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It has been a career-defining few years for Rita Konig. First there was the British interior designer and author’s Create Academy course, which was expanded for a second installment last year following popular demand. Then her product portfolio grew, with a fabric and wallpaper line for Schumacher and furniture for Oficina Inglesa. (Her fan-favorite styles for The Lacquer Company just got a refresh, too.) And then there were the accolades—namely back-to-back AD100 honors and being named House & Garden’s 2024 Interior Designer of the Year. But her success shows no signs of slowing: This year, Konig is set to open her first stateside office in Palm Beach, keeping her team of eight busy with residential and commercial projects across the globe.
I recently caught up with the industry leader to discuss her process, namely from a client experience standpoint. As she expands her team and physical footprint, what studio standards is she setting? Read on for Konig’s trusted vetting process, as well as her tips for curbing client fatigue and encouraging design risk-taking.
Mel Studach: What is your client vetting process?
Rita Konig: That first meeting is always a bit like a first date to see if you like each other. It’s also to see if you know that you are both a good fit design-wise because very often when people are looking for a designer, they don't necessarily know their taste clearly. I look for the basics: Do we get along? Are you willing to spend years together over a project timeline? That's basically what it comes down to: You are spending years together, and there's a discipline and shared values—or at least an understanding of your client’s values—that one has to have. Start to understand what those are, how the clients live, and if you're going to be able to deliver. It’s a bit like a detective game in the beginning, trying to extract all this information. If you just come out and ask questions or send a questionnaire, that feels like a chore. It should be a gentle extraction of information that's much easier, I think, for people to reveal just in a chat.
How do you encourage clients to take risks with their design choices?
Create illustrations—it’s expensive, but it's the best because they can immediately see what you're talking about. Take a trim-painting specialist: Often people can't see the value in it because when you show it as a sample, it’s a subtle difference. Why would we spend all that money when it’s perfectly fine as is? And yet the difference to a room is huge. Progressively, when you keep taking all of those layers away, you lose the depth. It's like slow cooking; it's where the flavor is. That can be hard to explain to somebody quickly, but it's a long process to build trust.
Like any relationship, it’s establishing a good foundation to build from.
When people talk about collaboration, we so naturally go to the architects, the upholsterers, the specialist painters, but the most important collaboration is with the client because without their collaboration what do you do? When they arrive at the end and they feel like it's their house, like they're walking into their own taste and lifestyle rather than it being a Rita Konig house and I've put my five things that we always do—for some clients and designers, that's the experience and that's what everybody wants. But that's what I find very exciting: the discipline to work through these things and create beautiful, sophisticated, and comfortable interiors for clients.
How do you manage client fatigue?
One of the things that I do and try to instill in my team is to always put yourself in the client’s shoes. It doesn’t happen often, but things do go wrong. Something arrives broken or in the wrong color. I feel the less a client can be subjected to that and the more it's not their problem, the better—it reduces the areas for fatigue. We are in the service industry—It’s all client experience. I would want somebody to say to me, “This will be taken care of. You will not be billed for this.”
Budgets can also rear fatigue. Any tips for stopping it before it starts?
You have to put every little thing in your budget to begin with. I never want to say to somebody, “That’s not in your budget.” It’s so annoying, and again, that's just putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. Whether you're spending $2 or $2.5 million, it's all huge money. It’s all a frog to swallow when you get to the bill, so tell them $2.5 million—not $2 million—so that every time you're doing something you say, ‘Yes, it’s in the budget.’ If somebody is always telling you that’s not in your budget you just perpetually feel like you’re getting the cheapest version. In every room, we build in a sum for everything—lighting, china, glass, everything. That is where the fatigue comes from. It’s really annoying to be told that you can’t afford lights. It shouldn’t be an extra.
How do you keep in touch with clients longterm?
There’s a reality that comes that year following installation. The client moves in and realizes that actually this doesn’t work as well as they thought, or they need to change that, or add a couple of extra things here. That's another area where you can get client fatigue—they move in, you move on to the next job, there are always things that will go wrong. So you have to always make sure that there is space in your team for that aftercare because you can deliver the most beautiful thing and everybody's delighted, but it can sour quickly when you’re not tying up those loose ends in the six to 12 months following.
This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.
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