Interior-design projects almost never have a precise, definable beginning. You might know from the moment you move into your home that it needs an overhaul. Or you might live there comfortably for years before your needs change—the kids go off to school, your job goes remote—and so you need the house to change with you. Or maybe you just feel a little dissatisfied with a certain room, always wondering vaguely how you could use and enjoy it more.

What’s certain, though, is that it’s never too early to bring a designer on board. Take these three scenarios handled by designers with Decorating Den Interiors, a collective of individually owned and operated design firms across the U.S. They’ll show you that no matter where you are in your particular project—dreaming about it, actively planning it, or wondering if you need to do it at all—the time to enlist professional expertise is right now.

When the entire space needs reimagining

Designer: Krista Shugars | Photographer: John Cole

When Krista Shugars, owner and lead designer of KD Designs Custome Interiors-Decorating Den Interiors, turned to the dining area in a historic home in Baltimore (one of multiple rooms there that she and her team designed), she didn’t start with paint colors and fabric swatches. That would all come much later. First, she and her team had to more or less create the room from scratch, knocking down two brick walls and moving an entire kitchen.

KD Designs essentially served as project manager on the renovation, not only envisioning how the space could be reconfigured, but diving deep into the feasibility and cost of the complex undertaking. On major projects like this one, Shugars says, “we provide schematic and rendering drawings for how the space should look. It’s really a collaborative effort between our firm, the general contractor, and the client.”

Here, the firm had to contend with the fact that 10 solid marble columns—a defining feature of the historic 1880s home—needed to be retained. (At top, you can see how the dining room flows into the great room, which is defined by these massive structures.) The challenge was to develop a more contemporary feel that was still in keeping with the house’s grand scale. “The client loved the historic feel of the home, but inside it was designed very traditionally, and that’s not their style,” Shugars said. “They wanted a place that they actually wanted to live in and enjoy without being stuffy.”

And then they moved on to paint colors and fabric swatches.

When you have a room you don’t know what to do with

Designer: Kimberly Paulus | Photographer: Andrei Restrepo

Sometimes, a design project starts with a brainstorming session. “We’ll have people call us and say, ‘We just don’t use this room at all, and we don’t know what to do with it,’” says Kimberly Paulus, owner of Sienna, Texas-based Monarch Designs-Decorating Den Interiors.

In this particular case, she started with a freewheeling interview about what the family liked to do, what activities they enjoyed that weren’t accommodated by existing rooms. For this family with two daughters—one in high school and the other in college—the answer turned out to be “hang out and drink coffee.” So Paulus turned their unused formal dining room into a European-inspired coffee bar and “internet café.”

The traditional dining-table-and-chairs setup was replaced with a coffee station and three bistro tables. A high table with stools facing a window makes it “almost like you are sitting in a coffee shop,” Paulus says. Additional vintage-look features like stonework, ceiling beams, and hand-painted tiles provide theme-appropriate finishing touches—“so it feels like a place you might find on the street in Barcelona.”

Paulus points out that designers don’t just need to know what colors you like and whether your tastes are more traditional or more modern. “Some of the questions we ask are personal: How do you spend your free time; what are your likes and dislikes from a hobby standpoint?” she says. “Clients ask, ‘Why do you need to know this?’ But really, we do. The only way a designer can help your home reflect you is if you let them know you.”

When the way you use your space changes

Designer: Claudia Leah | Photographer: Darren Miles

The pandemic was what spurred one couple with a vacation home in Naples, Florida, to turn their part-time status there into permanent residence. That, in turn, meant that their casual home office in a detached cabana was no longer sufficient. “A lot of people found that a certain function—being able to work from home—was just not there,” says Claudia Leah, owner of Claudia Leah Design-Decorating Den Interiors. For this client, “the space was too high, so it echoed. They didn’t have a good enough backdrop for video meetings—it showed the pull-out bed. The function wasn’t there.”

So Leah proposed an office purpose-built to fit their needs, enclosing a dining area and truly drilling down into exactly how they planned to work in the room. Walls were installed with acoustic backing for soundproofing. To help the client better control the room’s lighting while working at the computer, existing French doors were given adjustable-louver shutters, which also allowed for more privacy. And the overall layout was designed with the need for an appealing background for video chats in mind. “It’s now probably the most-used room in the house,” Leah says.

Part of a designer’s skill is “we see the thread that goes through,” Leah says. “A certain style of furniture, a certain color, how a room is arranged, how the light is filtered or captured—things like that. It’s a matter of asking and eliminating and finding the right path. It comes down to listening to the client—and also educating them.”