Interior Design for a New Build Home

You have the keys. The house is finished, warranted and almost entirely undecided.

That is the odd thing about a new build. An older house arrives with decisions already made, some of them badly, and the job is editing. A new build arrives with almost nothing decided, which feels like freedom for about a week and then feels like a list.

This is what is on the list, the order to work through it in, and the things that catch people out.

What the house decides, and what is left to you

The fixed parts are the ones that came with the plot. Layout, kitchen, bathrooms, the flooring if it was included, the position of the sockets and the downlights, the radiators and where they sit under windows.

Left to you is everything that makes a room read as finished. Window treatments. Lighting beyond the ceiling grid. Soft surfaces of any kind. Furniture and its scale. Paint, eventually. Shelving, art, rugs, and the storage the plan assumed you would bring.

None of that is an oversight. Blinds, lamps and turf are personal choices, and a housebuilder leaving them out is a housebuilder not choosing your curtains for you. It is worth knowing what is on your side of the line, because the first month is much easier if you are not surprised by it.

Start with the plan, not the paint

The most expensive mistakes in a new build are made in the first fortnight, by people buying things before they have decided where anything goes.

Work out the layout first. Which wall the sofa sits on, which way the room faces, where you will walk through it. A room that is arranged well can be finished cheaply and still read properly. A room arranged badly cannot be rescued by what goes into it, however good the sofa is. We have written about that specific decision in Where the Sofa Goes Decides the Room, and about the broader order of play in Where To Start In A New Build.

Measure before you buy. New build rooms are efficient, which means a sofa that worked in a Victorian front room will not necessarily leave you a walkway here. The number that matters is the wall it sits against and the gap it leaves, not the room's total square metres.

The order things happen in

The sequence matters more than people expect, because several of these decisions depend on each other.

Floors first, if they are not already down. Floor height changes curtain drops and door clearances.

Then measure for window treatments, because they are the one thing in the house that cannot be bought in advance. Everything else is made to a size and then carried in. Curtains and blinds are made to the window after the window exists. How to Choose Curtains and Blinds for a New Home covers that decision properly, and in the meantime, bare windows are the normal state of a new build.

Then lighting, which in most new builds means adding to a grid of downlights on one switch. Table lamps, floor lamps and anything at eye level change a room more than any other single purchase. The One Light in The Middle of The Ceiling is about exactly this.

Then furniture, then the soft layer, then paint. Paint is the last decision, not the first, for reasons that are partly about new plaster and mostly about choosing a colour against things that are actually in the room.

The things that catch people out

The echo. Hard floors, fresh plaster, no curtains, no upholstery. For the first few weeks a new build sounds like a swimming pool, and the fix is soft surfaces rather than anything structural. Everything Echoes And Nothing Is Broken.

The rooms with no obvious purpose. The small one off the landing, the space at the bottom of the stairs, the second reception that is not quite a dining room. The plan named them optimistically and they arrive unassigned. The Rooms That Came Without A Name.

The scale of everything. Furniture bought for the room you imagined rather than the room you have. This is the most common and most expensive error, and it is solved with a tape measure and twenty minutes.

The walls. Plasterboard, not masonry, so hanging anything heavy needs the fixings thinking about rather than a nail and optimism.

How different it feels from the show home. Which is usually about lighting, soft surfaces and furniture scale rather than anything the builder did. Why your new build feels different to the one you viewed.

What an interior designer actually does on a new build

Worth being plain about, because the phrase covers everything from a colour consultation to a full fit-out.

On a whole house it is a space plan first, meaning circulation, sightlines and what goes where, resolved before anything is chosen. Then specification, which is the decisions themselves: finishes, fabrics, lighting, furniture, chosen for how they will look after a year of use rather than how they look on arrival. Then the logistics, which is measurement, procurement, delivery and installation run as one programme rather than eleven separate deliveries you have to be in for.

On a single room it is the same work at a smaller scale, and one room is a real project rather than a favour.

On curtains, blinds and lighting alone it is measuring on site, specifying, ordering and installing. That is the quickest way to change how a house reads, it is the part most often left until last, and for most homes in Bristol and Bath it is a matter of weeks.

Most of our work is show homes, which means we furnish empty new builds to a deadline for a living, several hundred of them. The decisions are the same ones you are making, made faster and more often. That is the whole reason we are any use on a house someone has just bought.

When to do it yourself

Plenty of this does not need a designer. If you have one room to sort, a clear idea, and time to measure properly, do it yourself.

Where it is worth getting help is when the decisions interact. A whole house where the scheme needs to hold from the hallway to the back bedroom. A room that has never worked and you cannot see why. Windows that need doing properly, which is most of them. Those are the jobs where the order of decisions matters and where a wrong one is expensive to undo.

You can see how we approach this as interior designers in Bristol, working on private homes across Bristol, Bath and the towns between.

Send us the room you are stuck on

Design Seven is a Bristol studio. Most of our work is show homes for housebuilders, which means we furnish empty new builds for a living. We take on private projects too, whether that is a single room, a whole house, or curtains, blinds and lighting measured and fitted properly. We are based between Bristol and Bath, and work across the South West and further afield where the project warrants it.

Stand in the doorway of whichever room is bothering you most, take one photo from there, and send it with the development name and which way the room faces. If you know the width of the main wall, include it.

We will tell you what we would resolve first in that room, what can wait until spring, and whether it is a plan problem or a specification problem. Those two need different answers and it is hard to tell them apart from inside the room.

Call 0117 450 6707, email info@designseven.co.uk, or use the form on our contact page.