"I'd like something warmer, but I don't know where to start." The enquiry almost always arrives like that: a precise dissatisfaction, a vague wish, and a budget whose reach nobody has yet measured. The trade consists in turning that into decisions the client can live with for a long time.
Decorating is not arranging furniture attractively
An interior decorator works on what is laid, covered, lit and furnished: colours, finishes, furniture, textiles, lighting, storage, accessories. They compose a coherent and functional atmosphere in a space whose structure they do not alter.
That sets them apart from a neighbouring trade, spatial design, which intervenes earlier on volumes, circulation and sometimes partitions. Job titles, the qualifications required and the extent of permitted acts vary by country and by regulatory framework: it is better to describe what each does than to invoke a title. One prudent rule holds throughout, however: where a project touches structure, services or acts subject to authorisation, it belongs to a qualified professional.
Another boundary, quieter: decorating a lived-in place is not decorating an event. One is taken down the next morning, the other is lived in every day for years. That changes everything — the choice of materials, the resistance expected, the upkeep, the real cost.
The survey: why you do not decorate from photographs
The site visit is the first professional act, and it is not negotiable. A photograph flattens proportions, lies about colour and hides what gets in the way.
You record the useful dimensions, the ceiling height, the orientation and natural light at different hours, the position of openings, sockets and switches, the state of the surfaces, the real circulation routes — where people pass, where they stop —, the visible technical constraints, and the bulk of the furniture the client is keeping.
Above all you listen to use. How many people live there, who entertains, who works from home, where the children eat, what always ends up lying around for want of storage. A magnificent living room with nowhere to put a bag is a failed living room.
From concept to plan
Then comes the proposal: an intention — palette, materials, spirit — translated into concrete elements, then a layout plan that places the furniture and checks that people can move.
The professional value of a mood board is that it should be costed. An atmosphere presented without an estimate commits nobody and sets up a disappointment: the client approves an image, discovers the cost later, and the project falls apart. Costing the concept, by contrast, allows informed trade-offs — dropping an item, changing a material, phasing the work.
Approval happens in stages, each recorded before moving to the next. That is what avoids everything being reopened at delivery.
Specifying what genuinely exists
This is where many projects fail, and it comes down to one sentence: specify only what you can actually obtain.
That requires continuous sourcing — knowing who sells what, on what lead time, in what quality, with what consistency of supply — and checking availability before proposing, not after. A magnificent fabric unavailable for four months is not a proposal, it is a problem.
When a substitution becomes necessary, it is handled as a decision and not as a detail: you warn, you propose a reasoned equivalent, you get approval. The client must always know what will be installed in their home.
Fees, purchases and works: three different things
A readable proposal separates clearly what the professional sells from what they have the client buy.
Fees pay for the survey, the design, the specification, the coordination and the follow-up. Supplies — furniture, finishes, textiles, lighting — are purchases. Third-party labour — painter, joiner, electrician, upholsterer — is a separate service. Transport and installation form an item of their own, often underestimated.
Two models coexist, both legitimate: the professional buys on the client's behalf, or the client pays suppliers directly against a specification. What matters is that the client knows which applies, and whether a margin or a commission enters the equation. Price levels themselves depend on the local market, the floor area, the scope and the level of finish: no general scale means anything, and no typical budget describes a real market.
A deposit, an advance, a bond and a cancellation do not carry the same legal effect everywhere: they are settled in the contract and under the applicable law, never by a percentage presented as a rule.
Working with trades without standing in for them
A decoration project almost always involves other hands: painter, joiner, upholsterer, electrician, floor layer, sometimes a metalworker. The decorator coordinates; they do not execute in their place.
Coordinating means precise things: giving each trade information they can work from rather than an inspiration image, setting an order of intervention — what makes a mess before what gets dirtied, what is fixed before what is movable —, checking progress, and arbitrating when two trades get in each other's way.
Safety sets a firm limit. Modifying an electrical installation, working on a distribution board, fixing a load to a ceiling, hanging a heavy element at height, touching a load-bearing element: these belong to competent personnel and to the rules applicable to the place and the country. A decorator identifies the risk, flags it and calls in the right people — they do not improvise it, and they do not play it down because the result would look good.
Installation, handover and changes
Installation is prepared like a small logistics exercise: dated deliveries, verified access — door width, stairs, lift —, an assembly order, protection of surfaces already finished, removal of packaging.
Handover means walking the project with the client, item by item: what was delivered, what was installed, what remains, what was substituted and why. Reservations are written down.
Changes along the way are normal — a use becomes clearer, a piece pleases less than hoped. They are handled with the same method: what it changes, what it costs, what it delays. A change accepted without being costed always ends in disagreement.
In the African context
Conditions vary sharply from one country, one city and one client segment to another: there is no single African decoration market, and a professional applying the same method everywhere would be wrong.
The first reality is housing itself. The United Nations Human Settlements Programme places housing at the centre of urban policy and points out that it conditions access to employment, education and services; it estimates that three billion people will need adequate housing by 2030. In fast-growing cities, a significant share of demand concerns contained floor areas, homes that evolve in stages, and spaces where one room serves several uses. Storage, modularity and circulation often matter there more than visual effect.
The second is supply. Depending on the market and the supply chain, part of the furniture and finishes is imported, with variable lead times, while another part is made locally. That shifts the skill required: knowing what can be found locally, what is made well and how quickly, and what is better not specified at all, becomes as decisive as a sense of colour.
The third is an opportunity rather than a constraint. Local manufacture and craft allow bespoke work where an imported catalogue cannot follow: joinery, basketry, weaving, metalwork, pottery. The UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage places traditional craftsmanship among the domains of living heritage transmitted from generation to generation. A decorator working with those skills is not indulging in folklore: they obtain pieces fitted to real dimensions, repairable, and carrying an identity importing does not supply.
The fourth concerns material conditions. Depending on the region, heat, humidity, dust or direct sunlight bear on the choice of materials, finishes and textiles, and on the upkeep expected. That is not an aesthetic obstacle but a selection criterion, on a par with colour.
The fifth is the degree of formalisation. The International Labour Organization documents the scale of informal employment in its statistical study on women and men in the informal economy, and decoration is one example: it is practised occasionally as much as by established studios. It also documents, in its guide on upgrading informal apprenticeship in Africa, how many trades are transmitted in the workshop, alongside someone more experienced, outside formal schemes — which describes exactly the path of many partner craftspeople. For a decorator the consequence is twofold: judge a craftsperson on what they have actually delivered rather than on a certificate, and stand out oneself through what can be shown — a survey, a costed concept, a contract, invoices.
What the decorator commits to, and what they do not promise
They do not guarantee a product's availability before checking, nor a result identical to an inspiration image, nor a budget held if the choices change along the way, nor the durability of work carried out by a third party. They stand in neither for the trades, nor for professionals qualified for the acts that require it, nor for the competent authorities.
What they do commit to can be checked: an on-site survey, a costed concept, a layout plan, a specification of genuinely available products, a clear separation between fees, supplies and works, effective coordination and a proper handover.
That is also what makes the practice legible: a portfolio of real, dated work, honest before-and-after views, an enquiry form, a calendar that is kept, quotes, contracts, invoices, clear payment methods — mobile payment having become common in several markets — and genuine reviews. No tool is compulsory, and no online presence promises clients.
Artificial intelligence can help structure a brief, organise stated needs, explore directions, sort references, prepare a checklist or draft a proposal. It does not know the real space, confirms no product's availability, validates no fixing and no structure, replaces no qualified professional, and a render it generates is not proof of feasibility.