Landscapes & Interior Design.

The Growing Field of Interior Design

Interior design is one of the newest and hottest fields in the home improvement industry. Still, many homeowners make the mistake of confusing these trained professionals with interior decorators. Of course, interior decoration is an important profession, but they are not, in fact, professionals. The only actual requirement of the job is that you have a good taste and a sense of style. But there are absolutely no educational requirements.

By comparison, an interior designer must graduate with a degree in either architecture or interior design from an accredited college or university. And after that the young designer must pass a licencing exam. What this means is that designers must answer to licencing boards, just like physicians or attorneys. It also means that if something goes wrong or if the designer does not complete the project to the client’s satisfaction, then they can file a complaint with the licencing board.

But that is just one of the many important differences between decorators and designers. While it may appear to the untrained eye that both jobs have similar goals, i.e., decorating a space, they go about their work in very different ways. For decorators, all projects inevitably rely on personal taste and style. But designers, like the ones at Toronto interior design , have more tools and experience with which to work.

For example, most licenced interior designers use a program called computer-aided design (CAD), which gives them the ability to create space designs with 3-D computer graphics. Decorators are simply not trained to use this software and as a result they rarely pay any mind to structural elements or architecture.

Interior designers must also pay attention to building codes and interior lighting. And since many of them are trained architects, they are experts at knowing exactly how to use space.