Designs on Survival : Despite a Downturn in the Industry, Interior Designers Are Streamlining and Specializing Services to Stay in Business
Interior designer Ivan Beardsley, called upon to lecture at a colleague’s home on a cool fall night 18 months ago, looked to his audience and caught a glimpse of the future.
Instead of half a dozen or so beginning designers, Beardsley faced nearly 40 stellar industry professionals who had come to hear his talk on how to survive the 1990s. Like a hungry press corps, they besieged Beardsley with so many questions that his planned 45-minute lecture became a three-hour session on designer woes, ranging from marketing and billing problems to shrinking demand and decorating budgets.
“I was beside myself,” recalled Beardsley, a Silver Lake designer with nearly two decades’ experience and a past president of the American Society of Interior Designers. “I was prepared to talk to six to eight people.”
Since that lecture--his first--two things have happened: Beardsley’s advice has become so in-demand that he now addresses interior designers several times a year. And Southern California’s recession, thought then to have perhaps bottomed out, has grown steadily worse, making things yet more perilous for interior designers.
Of all the high-ticket industries to nose-dive in the grim ‘90s, West Los Angeles’ residential interior design business has taken a particularly nasty crash. Once awash in the capital of a thriving regional economy, Westside designers now are in the midst of a shakeout that has left them scrambling for customers, discounting prices and developing narrower and narrower specialties to woo their remaining customers.
And those are the lucky ones. The unlucky ones have simply closed shop and moved on. “We’re having an industry fallout,” said Beardsley. “Everyone’s gearing down on their products, on their prices and on their real estate.”
The upheaval has been as sudden and overwhelming as a brush fire, affecting a few designers at first before spreading quickly throughout the industry. Indeed, it wasn’t that long ago that interior designers on the Westside were blithely passing on projects that weren’t large enough for their tastes. In the age of affluence of a mere five years ago, a $100,000 budget for a single residential project wasn’t considered unusual at all.
“People were buying incredible homes and putting tremendous budgets into redecorating,” said Bobbie Everts, owner of Designer Previews in Marina del Rey, a firm that represents interior designers and architects. “They were spending money like they were printing it.”
Now Everts’ customers are willing to part with only a fraction of that. In her last three jobs, the biggest interior design budget amounted to $20,000. “People have to put bread on the table before they put fabric on their walls,” she said.
The physical and spiritual base for the local design industry--the area in and around the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood--reflects that economic shock. Overall occupancy rates hover between 70% and 75% at the 16-acre center, regarded as one of the major design centers nationwide and the premier such facility in the West. The center, built in 1975, recently had to have its mortgage renegotiated after the partnership that runs it, the San Francisco-based Catellus Development Corp., fell behind on payments.
“(This) is a world-class facility that needs to regenerate momentum about its mission,” said center president Andrew Wolf, who was hired in January to rejuvenate the center.
The downturn also has triggered wholesale changes in the way designers do business. Perhaps the biggest turnaround is how designers offer, and charge for, their services.
Instead of purchasing furniture and accessories from showrooms, and then billing clients for their time and the merchandise, more designers are charging strictly for consulting and letting their clients pick up their own goods. Though hiring a design consultant can cost between $75 and $200 an hour, those are still much more affordable sums to customers who might have anticipated spending tens of thousands of dollars in one designing fell swoop.
“We’re charging for our creativity and design services rather than for providing a sofa,” said BJ Peterson, a West Los Angeles designer and national president of the 33,000-member American Society of Interior Designers. “The designer is being paid for being a designer.”
Some interior designers are also narrowing their focus in hopes of capturing a particular type of client. One burgeoning specialty in residential interior design is environmental design, in which some designers offer allergy-free environments or interiors that use only recyclable and nontoxic materials.
“We’re not into the ‘build your castle’ aesthetic,” said Alison Pollack, a West Hills environmental interior designer who recently launched her own firm called Earth Friendly. Despite the grim outlook in the rest of the interior design industry, Pollack says that so far the response to her business has been very encouraging. “You can’t put a price on clean air,” she said.
Likewise, because of a confluence of social and economic factors, the home office interiors trade is booming. Fifteen years ago, Douglass Hiatt, a Beverly Hills-based interior designer, became one of the country’s first designers to begin creating such offices. Today, said Hiatt, advances in communications technology, combined with the conflicting goals of working longer but maintaining a high quality of life, have prompted more people than ever to seek out spaces in their homes in which to work.
“Almost every one of our clients now includes for himself a home office,” said Hiatt, whose services can command upward of $100,000. Still, he said, it can be psychologically easier for people to justify an expensive design project that can be considered functional, rather than merely decorative.
Psychology, say designers, also explains why some people who can afford it are no longer blowing big budgets on interior furnishings. Though their clients may be relatively unaffected by the recession, designers and industry observers say many customers continue to be apprehensive about the future--and concerned that conspicuous consumption in lean times would be politically incorrect.
“There’s a weariness I call, ‘compassion fatigue,’ ” said Wolf, the Pacific Design Center president. “You’re very aware of being ostentatious.”
The result has been a boon for retail design and furniture shops, as opposed to the “for the trade only” stores that allow only accredited designers to purchase goods. Along Venice Boulevard, dozens of home interior design shops in the vicinity of the Antique Guild, the former Helms Bakery, are attracting a steady stream of weekend shoppers looking for less expensive ways to decorate their homes.
Steve Melendrez, manager of Civilization, a home furnishings and accessories store located near the Guild, says that while the shop’s customers usually are well-heeled, they are drawn by the combination of cutting-edge styles at prices that are typically 30% cheaper than list price.
The success of retail outlets has not been lost on “for the trade only” shops, some of which have adapted to the changing times. Though interior designers and store proprietors are hesitant to admit it, given the tough economy, more stores than ever are likely to waive the “for the trade only” rule and allow the public to buy under certain conditions--if the purchase is large enough, for instance.
“People who want to make a substantial investment, well, someone’s going to sell to them,” Beardsley said.
The goal of reaching out to a larger customer base, and making interior design more consumer-friendly, is also prompting changes at the Pacific Design Center, which is now in the midst of preparing for Westweek, an annual trade show. The three-day event, scheduled to start March 23, is expected to draw 30,000 people. Acknowledging that the center has suffered from an aloof and “off-putting” reputation, Wolf envisions broadening the center’s purview to encompass all aspects of design--and attracting more visitors in the process.
Some of the items on his agenda: opening a museum shop, attracting a major school of design to the building, showcasing the city’s up-and-coming designers, and eventually turning the center into a visitor attraction.
Echoing a sentiment heard increasingly in the design community, center executives also say they are targeting a new client base: members of the upper middle class who may have never used a designer before but who can now afford their services--and may have become more attuned to design in the status-conscious ‘80s.
“A center is more than just a trade mart,” said Wolf. “I want people to leave aware that everything in the planned environment is the ‘D’ word.”
Yet some wonder whether making high design available to upper-middle-, and possibly even middle-income consumers, can give the industry a significant economic boost. Even when showrooms in the Design Center hold an open-to-the-public demo sale of their furniture--with goods and accessories discounted as much as 75%--such prices still may not prove alluring when the item in question is a $12,000 leather sectional or a $1,200 cocktail table.
“The public that buys retail can’t afford this furniture, anyway,” said Beardsley. “That segment of the market isn’t the segment that uses designers. They aren’t even buying on a markdown basis.”
Everts adds: “The designers are cutting their prices but furniture costs what it costs. Ten thousand dollars is still not going to get your home decorated.”
Moreover, designers say, even if trade showrooms were to open to the public and clients ended up buying all their own furnishings, customers still lack the creative vision to put together an interior design scheme. In a practice where one fatal design choice could cost thousands of dollars to rectify, many people remain intimidated by the decorating process.
Indeed, at Civilization, store manager Melendrez says not as many customers are coming in by themselves anymore. “I see more and more designers bringing their clients in,” he said. “You never saw that before.”
Such reports, though, will likely bring small comfort to those designers struggling to weather the recession. Beardsley said one recent survey he conducted of his colleagues found that more than 40% were forced to make changes in their business to survive, while another 16% were contemplating leaving the business altogether.
It’s a refrain heard often by Everts, who represents nearly 50 interior designers and about a dozen architects.
Everts, who is married, considers herself lucky because she is not her family’s only bread-winner.
“I don’t see it getting better at all this year and I don’t see it getting better next year,” said Everts, who on the advice of her accountant husband moved out of her pricey Marina del Rey office to work at home, just before the industry turned southward. “If I had to depend on this to live, I would be scared out of my mind.”
On the Cover
Andrew Wolf, president of the Pacific Design Center, was hired in January to rejuvenate the facility. The West Hollywood center, built in 1975, serves as a base for the local design industry and is one of the country’s premier design outlets.
