Most clients who reach out to us at Midtones do so with the same opening line: “We’re thinking about renovating, where do we even start?”The honest answer is that there are five questions worth answering before the first call with any designer — ours or anyone else’s. Spending an evening with these saves weeks of back-and-forth later.
This is not a sales document. The questions below will work just as well if you choose not to hire a designer at all.
01. What is actually wrong with the space as it stands?
The most common mistake is jumping to what I want it to look like before establishing what I want it to do that it isn’t doing now. Walk through your home or workspace at three different times of day — morning, afternoon, evening — with a pen and paper. Write down only the things that frustrate you. Not aesthetics. Function.
The bedroom is too hot by 3 PM. The kids’ study area is in the path of the living room TV. We never use the formal sitting room. The kitchen counter is always cluttered because there’s nowhere to put the toaster.
These observations are worth more to a designer than ten Pinterest boards. They give us a brief.
02. What is your actual budget — not the one you want to tell us?
This is the question most clients dread. We understand why: the moment you name a number, you worry the designer will spend exactly that amount, no matter what the project actually needs.
A good designer will tell you when the brief is too ambitious for the budget — and when it’s modest enough that the project can grow. But we cannot do either if we don’t have the real number. The first conversation should include an honest range, even if it’s wide (“somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five lakhs”). The fee proposal you’ll receive will be scoped to the real number, not the wish.
03. How do you actually live — not how you imagine you live?
If a designer asks you what kind of cuisine you cook, do not say “a bit of everything”. We know what that means. It means South Indian breakfast, North Indian dinners, weekend experiments, and a Sunday morning when nothing happens at all. Tell us the specifics. The kitchen we’d design for someone who makes dosas three times a week is genuinely different from the kitchen we’d design for someone who orders out four nights a week.
The same goes for the living room (do you actually entertain, or is the formal sofa untouched?), the study (do you work from home, and if so, how many hours a day?), and the bedrooms (is the primary bedroom a sanctuary or a thoroughfare?).
04. What are you willing to keep?
Most renovations are demolitions waiting to happen. The designer arrives, the existing kitchen is gutted, the existing wardrobes are torn out, the floor is removed, everything starts at zero. This is almost never necessary.
Before the first conversation, identify three to five things you are explicitly willing to keep — the teak ceiling beam, the brass switchplates from the 1990s build, the floor tiles in the entryway, the marble vanity in the second bathroom. Some of these will end up replaced anyway. But the act of identifying them tells your designer what you value, which in turn shapes everything else.
05. What is the timeline that actually matters?
There is a difference between a hard deadline (we are moving in by October because school starts) and a wished-for deadline (we’d like it done by Diwali). A good designer will work backwards from a hard deadline and forwards from a wished-for one. Both are workable. But they produce different briefs, different schedules, different costs.
If you have no real deadline, say so. The best residential projects are usually the ones where the client is not rushing — the design holds longer because the decisions were made calmly.
A small closing note
None of this requires a designer to figure out. You can answer all five questions on your own, write them down on one sheet of paper, and either hand it to a designer or use it to think about the project yourself. We have given the same five questions to clients who eventually chose not to hire us — and we have not regretted doing so.
The clients who arrive at the first conversation with these answers ready end up with better homes. That is true regardless of who designs them.
If you’d like to talk through your project after working through these, the studio is open. You can begin a conversation here.