Architecture and interiors: who owns the gaps?

A shared design team works well - until something falls between its members

A good building is almost always the work of several hands. An architect, a structural engineer, sometimes an interior designer, a services engineer, a party wall surveyor, specialists of various kinds - each brings expertise that no single person could hold alone. Specialist knowledge is not a luxury on a project of any ambition. It is a necessity, and a team of the right people produces work that none of them could produce on their own.

So the cost is never in having a team. It is in the gaps between its members - the moments where two people each assume the other is handling something, and it falls between them. A shared design team works well when everyone knows exactly what they own. It goes wrong in the spaces where that is unclear.

Some roles are settled, others are not

Some divisions of responsibility are long-established and cause very little friction. The relationship between an architect and a structural engineer, for instance, is well understood on both sides - each knows where their work begins and ends, and the two dovetail without much need for negotiation.

The friction tends to arise in the less-defined pairings. Where an architect and an interior designer both work on the same rooms, or where a project manager and an architect are not entirely clear on who leads what, the boundary is not fixed by convention. Each may reasonably assume the other is dealing with something, and that assumption is where the gap opens. The problem is rarely that anyone has done their job badly. It is that the edges of the jobs were never drawn.

Three ways a project falls through the gaps

A few examples show how easily it happens, and how little it has to do with anyone's competence.

The first is the site visit that leaves someone out. An engineer is called to investigate a structural question, and the architect is not invited, because the client understandably thinks of it as a purely structural matter. But a structural investigation is rarely only structural. Any solution the engineer proposes will have consequences for the spaces, the light, the way the building is used and how it looks, and the architect will have a view on what matters that ought to shape the approach from the outset. When the person thinking about the whole is not in the room, a solution can be settled before its wider implications have been considered - and unpicking it later is far harder than getting it right at the visit.

The second is knowing where to start. A client came to me recently who had not been sure how to begin. They had thought they would start with an interior designer, then realised the changes they wanted involved the structure of the building, and understood that an engineer alone would not give them the answer either. What they needed was someone to see the whole picture first, and sequence the right expertise in the right order. They arrived at the realisation themselves: the architect comes first, and brings in the others as the project requires. Starting in the wrong place is one of the most common and most avoidable ways to lose time and money early.

The third is the resolution of the interior, and it is the one that catches people out most often. There is sometimes genuine confusion about who resolves what lies behind a finished surface. An interior designer may draw a bathroom beautifully, showing the tiling and the layout, without detailing the substrate the tiling needs to sit on. They may specify the ironmongery of a door without being concerned with the fire rating of the door as a whole. They may produce a lighting layout without looking at what sits above the ceiling it is set into.

None of this is a failing. It is perfectly reasonable for an interior designer to resolve the surfaces and leave what lies behind them to someone else - as long as the team knows that is the arrangement, and someone else is genuinely resolving it. The trouble comes only when everyone assumes the build-up behind the surface is being handled, and no one actually owns it. The tiling gets to site with no substrate specified; the door is beautiful but its fire performance was never anyone's job; the lights are placed where a joist turns out to be. These are gap problems, not competence problems, and they are entirely avoidable when the boundary is drawn clearly at the start.

Architecture and interiors, resolved together

One of the most common gaps is the one between a building and its finishes - between the architecture and the interior. Because I work across both, I am often able to close it. When the architecture and the interior are designed together, by one hand, the surfaces and the structure that carries them are resolved as a single thing. The bathroom is drawn with its substrate; the door is designed as a whole, its appearance and its fire rating considered at once; the lighting is placed with full knowledge of what sits above it. The result is a project that feels like a unit, where nothing falls between the building and the way it is finished, because there was no gap to fall into.

That integrated approach is often the right one, but there are other solutions that could work as well. There are projects where an interior designer's specialist expertise brings a richness that lifts the whole - a depth of knowledge about furniture, materials, styling and atmosphere that is a discipline in its own right.

On those projects, a clear and comfortable division works very well: the interior designer takes the furniture and the styling, or expands their role to take on the surfaces, or even the detailed build-up behind the interior finishes. What matters is only that the two disciplines, each doing what it does best, clearly understand the boundary between them.

The gap, not the team

The lesson in all of this is not that a project is better with fewer people. It is that a project is better when everyone knows exactly what they own, and when someone is holding the whole in view and making sure nothing falls between the parts. Sometimes that means one person designing the building and its interior together. Sometimes it means a team of specialists with the boundaries between them drawn clearly. Either can produce excellent work. What produces problems is the gap - the thing everyone assumed someone else was doing.

If you are planning a project and would like to think about how to put the right team together, please get in touch here.