The design service

What £500 buys

A design, on paper, priced. Not a mood board and not a showroom visit with a laptop.

The fee is credited in full against any commission you go on to place. It exists so that we can put three to four weeks of Oliver Manning’s time and a day of Paul Sims’s into your room before you have committed to anything.

It is the same service whether the room is a cottage kitchen or the ground floor of a listed house.

The survey

We come to the house. Two to three hours. We measure the room properly, take levels across the floor, check walls for wind and bow, find the services, and look at what is already there.

In a listed building we also record what we have to match: skirting profiles, architrave, cornice, door stiles, glazing bars. Those go on the drawing as sections, because a kitchen in a Grade II* house has to look as though the house grew it.

We photograph everything and leave with a hand-drawn sketch plan. You get a copy of it before we start the proper drawings, so you can see the thinking early and stop it if it is wrong.

The drawings

A measured plan at 1:20. Full elevations of every run at 1:20, showing door and drawer divisions, appliance positions, cornice and plinth, and the relationship of the cabinetry to the windows and doors of the room.

One rendered visual, from the position you actually stand in. One, not eight. It is there to test the colour and the mass, not to sell you the room.

Sections through the island and through any piece where the construction is not obvious.

What arrives in the box

The drawings come in a presentation box, handed over in person at the workshop or at your house. Inside it: the plan and elevations, printed at scale; the rendered visual; two or three timber samples in the species proposed, finished exactly as your kitchen will be finished, not sanded blanks; paint samples brushed out by our polisher on the actual door profile, so you see the colour on a moulding and not on a card; worktop samples in the materials specified; the handles and knobs themselves, in the finish specified.

Also in the box: an itemised quotation, priced line by line, cabinet by cabinet, with the hardware schedule and the appliance allowances shown separately. And a programme with dates on it.

Revisions

Two rounds are included. Most clients use one and a half. People move an island, drop a wall cupboard, change a colour and take a door off a larder.

Anything beyond the second round, or a change of brief large enough that the room becomes a different room, is charged at £150 per further round. We tell you before we start it.

What it does not buy

It does not buy a set of drawings you can take to another maker. The design remains ours until you place a commission. That is not us being difficult; it is the only way we can afford to do this much work for £500.

It does not buy interior design. We do not choose your flooring, your lighting or your paint for the walls, though we will talk to whoever does.

It does not buy planning or building-regulations drawings. If your architect needs our information, we give it to them free.

If you go no further

You owe nothing beyond the £500. No follow-up calls, no discount offers, no pipeline. We will send the samples with you if you want them.

To book, telephone the workshop at Mickfield or write to us. We will normally survey within a fortnight.

Workshop visits are by appointment. Mickfield is twelve miles from Ipswich, about thirty from Bury St Edmunds, Cambridge and Colchester, and an hour from London by rail. Many clients prefer to take the box here, with the machines running.