The flat looks finished: pale walls, a level floor, a tidy bathroom. So the question comes up naturally - why pay for a design project when all the place needs is fresh finishes before you move in or start renting it out?
I will answer as an architect. A photograph shows you how a room looks. It tells you nothing about how it works. The expensive decisions are the ones taken mid-renovation, when the finishes are already on and changing anything means taking them off again.
This article is about the difference between a design project and a renovation without a plan: which jobs get expensive once the finishes are on, which mistakes turn up in almost every flat done without drawings, and where a project actually saves money on purchases and rework.
Two ways to run the same job
Without a plan, decisions get made on site. The electrician asks where the sockets go, and you answer standing in an empty room, with no furniture and no appliances to point at. The kitchen is chosen in a showroom, with no reference to the connections already buried in the walls.
Lighting works the same way. The lighting scenes you actually live by - general, task, evening - are set by cables in the walls and the ceiling, and the cables go in long before anyone has chosen a single fitting.
A design project is the same set of decisions taken before the work starts, on paper. Where the bed goes. Which way the wardrobe door swings. How high the tap sits. Which switch controls which fitting. Where the air conditioning unit goes so that it does not blow into your face. While these are lines on a drawing, they are cheap to move. Once the plaster is on and the tiles are laid, every change costs time and money.
The short version I use with clients: a renovation without a plan answers the question of how a room looks. A project answers how you live in it, how it works, and what the whole thing costs together.
And a project is not a set of pretty pictures. The renders are one part of the package. The substance is the working drawings and the schedules: dimensioned plans, electrical and plumbing setting-out, wall elevations (a flat drawing of every wall, with heights and junctions), a finishes schedule and a specification - the list of everything to be bought, with names, quantities and the room each item belongs to. Later in this series I will go through the package in detail. Here the point is the contrast itself: decisions in advance, or decisions on site.
What gets expensive after the finishes are on
Some jobs are cheap in the right order and miserable afterwards. The list is short, and it barely changes from flat to flat.
Sockets and outlets. The classic. Too few, or in the wrong places, and you live with extension leads running across the room. Adding a socket to a finished wall means cutting the finish, chasing the wall, filling, repainting, and dust through the whole flat. On a drawing the sockets are tied to the furniture: both sides of the bed, the desk, the kitchen appliances one by one, the bathroom for a hairdryer and a washing machine. "We will put in plenty, just in case" usually produces plenty in the wrong places.
Light. One fitting in the middle of the ceiling gives flat light that is no good for reading, for cooking or for looking at yourself in a mirror. The scenes - general, task, evening - are decided before the ceiling closes: the reading lights by the bed, the strip over the worktop, what comes on when you walk in. Moving a fitting after decoration means a new cable in a finished ceiling. Without renders it is hard to judge the proportions of a fitting, or where its light will actually fall. In a rental, bad light shows up in the first guest photo: grey faces, dark corners, and no amount of cushions will fix it.
Ventilation and air conditioning. On this coast it is not an optional extra, it is the background to the year: humidity, July and August heat, damp shoulder seasons. The indoor unit over the head of the bed is the most common thing I find in a finished flat. On paper it cools the room. In practice it blows down your neck and hums above your ear. Pipework and condensate drainage are hidden before the finishes go on, and the unit is placed so that the air moves along the room rather than into the pillow. The same goes for extraction: a short, straight run for the air is planned early, or you end up dragging a duct across the kitchen and boxing it in.
Plumbing and heights. Taps, the toilet, the towel rail, the connections for a washing machine and a dishwasher - each has its own height and its own place. If the tiles are already on and the connection turns out to be ten centimetres off, the choice is a visible bent adaptor or a broken tile. A project fixes these points before the tiler arrives, not after.
Doors, swings and clearances. The wardrobe door that hits a light fitting. The kitchen drawer that will not open because of an architrave. The bathroom door that blocks the hallway when it is open. All of it is obvious on a dimensioned plan in five minutes, and nearly invisible in an empty room with no furniture in it.
The mistakes I see most often
This is what I find again and again in flats and houses where nobody was asked to draw anything first. The examples are generalised, and none of them points at a particular client.
A kitchen with no appliance plan. Connections go in roughly, and then it turns out that the oven and the microwave each want their own socket in their own place, the dishwasher needs its own supply, and so does the extractor. Out comes the angle grinder for the splashback, in come the extension leads and adaptors. If you do not want the adaptors, the splashback is cut out and the kitchen wiring is done again.
Another common one: the hob pushed up against the sink. There is no worktop left between the two, so anything you chop you chop in mid-air or at the dining table. On a kitchen plan you see it at once - you keep at least sixty centimetres of worktop between the sink and the hob.
A bathroom mirror with no light of its own. One fitting, behind you. Your face in shadow every morning. Adding lights on either side of the mirror once the tiles are on means a surface cable or a rebuilt wall.
The air conditioning unit over the bed. I see it in almost every second finished flat I walk into. Moving it in a finished interior means new pipework across a decorated wall and a new chase for the drain.
Storage measured to the millimetre and no further. On the plan the flat looked roomy. In life, the suitcase, the ironing board, the vacuum cleaner and the spare bedding for guests have nowhere to go. The wardrobe that will be "bought later" turns out to be too deep, or it covers the sockets.
Tiles and sanitaryware bought before the drawings. You liked them in the showroom, they were delivered, and now the setting-out does not work: the cut tile lands in the most visible place, the decorative row disappears behind the mirror, the access hatch sits on a joint. Tiles and sanitaryware are chosen to suit the setting-out, not the other way round.
Tile size is a story of its own. If it does not divide into the room, you are left with a two or three centimetre strip along the walls. Expensive tile looks cheap that way: the eye goes to the sliver at the skirting instead of to the material.
Then there are the walls themselves. If they are not parallel, that narrow strip tapers along its length and underlines how crooked the room is. And recesses built before anyone set out the tiling never line up with the joints.
In Montenegro there is one more: heights. I keep finding kitchen worktops, basins and bathroom mirrors set higher than standard. Montenegrins are tall on average - around 183 centimetres for men, one of the highest figures in the world - and builders often work to their own height rather than to the standard. In a house where the whole family is tall, that is a reasonable decision and people live comfortably with it. In a flat that will be rented out it is a mistake, and it gets paid for in reviews on Airbnb and Booking.com.
Colour chosen without testing it in the room. The shade that looked warm grey in the showroom turns lilac in a south-facing flat, and a north-facing bedroom eats the warmth out of beige. Painted samples in the actual room, looked at in daylight and in the evening, are part of the project, not a whim.
None of this is about taste. All of it is about order: decide first, then buy and build.
Where a project saves money
A project saves in three places: purchases you did not need, days the site stands still, and work done twice.
The specification kills duplicate buying. With a list of everything and its quantities, nobody buys boxes of spare tile just in case, and nobody orders the missing third of it three times over with delivery from the other end of the country. Waste is counted in advance: tile plus cuts, paint for two coats, sockets and faceplates room by room. In Montenegro, with its logistics, this is worth real money - much of it comes from Podgorica or from abroad, and every extra order is days of waiting.
A full drawing set kills downtime. Nobody stands around waiting for you to decide, and nobody guesses. The electrician has their plan, the plumber has theirs, the tiler has the setting-out. The question "where do you want this?" stops being asked. It does not make the work itself faster by magic, but it removes the pauses in which a crew goes off to another site and comes back a week later.
Decisions on paper kill rework. Moving a wall on a drawing is an evening. Moving it after plastering is a week of dust and new materials. The earlier a decision is made, the cheaper it is. A project moves as many decisions as possible into the cheapest phase there is.
One honest note about expectations. A project does not make a renovation cheap. It makes the budget predictable. You see in advance what the total is made of - labour, finishes, lighting, sanitaryware, furniture - and you can move money around deliberately: simpler here, keep the level there, because that is what a guest notices or what you live with every day. Where the budget of a build in Montenegro comes from in the first place, I have written about separately.
If you are renting the flat out
An investor has a different logic. The guest will not notice how well a junction is detailed. The guest notices sleep, light for photographs, hot water without surprises, and somewhere to put a suitcase.
What a project gives you here. A neutral but warm base that photographs well and does not date in a season. Hard-wearing surfaces where suitcases hit them and where everything is cleaned after every stay. Enough sockets by the bed and by the mirror, because guests arrive with phones, laptops and hairdryers. A quiet indoor unit that is not above the pillow. Spare tile and paint in the same shades kept in the store cupboard, so that a chip after the season is dealt with in a day instead of re-tiling a wall.
And one more thing, about reviews. Guests rarely write at length about good design. They write, consistently, about dark rooms, noise, nowhere to hang a towel and nowhere to put their things. A project closes exactly those points, and those are the ones that hold the rating.
If it is your own house
An owner has different questions. Where you drink your coffee in the morning. Whether you need a quiet corner to work in. Where the children sleep when the grandchildren come. Where the washing dries in February, when the terrace is damp. What kind of light you like in the evening.
A house project starts with habits, not with a catalogue. We write down the routine: who gets up first, who works from home, who cooks seriously and who only has breakfast. The plan, the lighting and the storage grow out of that, not the other way round. A house done without it comes out looking like everyone else’s, and then gets fixed in small pieces for years.
For a house in Montenegro, the terrace and the way you move between inside and outside deserve their own attention: shade in summer, shelter from the wind, light for the evenings, sockets outside, somewhere to keep cushions and covers. That is designed too, not bought afterwards.
In short
A renovation without a plan is a series of decisions taken while the work is going on, when every change already costs finishes and time. A project is the same decisions taken earlier, when all they cost is drawings and conversations.
Put simply: a project is not about "beautiful". It is about comfortable, predictable in budget and free of rework. Beautiful follows from that.
The next article in the series will be in the journal: what a full design package actually contains - surveys, layouts, renders, working drawings, specifications, stages and timing - and what site supervision is and why it pays for itself. You will know what you are paying for before you buy anything.