Lado Sarai · four projects a year

Paid a fee, never a percentage

Agreed before anything is bought, and we take no commission from any supplier. It makes us look expensive on the first page of the proposal and cheaper on the last.

Enquire How we charge

Rooms, unnamed

No project titles and no clients. A portfolio that names "the such-and-such residence" is naming somebody else’s house on our page.

A finished sitting room — Stone was the client’s; the lighting plan took four revisions.

A bay window seat — Built in rather than bought, because the bay was not square.

A panelled room — Existing panelling kept and repaired — most of the budget saved here.

A room with full-height glass — Nothing hung on the glass wall. The argument took three meetings.

A lamp beside a window — A room lit at three heights reads warm; one ceiling light never does.

A brass table lamp — Made by a workshop in Moradabad we have used for nine years.

The fee

One figure, agreed at the start

A flat design fee, quoted once the brief is settled and unchanged whatever gets bought afterwards. We take nothing from any supplier — no trade discount kept, no commission, no "sourcing fee". Every invoice is passed through at what it actually cost, with the supplier’s own bill attached.

Fee fixed before anything is specifiedNo commission from any supplier, everTrade discounts passed to you in full, with the invoiceFour projects a year, so the fee is what pays us

Kota stone

Reclaimed teak

Lime plaster

Moradabad brass

Handloom cotton

Terrazzo, poured in place

Rattan

Unlacquered brass, left to age

The studio, counted

Three figures from the studio diary. None of them is about a budget.

Projects a year, and never a fifth

9 yrs

The same three workshops for joinery and brass

Commission taken from any supplier

Reasonable questions

Four answers, and the third loses us most of the enquiries we receive.

What does a room cost?

We will not publish a rate. Most of a room’s cost is what goes in it, and the same design lands anywhere between two figures depending on whether a sofa is made or bought. What is fixed is our fee, and that is quoted once we know the rooms.

Can you work with things I already own?

Preferably. The best rooms we have done kept about a third of what was already there, and a designer who wants everything gone is a designer whose fee is a percentage.

Will you do one room?

Rarely, and this is where most enquiries end. Four projects a year means each one is a whole house or a substantial part, and a single room costs us nearly the same in meetings as five do.

Do you supervise the work?

Yes, and it is in the fee. Somebody from the studio is on site weekly and at every delivery, because a specification is a document and a room is a set of decisions taken by a carpenter at four in the afternoon.

Enquiries

Tell us the rooms, roughly when, and whether the house is finished. We reply within a week, and about two enquiries in three get a recommendation of somebody else.