BIG IDEA: Tricks the John Loecke design team used for Andree Corroon’s co-op included painting the inside of built-ins to give them more depth and papering ceilings to make them appear higher. (CHRISTIAN JOHNSTON)
Remember the go-go years of the aughts — when Tyco tycoon Dennis Kozlowski dropped $6,000 on a single shower curtain and being a high-end interior designer could be as lucrative as being a venture capitalist?
Today, the interior design market is seeing some major adjustments. The rise of HGTV and decorating Web sites like ApartmentTherapy.com, as well as the democratization of design (e.g., Thomas O’Brien and George Nelson at Target), has made customers savvier. And the economic meltdown has made these same clients more frugal.
“Money was once no object,” says John Loecke, who, with his partner Jason Oliver Nixon, runs the interior design firm John Loecke Inc. and has taken on projects like designing an 1,100-square-foot Upper East Side co-op with a tight budget of about $60,000. “Now people have become more cautious and more budget-minded. They are designing room by room and hedging their bets.”
“Clients are still spending, but in a more timid way,” says Laura Bohn of Laura Bohn Design Associates, whose firm is part of a luxury designer collective that includes Clodagh and D’Aquino Monaco. “Today, they’ll just do a kitchen or a bathroom. And in the past we wouldn’t have taken on jobs that small.”
Of course, small is relative when it comes to top design. For Bohn, $150,000 is considered the lowest amount — “that barely goes anywhere, but it will get you a basic kitchen” — while most projects she takes on start at $500,000.
But Bohn admits she’s had to lower her fees.
“Designers don’t want to talk about it, but almost all of us are willing to negotiate,” she says.
During the boom years, her firm typically worked on about six large-scale projects each year, but it only saw half that number last year. And while Bohn says that 2010 looks to be better than 2009, she’s working harder to line up jobs.
“It’s a completely different marketplace,” she says. “With the recession, the nature of the way we do business has changed. We’re more willing to serve the client and guide them through the process.”
And customers are more hands-on than they’ve ever been.
“I’ve had clients give me renderings,” laughs Bohn, who has roughly 30 years of experience as an interior designer.
The design process is “no longer so one-sided,” says Nixon. “We try to be more of a sounding board now.”
That was certainly the case when Nixon and Loecke worked with Andree Corroon, the founder of her own marketing and communications consulting firm, on her postwar Upper East Side apartment.
“Our working relationship was a true dialogue . . . we would go back and forth with ideas and looks until we reached what I liked,” says Corroon, who favored a classic style with “a bit of a twist.”
She purchased the two-bedroom co-op in 2006 and started the renovation in 2007. Though technically it was before the market fell apart, Corroon, a single mother of two young girls, was on a strict $60,000 budget, with most of it going toward the kitchen redo.
“I thought it was an enormous amount of money to spend, since this was my first apartment, but John and Jason drew up an overall plan, and we figured out what we could repurpose and where to invest,” says Corroon.
To that end, Loecke and Nixon incorporated many of Corroon’s existing pieces — family heirlooms and items she’d gotten at the Plaza hotel auction — updating and mixing them with lower-end furnishings. It’s a tactic the designers have always employed, but to an even greater extent lately.
“We’re very much about reusing good pieces, having things re-covered to look bespoke,” says Nixon.
And reupholstering solves two problems. “People don’t want to spend a lot of money on completely custom items anymore,” says Nixon, “and they don’t want to wait a year to get them.”
As for trendy pieces, “people aren’t as interested,” says Loecke. “Now they want something that can last longer.”
With this in mind, the duo relies on classic furniture styles when creating interiors, especially those by Mitchell + Gold.
But being an interior designer in NYC is about more than just pleasing the client with a graceful layout and tasteful furnishings.
“I have to do all the paperwork for the [co-op or condo] board,” says Alma Nugent of Nugent Designs. “I have to break everything out and show what’s being done before it can be submitted to the board. Landlords have become a lot tougher and are requiring a lot more now.”
Nugent, whose fees start at $15,000 for a simple bathroom renovation, has recently seen a new component of her business — repairing the mistakes of overzealous DIYers. And this goes beyond simply painting a wall the wrong color; some blunders can be very costly.
“Some hired contractors, but they didn’t know how to tell them what to do, and a lot of contractors need guidance,” she says. “Also, some contractors simply weren’t qualified. So I have to go in and clean it up and start over.
“Everyone would like to be a designer, but they don’t necessarily know the ins and outs, the details,” Nugent adds. “I have people who want their places to look like a picture they saw in a magazine. Sure, it looks good. But it’s not practical for their space.”
And now that interior design is becoming more affordable and less intimidating, getting a professional opinion is a more viable option.
“Design is still a mystery to a lot of people; they think of it as a luxury, as something that’s only for the very wealthy,” says Nixon. “We want to educate the consumer, show them why it makes sense in their lives and help them edit and polish the way they live. We want to make design accessible.”