough before payment milestones is the fourth warning. A confident designer welcomes inspections — they use the walkthrough as an opportunity to demonstrate progress. One who discourages you from visiting the site, or keeps changing the date of walkthroughs, is almost certainly hiding incomplete or substandard work.

The fifth red flag is high staff turnover during your project. If the project manager who signed your contract leaves and is replaced by someone who doesn't know your brief, you are essentially starting over. Ask upfront: what is your policy if the assigned PM leaves during execution? Get the answer in writing.

Sixth: check whether they are GST-registered. An unregistered vendor cannot issue a legal tax invoice. This matters not just for your accounts but because it tells you how organised and above-board their financial operations are.

The seventh flag is portfolio photos that don't match their team size. A firm with three people claiming to have completed forty luxury projects should raise questions. Ask for references from the last three completed projects and call them yourself — don't just accept names on a list.

Eighth, be wary of any designer who pressures you to decide on materials quickly "because prices are rising" or "because the factory slot closes tomorrow." Artificial urgency is a classic high-pressure sales tactic that benefits the vendor, not you. Good designers give you time to make considered decisions.

Ninth: if a vendor refuses to write down the escalation and dispute process, that is a red flag. You should know before you sign exactly who to contact if work quality is poor, if payments are disputed, or if the timeline slips by more than two weeks. Absence of any escalation mechanism means the vendor expects all disputes to be resolved in their favour.

Finally, the tenth red flag is poor communication quality in the pre-signing phase. If emails go unanswered for days, if the designer confuses your brief with another client's, or if the contract document is riddled with errors — these patterns will not improve once work begins. The selling phase is a vendor's best behaviour. If their best isn't good enough, walk away.