Trust the Process: Why Good Design Can't Be Rushed

I tell people frequently, I solve problems. That’s what I do. I do it through the application of interior design, but I’m a problem solver. So in order to establish a good plan, I have to understand what’s the problem and what’s the goal. And that is the whole premise. That is the foundation for all of the decisions throughout. Making it pretty is the easy part. Really making it functional, establishing the right form and making sure it’s actually a livable space is what takes so much intentionality down to every little finite detail. Welcome to Return on Design, the podcast where beauty meets strategy and interiors become assets that perform. I’m your host, Rachel Niederhofer, designer, investor, and builder of high impact spaces that deliver real results. Alongside my husband, I run both a design firm and a real estate investment company where I live at the intersection of creativity and ROI every day. Each week, I’ll be unpacking what most people overlook, how strategic design decisions can grow your investment, elevate your lifestyle, and unlock the full potential of your property. You’ll get real tools, proven strategies, and unfiltered conversations with industry experts who are doing it right. So if you’re ready to invest with purpose and leverage design as a powerful tool, this podcast is for you. Rome wasn’t built in a day and a good design is not going to be done overnight either. So you have to trust the process.

Whether you’re an investor or a home owner working with a designer, there’s a process to go through with all of this from laying out the foundation to picking the materials to implementing the design. There is a process.

Today, we’re going to be sharing with you how trusting the process will save you heartache in the end. Rome wasn’t built in a day and nobody can thoughtfully build anything or design anything in a day either. We can’t tell you how many times people come to us with unrealistic expectations, unrealistic timelines, and predetermined outcomes when they don’t even understand the space at all.

So many people want that Instagram. Look, I want this picture in this. Okay, well, let’s break that down. What is it that you like? Oh, wait, does that even fit in the space? Yes or no? Okay, what about it specifically? Do we like, okay, how do we get that implemented? Because there are parts and pieces to it all. And you have to go, you have to figure out each step in order to get there.

Yeah, social media does a really good job of showing people the dramatic before and after, but not many people take the time to actually explain the process. So that’s what we’re going to do. The way we function, the way I start every design project is always my identifying purpose. I can never design in a vacuum. I have to understand what is the use of the space or what is the goal for the property to help define realistic expectations. That’s always starting point, whether I’m working with a design client or we’re doing a rehab on a property.

And I have to understand what your design is so that I know and can help to facilitate bringing in the right person to help get that job done. This tile guy over here, he specializes in this and these designs and my applications, but I want to go with something over here a little bit different, just according to the design you’ve got. So maybe he won’t be the right person. I need to get the right guy in to do it.

Yeah, you can’t go past that. So after I define purpose, I want to establish function for the space and then everything becomes built upon that in terms of process on how things go. I mean, we’re going to have to sit down and start with the floor plan, establish what’s the current state, what is the desired state based off of purpose and functionality for the space? That’s like step one.

And that can take a while, especially depending on how complicated or large scale the project is. I mean, everyone is different, but generally that’s always the starting process. And the planning step, as we said before, the better you plan, the better you prepare and prevent possible hiccups in the middle. Yeah.

And you know, you’re usually collaborating with a team already, whether it be an architect or a builder, but you have to have that initial plan structured first before anybody else really gets involved. I mean, that’s going to affect all of your electrical, all of your plumbing. I mean, those are the main ARH vac. I mean, anything, depending on what you’re putting on the property, if you have pool, your landscaping, I mean, all of those things can be factored initially, and your team is collaborative in that effort. After we establish that initial plan, then I start creating elevations. And we hone into each specific area for that design via elevation. So we might be, we’ll start looking at cabinetry and millwork design and, you know, really fine-tuning the space planning itself and exactly how each space is going to look. And that takes time. It takes time. It takes buy-in from everybody that’s involved, or that’s going to be weighing in on the decision. And all of those plans have to be solidified really before we start kicking anything off.

You know, and understand that as a designer, you function in a space that goes from idea to conception all the way through. And there are steps along that way that most people, and I know I’ve learned this is, you know, through working with you for so long that most people don’t think about all the in-betweens. And I know I did that a lot with the designs in my corporate world and trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B. And it’s a learned process. But, you know, one of the things that always has rung out to me, you know, since a little kid, my grandfather used to always said, in the seven piece, proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance. You have to come out with a plan and you have to make sure it’s correct to the best of your ability. Otherwise, you’re going to get into the middle of it and something’s going to go haywire and something’s going to, it’s going to be a big mess at that point. But if you’ve planned for it, you’ve put the time in to make sure I’m 99% not 50%, you minimize those. And those hiccups that come along the way are generally very easy to get around. You can pivot fast, you can pivot smoothly.

Right. And you don’t have to necessarily redesign everything. I mean, you’re already, you’re not necessarily deviating from the design, but you can pivot if you have to adjust.

You can make it an adjustment, a tweak. Yeah. But see, that’s something that you think about through this whole process that most people don’t see.

Yeah. I tell people frequently, I solve problems. That’s what I do. I do it through the application of interior design, but I’m a problem solver. So in order to establish a good plan, I have to understand what’s the problem and what’s the goal. And that is the whole premise. That is the foundation for all of the decisions throughout. Making it pretty is the easy part. Really making it functional, establishing the right form, and making sure it’s actually a livable space is what takes so much intentionality down to every little finite detail. And part of that process also is you’re getting client buy-in if you’re working with a design client directly or if we’re doing it on our own. And then now we have like an actual concrete plan that is not only going to equip our trades people to execute, but it’s going to affect all the logistics. Like we can’t even start to order material for anything until our plan is finalized. So we know exactly what we need, how much of it we need. So really the first several months of a good design, whether you’re building a new construction or you’re rehabbing, it doesn’t really matter. It takes months to develop a solid plan and you should have that plan ready before you ever break ground on anything. That’s going to save you heartache, time, and for sure money.

That’s not to say that you have to have every tile selected before you break ground to redo this, but there’s the order to it. Yes. The order, like we’re not going to go pick tile if we don’t have cabinetry fix. Or at least we’re not going to order the tile.

Yeah. You might be able to start. You know, I really like this one or like this color. Yeah. But we shouldn’t be executing until we have our plan in place. At least that’s how we do. And it’s also not uncommon for those slight pivots and deviations from that original plan as you get rolling into the construction process. That’s normal. Not always ideal, but it happens frequently.

When you lay out that floor plan sometimes, especially when you’re doing a remodel or a rehab, you get into something that’s like, oh, I kind of imagined that it was going to be set this way. Well, let’s set this way a little bit more. So, okay, how do we have to tweak that? And those are natural normals, but that’s not something that generally is going to have to be, oh, God, we’ve got to read this on the entire space.

Yeah. And most of the people who come to us for renovation design who have already been through the renovation process are experiencing their pain points because they never adequately planned. So they maybe hired a contractor and they started or they tried to kind of DIY their own floor plan on the fly with the contractor. It was all executed and now they’ve lived in it for a year or two and they realize this has no function. It doesn’t flow and I don’t like it for my lifestyle. So now they’re spending more money to try to correct what they could have prevented from the get-go. It’s so important to have the right team of people.

Yeah. And it’s hiring a contractor just to come in and retile a shower versus completely gut a bathroom and redo it. Those are two different things. Yeah. Okay. It’s not as hard of a deal to come in and just let’s do new tile work in the shower. Okay, great. But if we’re ripping it out, I want to change the orientations. I want to take this wall down, move this here, move that. That’s where you’ve really got to plan it.

Yes, totally agree with you. And that’s also back to our original point. You have to trust the process and you have to trust the people you’ve hired. You can’t jump in head first and then 30 days down the road panic because now you suddenly don’t trust anyone when in reality you’re not trusting the process because you don’t understand. That’s why you’ve hired experts to come in and do what they do. You’re not meant to understand every capacity of it, but you do have to get in alignment and trusting the people that are overseeing and designing for you. Yeah. So that’s all part of trusting the process.

Kind of like I said the other day, I don’t tell my mechanic how to fix my truck. I trust that he knows what he’s doing and may sometimes take a little bit longer than I thought, but he knows.

And even as a real estate investor, some people jump into the game and they’re not always understanding the timeline, the logistics and trusting the full process of the cruise they’ve hired.

I think some of the takeaway from today is just knowing that the process, it takes time. There are parts that move slower. There are parts that move faster and understanding that, hey, we are trying to accomplish this end goal. I don’t necessarily have to see every step or understand what every step entails, but I have to understand that we have to go through each step on its own timeline and correctly so that we get from point A to point B. Yeah.

Correctly is key. You can’t skip ahead. You can’t jump over the process and expect an excellent result.

It’s not going to happen. Guys, you don’t want your wife to sit there and come back to you and go, hey, what were these four extra bolts for from the project you just put together? Were they necessary?

And then you don’t want to spend six figures on a rehab and then your wife come to you a year and a half later and say, I hate it. Let’s do it all over again. That’s why you’ve got to make sure you plan intentionally so that you can maximize the return you’re getting on your design. Exactly. So as an investor, when you’re coming in to rehab a space, you’re not necessarily thinking through the lens of design. You’re typically thinking flipping or gutting this and redoing, but if you look at it through the lens of redesigning a space and being very intentional about developing function form and flow to the space, the aesthetics and how it actually looks in the end is the easy part because that you can have a little fluid and you could change that depending on the style of the home.

So it’s easy to say that as an investor, looking at what you’re redesigning, how you’re rehabbing a space, the things that have to be right or have to be a certain way are the flow, the function that it feels right. You don’t have this weird space hanging off over here on the outside. It’s livable. It’s usable, but then it allows you more flexibility towards some of the finishing touches that will finally bring it all together because you’ve got the foundation and the form correct. Yes.

So if you come in and you want to rehab a space and you’re only thinking about the look in the end of what you think a buyer would want or what the most current look is on the market, then yeah, you could totally miss the fundamentals that are non-negotiable, which is the form function. It has to complement the existing architecture of the house. You can’t just start knocking down walls and making spaces not make sense just purely because you want it to look a certain way because you could easily fall into the trap of your house not selling. It’s not livable to people. The aesthetics will get you far, but only so far. Flow, form, and function are non-negotiable.

Yeah. So again, in some aspects of thinking in the end of what’s going to matter to your buyer and not just what matters to you. Yes, the look of it is going to matter for both of you, but your buyer or your renter is really going to be focused just as importantly on how does it feel? How does it flow? How can I be in the space?

And in reference to that vision in your mind, if you’re only thinking about, oh, I want the kitchen to look like this. I want the open concept and the waterfall countertop or whatever it be. If you’re focused on this vision and you’re not accounting for those non-negotiable things, then as you start to execute, you could be disappointed. It may not look like what maybe you thought it was going to look like or the result may be different.

Yeah. Sometimes the structural flow of the house may not necessarily always incorporate a certain design aesthetic. And you can start to force the design. And then you really run into this, well, that doesn’t look the way that I want it to.

Yeah. Or the architecture of the home was a big one. Yeah. Stealing hides all sorts of factors. I’m trying to encapsulate that whole vision word.

Maybe it’s not that it would necessarily not come up, but the pivot would be more challenging. Yeah. By not having those things. Yeah.

If you have your foundation, you’ve already addressed form, function, and those are your non-negotiables. When you do run into something with the quote unquote vision, when you’re executing, let’s say you have a material shortage or something is backwarded, you have to pivot. Those are tweaks you can make on the fly where you’re not really redesigning the entire space. You’re just finding an alternative material to continue with your original design execution. That’s going to save you time. It’s going to save you money. I mean, you don’t have to redesign the whole space because one flooring material is backwarded and you’ve got to select a different flooring material versus if we are trying to implement something that didn’t meet those non-negotiables of form and function, you could be redoing the whole space and costing yourself a ton of money and time. Yeah. Pay attention to those three primary non-negotiables, form, function, and flow. If you do have to pivot along your execution, you’re likely going to be able to pivot better and faster with less money lost, potentially lost.

Your design changes shouldn’t be a major shock to you. It should be a very manageable budgetary change.

Right. Let’s pivot into addressing more of a homeowner’s situation. Somebody who is maybe focused on the aesthetics or the finished goods of the room versus a construction aspect. Oftentimes they tend to fall into this trap also where maybe they’re following someone on social media and they fall in love with a look or a picture and they want to just copy and paste that into their own space. Once they start purchasing the product and putting it in place, their vision sometimes doesn’t start to come to life and they become disappointed because, oh, that’s not really what I thought it was going to be.

Yeah, but what are some of the ways that that happens? Is the room, got too many things in it, not enough? Is the scale off? What are things that affect that and how do you work with it?

Yes, all of the above, I would say, because everything matters and it’s all subject to your specific space. I mean, if I identified rules, things to pay attention to are ceiling heights and what’s like the focal point of the room, I would start there because every room typically has a focal point that should define the purpose of the room. So let’s say you fell in love with somebody’s social posts and they’re looking at an entry way and you love the look so much, but you want that entry way look in your dining knock or something. It’s not necessarily an apples to apples. What’s the function of that space? If I had to define what I do, I always define a purpose.

Yeah, you always define the purpose. What is the use of the room? What is that? Again, yes, just the focal point. What is the main area where you’re constantly going to be looking at for the room?

I don’t ever design just off of look, so that’s probably why I’m so different. Purpose, there’s a purpose for a space.

How do you go into, I want to redesign this room or how do you go about setting it up so that you don’t get into this position of this is just way off and I don’t know what to do.

Yeah, well, you first have to identify the purpose. What is the purpose of the room? What are you going to do in the space and really have a defined function? And then I evaluate, is there a focal point in the space? If it’s a living room, do you have a fireplace or is there anything architecturally that really grounds the room or that you need to consider in how you would functionally use the space? Then you need to evaluate scale, ceiling heights, are there windows? Even wall size is important. Most people, I would say DIY or design in a box, so they’re only thinking about the look, the vision. They’re not thinking about all of the other components to function, flow, form, architecture, lighting, scale, all of the things that actually affect what the aesthetic is going to look like in the end. So if I’m only focused on, oh, I saw this one Pinterest look and I like that look and I’m trying to just replicate it in my space apart from fully evaluating the entire space, you’re probably going to be disappointed.

So kind of like trying to design or try to do design from the in-product back to the front instead of going through a natural process of putting it together.

Yeah, you could say it that way where, oh, this is a picture. I just want this picture. Yeah, I say this a lot, but people do really good online of showing the before and after and people want to see this big transformative view, but no one explains the process and there’s always a process. If we avoid that aspect, we’re going to have unrealistic expectations of what things really take when it comes to design, renovation, construction and any any aspect. It’s not a magic wand and then boom, here’s your result. I mean, it’s a process and you have to put the time into that process to get a valuable result. You can’t skip the planning and just expect your vision to appear before you. You could still be inspired by that Pinterest photo or whatever you see that you love and focus more on what are the colors? What do I actually like about this picture? What is it in that color palette that stands out to me that I think is pretty and you can kind of start to pull out what is it specifically about that that I like and how can I apply what I actually like into what makes sense in my space versus just the copy-paste method that, again, is likely going to keep you disappointed. I actually walk my design clients through that often where I will encourage them to share photos with me, Pinterest boards or whatever they think is pretty as I begin to dissect what is the aesthetic that they like and then I will immediately probe back with what is it that you actually like about that and it gets you to think in a different way and really hone in what it is specifically that you like.

To take your Pinterest board or something and break it down farther. Don’t just I like the picture. It’s what get the specifics so that we can then implement those designs.

Yes, because even if you’re looking at like as a homeowner, let’s say you see a picture you love. You’re like, oh, I love that. So beautiful. Okay. Well, what do you like? I don’t know. It feels really bright. It feels really light and fresh. Okay. That might be something. And so then you know, okay, well, that’s a color aspect or maybe there’s a big mirror on the wall or yeah, definitely dissecting it. So thanks for listening today. Hope you learned a little bit and you remember to trust the process.

This episode interested you guys. Make sure you hit that like button, subscribe, follow along with us through this journey. And we look forward to seeing you guys next time. Appreciate it.