The Difference Between a Vision Meeting & a Design Meeting

If you taken a look at our design process when it comes to full service decorating and full service design, you may have noticed that we have two different types of meetings listed - the first being a “vision meeting” and the second, a “design meeting”. You might be wondering then, well what’s the difference?? That’s what we would like to discuss today.

The “vision meeting” is the first “official” meeting that we have with our design clients after having had our consultation and signing off on the contract for the project. In this meeting, we meet in our client’s homes and present them with the beginnings of a design plan. This includes: mood boards, floor plans, elevations, and a preliminary order list. The purpose of this meeting is to make sure that we are on the right track when it comes to the overall style and function of the rooms that we’re working on. We also want to feel the clients out on budget - what they’re comfortable with, where we have wiggle room, or where we might need to scale back. This meeting is extremely collaborative - we encourage client feed back! At the end of the meeting, our goal is to have gained a better sense of the direction of the project. We then go back to the office to make modifications to the design.

The next meeting that we’ll have with our clients is called a “design meeting”. In this meeting, we present a much more concrete design plan; again, with: mood boards, floor plans, elevations, order list, etc. However we may also have some more detailed specifications on their (geared towards our contractor). In this meeting we really hope to cement the overall design, timeline and budget for the project. The goal for this meeting, is to come away with just a few modifications to make. We’ll have a clear idea of who we need to involve (i.e. electrician or contractor) and when (scheduling things out). We’ll also be a lot closer to a final order list. Once that gets approved by our clients, we go ahead and order/procure the necessary pieces.

We often have more than just one design meeting for a full service decorating of design project, however often these are woven into site-visits, when we’re checking on the progress of a renovation, etc. We also have phone-calls with clients, touching base on things.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Austin Kaseman