Design services covers everything beyond a single visit to your home. A full kitchen or bath remodel is design work. So is choosing colors for a house, building a board so you can see a room's palette together, or shopping to finish a space.

What a specialist brings

Plenty of places will draw you a kitchen. Big-box stores and building suppliers have people who will sit with you and produce a plan, and most of them mean well.

What's different is training. The person drawing your kitchen at a supply house may have drawn a deck that morning. Often the job came from knowing the software, not from studying design. Here's where that shows up:

Cabinets planned to your room. Stock cabinets come in set widths. Your wall is whatever width it is. When those don't match, the extra space gets filled with strips wherever the math lands. Cabinets planned for the room solve the wall in the drawing instead.

Spacing that works in real life. There are real standards for how much counter belongs beside a cooktop, how far a dishwasher should sit from the sink, how much room you need standing in front of an open dishwasher door, and how wide an aisle should be with two people in the kitchen. A plan that ignores them looks fine on a screen and annoys you every day for twenty years.

A room planned for everyone in it. Most kitchens hold more than one person doing more than one thing — someone cooking, someone at the counter with homework, someone dropping the mail. Planning for that is what keeps a busy room from jamming up.

Wall drawings, not just a floor plan. A floor plan shows what fits. It doesn't show whether the hood lines up with the window, or where the tile lands against the cabinets. Those get worked out on drawings of each wall, before anything is built.

Storage that fits how you cook. How much storage a kitchen needs is a number. What kind you need isn't. That depends on how you cook and what you're tired of reaching for.

Options you'd never be offered. You can't choose something nobody in the room knows about.

Hearing what you meant. Almost nobody describes a kitchen in inches. They describe a feeling, or a frustration, or a room they saw once. Turning that into a plan is the work.

Shenley holds a master's degree in interior architecture and has spent 19 years on kitchens and baths.

Getting started

It starts with a phone call, then a walk & talk in your home. If you'd like to move forward, we send a contract. Work begins once it's signed and the retainer is paid. The retainer isn't an extra fee — it goes against the hours as the work gets done.

Nothing is drawn before that. What you're hiring is time and judgment.

In the studio

Design work happens with you, in sessions here. For a remodel that usually means layouts to look at together, often more than one version of the same room, along with renderings so you can see the space before it's built.

Plans and renderings stay with us until you've purchased your project materials. Design boards are different — for color and decorating work, the board is what you're buying, and it's yours once it's paid for.

Materials

We order and track the materials we supply, and coordinate delivery. A remodel arrives in pieces from different places on different schedules, and someone has to be watching all of it.

Your contractor

You hire your own contractor and hold that relationship directly. If you don't have one, we can offer referrals. We work alongside whoever you choose, but we don't handle their contract or their schedule.

When something comes up on site, we work through the options with you. If a fix falls outside what was planned, that's a change you decide on, and our contracts address out-of-scope work directly.

Budget

We want the money conversation early, and honest in both directions. If what you're describing costs more than what you have to spend, you should hear that at the start. And if you tell us your number, we're not going to walk you past it.

Wondering what working together looks like? See our full design process — from your first Walk & Talk to the final walkthrough.