By Nancy Robinson, Julie Smith Vincenti

If finding your personal style is as daunting as changing your Facebook privacy settings or rebalancing your asset portfolio, you need not fret. Defining your home’s style is easy—if you’re willing to accept that you can’t achieve on your own what a design professional can do quickly, easily and extremely well for you.

Yes, the comfort level, colors, patterns and products in your interior must appeal greatly to you. But the designer is able to narrow thousands of options down to a few and, ultimately, unlock your personal style potential.

It is like a painter who knows what the canvas will look like before he starts painting, or a writer who knows how the book will end, even before she starts to write, according to David Homer of Point of Origin in Glenview, IL.

“A true designer, a good designer, is an artist who can look at a room and the client, and is smart and intuitive enough to figure out what you want based on your lifestyle choices and a proper interview,” Homer says.

This interview likely begins with analyzing pages from magazines, reviewing design books that appeal to your sensibilities, and sizing up your rooms—and it can happen in your home or at a store.

In fact, many of your favorite local retail stores and showrooms, as well as a growing number of national home furnishings brands, offer in-home and/or in-store consultations at little or no charge.

“The outcropping of retail boutiques with trained designers on staff has opened the door to having a professional come in and really give good advice to homeowners,” according to award-winning retailer Jim Hering of Denver retail chain HW Home.  “There are a lot of companies like ours that offer really great design services for free.”

The more advice you solicit and information you share, the more likely you will benefit from the collaboration.

“We ask all the right questions: how do they want to live, how do they intend to use the space, and what are their likes and dislikes,” Hering explains. “It is so much easier to define a style when we get to start with a clean, fresh slate.

“If they have the time, we walk customers through the store to get a feeling of what they respond to in terms of scale and comfort and color,” Hering continues. “This way, we put together a presentation that really works.”

Another type of customer has done plenty of research, but needs a designer to read the tea leaves—what do all these torn magazine pages, reflections from a recent show house tour and sticky notes in design books really mean?

The designer brings all these inspirations together into a cohesive plan, according to Point of Origin’s Homer.

What’s more, the designer facilitates some risk-taking. Because being locked into preconceived notions of what you and your house want, need and love will lead to disappointment, HW Home’s Hering cautions.

“The customers who come in with an exact idea of what they want in their home are usually the most difficult to satisfy for lots of reasons,” he explains. “First, they have a preset notion of what their home is going to look like when it’s all complete. But, often, this customer is unsatisfied because her goals were likely unrealistic.”

According to Patti Schmer of Connecticut retailer Homeward Bound, the best way to create a pleasing interior is to coax the client to leave her comfort zone.

“I absolutely pull customers out of their safety zone,” Schmer says. “I always start with a few safe, standard items, and then I throw in one or two that are really way out of the range. Most of the time, I am able to get the customer to go out on a limb and pick something that they wouldn’t have picked before. And these risky products suit the rest of the interior really well. I help the homeowner get out of their box, so that furnishings aren’t all matched…one thing exactly like the next.”

In the end, the design professional is more accessible today that ever before, and this is a great thing, according to Hering.

“The way consumers use designers and design centers has changed significantly in the last 20 years,” Hering says. “I think for the better. There were very few people in this country who were able to afford a designer or really understood what a designer could do for them.

“But we have a more educated public, people understand a little more about style, and they know it’s attainable,” he continues. “Homeowners can easily get a professional to come into their home and share ideas about how to make their space better. It has really opened up a whole world that people didn’t have much access to in the past. It has changed the way people shop for furniture, and it’s the wave of design for the future.”

Up next: Traditional, transitional, exotic or contemporary…which style are you?
 

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