What Interior Design Actually Involves

The most common assumption about interior design is that it's picking out things that look nice. In reality, most of the work happens before a single item is chosen: understanding how a family actually lives in a space, mapping a layout around that, and then finding the specific pieces, materials, and finishes that make the plan real. The picking is the fast part. Everything around it is the job.

A single room touches dozens of vendors, and every one of those relationships has to be managed, from confirming lead times and freight quotes to tracking down a delayed shipment or resolving a damaged piece before install day. Rayna coordinates all of it directly, so a client's only experience of that process is a finished room that arrives the way it was planned.

Twice a year, Rayna travels to High Point, North Carolina, home to the largest furniture trade market in the country, and to the Las Vegas Market, to see new collections in person before they're available anywhere else. Walking a showroom floor still beats scrolling a catalog when it comes to judging scale, fabric, and finish quality, and those trips are where a lot of a project's best pieces actually get found.

Rayna holds wholesale accounts with to-the-trade vendors that aren't open to the general public, which means access to furniture, fabric, and lighting lines a client can't source on their own, often at better pricing than retail. It also means more design options than what's sitting on a showroom floor.

The right piece for a room is rarely local. Furniture, custom cabinetry, and specialty materials for Rayna's projects regularly ship in from vendors across the country, which means coordinating freight schedules, delivery windows, and receiving logistics so everything arrives in the right condition, in the right order, on a timeline that still works for construction or install day.