By Andy Taylor | Art Haus
Working with Interior Designers: My approach.
If you’re an interior designer or specifier and you’re wondering how choosing original art for a client project might work with me, here’s the honest answer.
Buying a painting for yourself is one thing. Choosing one for a client’s living room, a hotel lobby, or a boardroom that fifty people will sit in every week is a different job entirely, and it comes with a different set of worries. Will it fit the scheme? Will the client like it as much as you do? What happens if it’s wrong?
Here’s the process I’d suggest, to take some of that pressure off.
Start with a photo, not a painting
Send me a photo of the wall, along with rough dimensions and whatever you can tell me about the scheme – the palette, the mood you’re going for, sometimes just “it needs to feel calm” or “this room needs some energy.” You don’t need a mood board. A phone photo and a few honest sentences is usually enough.
From there I’ll put together three to six recommendations from available originals, matched to the space rather than picked because they’re my favourites. If it helps, I can also do a digital mockup so you can see roughly how a piece will sit on the actual wall before anyone commits to anything.
Why this should suit trade work better than browsing a shop page
A website gallery is built for someone shopping for themselves, scrolling until something catches their eye. That’s a slower process, and it’s the wrong one when you’re specifying for a client on a deadline. Sending me the wall does the opposite – it starts from the room, not the painting, which is how it should work when the art has to earn its place in someone else’s space rather than just your own.
This is the same instinct that sits behind the darkness-to-light, chaos-to-calm thread running through my work generally. A boardroom and a wellness studio are asking for very different things from a piece of art, even if the underlying technique – palette knife, heavy layering, colour built up in stages – stays the same. Knowing which end of that spectrum a space needs is most of the job.
Where this could come in useful
This is aimed at a fairly wide range of spaces:
- Residential feature walls – the wall behind a sofa, a hallway, a dining room that needs an anchor piece
- Hospitality – hotel lobbies, lounges, guest suites
- Commercial interiors – reception areas, boardrooms, breakout spaces
- Wellness environments – spaces that need calm and presence more than impact
A corporate lobby and a spa reception are not looking for the same painting, and a big part of getting it right is being honest about that from the first conversation rather than after a piece has already been delivered.
What you get at the end of it
Every original comes ready to hang, with a signed certificate of authenticity, and I can provide documentation for client packs where that’s useful. Lead times and logistics are agreed upfront so there are no surprises close to a install date.
If you’re working on a project and aren’t sure whether a painting will work until you can see it in the room, that’s completely normal – that’s exactly what the wall photo is for. Send it over and I’ll do the first sift for you.
