How to Get the Most Out of Your Online Interior Design Session

You booked a designer, or you're about to. Now you're wondering what you're supposed to do to get ready, and whether you're already behind. Good news: you're not. There's no test, no prep list a mile long, and nothing you can get "wrong." A little setup just helps your designer move faster and hit closer on the first try.

Here's everything that actually helps, split into before, during, and after. Skim it, do what's easy, and let the rest go.

Before your session

The setup takes about fifteen minutes. You can do it from your couch, phone in hand.

Measuring your room, the parts that matter

You don't need a laser or a floor plan. Grab a tape measure and get the basics: the length and width of the room, and the height and width of anything that eats space, windows, doorways, a fireplace, a radiator. Note which way doors swing. If a wall has an outlet or a vent where a sofa might go, jot that down too.

That's it. Your designer would rather have four honest numbers than forty precise ones. Rough is fine. They'll confirm anything critical before you buy.

Taking good photos

Photos do more work than any measurement, so this is the one worth two extra minutes. Shoot in daylight with the lamps off, natural light shows true color. Stand in the doorway and take a wide shot of the whole room, then one photo of each corner. Corners tell your designer how the space actually connects, which a single wide shot always misses.

Don't tidy for the camera. Your designer needs to see the real room, clutter, cords, the chair you hate, all of it. That's the room they're solving for.

Deciding what you're keeping

Walk the room and split things into three piles in your head: keeping for sure, open to letting go, and hard no. The sofa from your first apartment, the rug you love, the lamp from your grandmother, tell your designer. A good plan is built around the pieces you're keeping, not in spite of them.

You don't have to decide everything now. "I think I'm keeping the bookshelf but I'm flexible" is a completely useful answer.

Setting a real budget

This is the one people fudge, and it's the one that matters most. Pick the number you're genuinely comfortable spending, and share that number, not a smaller one you think sounds reasonable. Your designer isn't judging it. They're using it to choose pieces that fit, so nothing on your list is a heartbreak you can't afford.

A too-low number gets you a plan you can't fully buy. An honest number gets you a room. If you'd rather phase it, say so, a designer can prioritize the pieces to buy first and the ones that can wait. Not sure what's realistic? See how much interior design costs before you settle on a number.

During your session, building your profile

Your session and style quiz are where your designer gets to know you. The more honest you are here, the less back-and-forth later. None of it requires design knowledge.

What to share

Talk about how you actually live in the room, not how you wish it looked in a photo. Who uses it, when, and for what. Do you eat dinner on the sofa? Does a dog own the armchair? Do you need the space to work by day and unwind by night? The way you use a room shapes the plan more than any style label.

How to describe your taste, even without the words

You do not need to know the difference between transitional and mid-century. React instead. Point at rooms and say what you feel: "this one's cozy, this one feels cold, this makes me want to sit down." Say what you can't stand, too, that's often more useful than what you like. Your designer translates plain reactions into a direction. That translation is the skill you're paying for.

Sharing inspiration

This is where all those saved images finally pay off. Send your Pinterest board, your screenshots, that one hotel lobby you can't stop thinking about. Even better, add a line about why you saved each one, "I love the light in this" or "it's the green, not the furniture." A pile of images with a little context tells your designer more than any adjective.

Naming your non-negotiables

Everyone has a few hard lines. The TV has to stay over the fireplace. The room needs to seat six. No white upholstery with toddlers in the house. Say these out loud and early. Non-negotiables aren't picky, they're the guardrails that keep the whole plan usable, and naming them upfront saves a revision later.

“You don't need the vocabulary. You just need to point at a room and say how it makes you feel. Reading the rest is our job.”

— The Havenly Design Team

After you get your design

Your first concept lands. Maybe it's exactly right, maybe it's ninety percent there. Either way, the revision round is where a good room becomes yours, and the quality of your feedback decides how fast you get there.

How to give good revision feedback

Specific beats vague, every time. "I don't love it" leaves your designer guessing and burns a revision. "The blue on the sofa reads too cool, can we try something warmer?" points straight at the fix. You don't need the right terms, just aim at the actual thing: the color, the size, the placement, the feeling.

Say what's working, too. If the layout is perfect but the rug is wrong, lead with that, so your designer keeps the good and changes only the rug. And group your notes into one round instead of a trickle of one-line messages. It's faster for both of you and gets you to done sooner. With Havenly, revisions run until it's right, so use them well rather than sparingly.

Trust the floor plan

Here's the advice almost nobody gives you, and it saves more rooms than any other tip in this guide. When you see your to-scale floor plan on a screen, it will probably look empty. There's white space around the sofa. The far corner looks bare. Your instinct will be to fill it, add another chair, a bigger table, one more thing.

Resist that instinct. A plan that looks sparse on a laptop almost always feels right, even generous, once you're standing in the actual room. Screens flatten scale and make breathing room read as emptiness. That negative space is doing real work: it's what lets a room feel calm instead of crammed, and it's what makes the pieces you did choose actually stand out.

Your designer drew that plan to scale for a reason. If a spot genuinely nags at you, flag it and ask, that's a fair question. But don't fill space just because it looks bare on a screen. Trust the plan, and let the room breathe.