Terms You Need In Your Residential Interior Design Service Agreement
Updated March 2023
When I start working with my clients, most of them have a contract in place that they’ve been using for years. But as we work through their client experience and identify gaps in their process, we find ways to make their contract stronger to better protect themselves and create a smoother experience for their clients. In fact, I recommend looking at your contract after every project to see if you need to tighten it up or make any changes to it (we all know every project presents its own set of challenges).
A solid residential interior design contract is one of the many steps to creating a seamless experience for you and your customers. When you don’t have the correct interior design contract terms and conditions in place or know how to use your contract to back you up, you’ll eventually run into some major hiccups. The question becomes: how do you address things ahead of time in a way that feels supportive to your clients AND that is in line with your policies? It’s all about the way you write your contract and present it to your clients.
My Favorite Interior Design Contract Terms
I’ve found that many designers (even those who have been in the industry for decades) don’t have some of the most important interior design contract terms and conditions in their contracts. Here are a few of my favorites that I often see missing from residential interior design contracts. Interestingly enough, these are also the challenges my designers experience that make them want to quit their businesses:
Communication - This term is rarely in contracts and is one of the most important items you can include! It gives you a place to outline how and when you prefer clients to communicate with you. If you want to stop replying to client messages via text, this is the place to take care of it. You don’t want to meet on evenings or weekends? Put it in your contract.
Term of Agreement - If your clients think they have you forever, they won’t be in a rush to make decisions. I would recommend having this term for all pricing models. As the pro, you certainly know how long each phase of your process will take, and to be of service to your clients, you should be letting them know how long a project like theirs typically takes to complete so that you can remind them throughout the process if needed, that you are coming up on the end of their contract and would like to get x, y, z moving.
Payment Due Dates - Creating fixed dates for payments is key to making sure you get paid, meaning, make the payment due XX days after contract signing rather than tying it to an event. If the event date pushes, so does your payment! To prevent this from happening, don’t tie the due date to an event, tie it to a date.
Late Fees - Obviously, your contract likely includes a standard late fees clause, but are you sharing it anywhere else? Like in your invoice memo lines, your pre-presentation and post-presentation emails, etc.
Budget - You don’t want to start designing without knowing your client’s project budget (and possibly design a whole space they can’t afford). If your client doesn’t know what their budget is, that’s the benefit of working with a pro like you. You can help them prepare a realistic budget for their project as one of your first steps together.
Requoting Fee - If you have to reselect items because something went out of stock and now you’re back in the design phase, that can really throw your whole schedule off. This also lets your clients know it’s their responsibility to make timely decisions, and if they don’t, you’ll be compensated for the time it takes you to contact your vendors, check stock and lead times in case they’ve changed, and update pricing in your system if prices have increased.
Trade Pricing and Information - This clause is amazing because it lets your clients know that you don’t have to share designer pricing or vendor information with them. When/if they ask, you can simply fall back on your contract and share this term with them.
Reinstatement Fee - If you have clients fall off midway through the design process and you don’t hear from them for weeks, how can you maintain your pipeline and your obligations to other contracted projects when you allocate certain hours and resources to their project completion in the timeline you outlined in the contract and in their welcome guide? You can’t. This term lets clients know what happens if they go MIA, and protects you so you can pause their project and focus on your active clients.
Revisions - A lot of clients don’t have a revisions policy included when we start, and I always encourage them to set parameters around revisions to keep the momentum of the project moving forward. There are several ways you can do this, but however you structure it, be sure the parameters work for your business!
Using Your Contract To Back You Up
Once you get your interior design contract terms and conditions in place (check out my Interior Designer Scope and Service Agreement here), there are some really great ways you can fall back on them (when needed) during the design process.
First and foremost, you might have a client read the contract and say “this is so long!” To that you should respond, “Yes, I’ve been doing this for X number of years, and if you see any terms in there that feel a little wild, know they are there because of a situation we experienced! We’ve learned it’s best to be transparent and cover our bases, to protect us and our clients.”
You can also use your residential interior design contract to enforce your communication boundaries. When your clients contact you outside of the outlined communication agreement, you can always refer back to the contract and remind them of it. “Hi Katie, I saw your text over the weekend and wanted to respond by email now that I’m back in the office/back at work. I like email because it ensures nothing gets lost and keeps the whole team in the loop.” If they keep communicating outside of your set hours/methods, you can copy and paste the communication term from your contract as a gentle reminder of how you can best serve them.
Third, REVISIONS!! Don’t lose the entire project because a client can’t decide which pillow they like! I’ve had designers whose projects fell off the face of the earth because there was no revision policy or had clients come back months later asking for changes. What?!? Have your clients initial each page (your attorney probably already has you doing this!), and you can also have them initial any key terms that are an issue, like revisions.
The other practice I recommend is reading the key terms of the contract with your client at their welcome/kickoff meeting so they know and understand what they signed off on. Doing this helps to formalize the process, build trust, and provide them with an opportunity to ask for clarification on any parts of your process if needed.
Need an Interior Design Scope & Service Agreement?
I have many more favorite terms I recommend including in a contract and the ones I shared above are some of the key terms that protect my designers the most, especially in this current climate. If thinking about all of these terms and conditions is making you feel like your current contract is leaving you open to a lot of headaches, I’d love for you to check out my full-service residential interior design contract template or my design day contract template. I created these with an attorney to specifically address the terms I discussed above, along with a ton of other invaluable clauses to protect designers from challenges I’ve seen with my 1:1 clients. BONUS: I include several sample scopes to simplify the entire process for you (this has allowed my clients to reduce their project scope writing time from weeks to less than an hour!!)
You can simply plug in your business-specific language to fit your scope, remove the clauses that don’t apply to your services and pricing structure, and then send it to your attorney to review. Click here to put it in the cart.
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