Interior Design Company Checklist for Africa & Gulf Builds

Shortlisting an interior design company for a project in Lagos, Juba, Dar es Salaam or Jeddah is a procurement decision before it is a creative one. The drawings decide how a room reads. The material schedule decides whether that room still reads the same way after three rainy seasons, and the packing list decides what condition it arrives in. Our enquiry log from East Africa now runs to 596 requests. Almost none of them argue about style. They argue about who owns the schedule, which absorption figure applies, and whether the joinery lands flat or warped after 40 days at sea.

So the checks below are not aesthetic. They are the nine questions we would ask if we were the client, each with a pass mark you can write into a contract.

1. What an interior design company is actually paid to deliver

Clients price the fee against the render pack. The fee really buys five documents, and only one of them is visual. Ask to see all five in the proposal, not after the deposit clears.

Concept direction sets the palette, the material family and the level of ornament. The room-by-room schedule is the working document: every floor, wall, ceiling, joinery item, textile and hardware piece, with grade, thickness and finish. Shop drawings carry real dimensions taken on site, not scaled off the architect's PDF. The physical sample set is the contract's colour reference, and it needs batch numbers on the back. The logistics plan covers crush protection, moisture barrier, container fill and the port of discharge.

A studio that hands over the first two and calls it a package is selling images. The last three are what make the images true eight months later, and they are also the part that most fee proposals quietly leave out.

2. Nine checks for an interior design company in a hot climate

Each row has a number attached, because a spec without a number cannot be enforced at handover. Run this table against every shortlisted firm and score the answers honestly.

Vetting an interior design company: nine questions, the pass mark, and the cost of a bad answer

Check	Ask	Pass mark	Cost of a bad answer
Timber moisture	What moisture content do you specify for joinery in this city?	Kiln-dried to 8–10% MC, every cut edge sealed	Cupping and open joints in the first dry season
Tile absorption	What absorption and abrasion class goes on the floor?	Below 0.5%, PEI IV domestic, PEI V commercial	Stained grout, chipped edges at chair legs
Metal grade	304 or 316 stainless on handles and balustrades?	316 within 5 km of the coast, 304 inland	Tea staining and pit rust inside a year
Wall build-up	Is the wall panel ventilated behind?	10–15 mm rear cavity on treated battens	Mould growing unseen behind the cladding
Textile rating	Is the upholstery solution-dyed?	Colour locked in the fibre, bleach-cleanable	Visible fade within 18 months of window UV
Sample control	Do I sign off physical samples before the PO?	Yes, with batch numbers and a retention set	Delivered colour that fights the approved render
Site measurement	Who takes the dimensions the joinery is built to?	The same team that details it, after screed	Units that cannot be fitted without cutting
Packing plan	How is the package protected for sea freight?	Flat-packed, edge-protected, moisture-barriered	Crushed corners and swollen board ends
Commercial terms	FOB, CIF or DAP, and who clears the port?	One named Incoterm per shipment, in writing	Demurrage billed to the party who assumed nothing

Two of these checks catch more failures than the rest. Moisture content is the single most common cause of joinery complaints we see, because board dried to a European 6 percent equilibrium will swell the moment it meets 80 percent relative humidity. Site measurement is the second, and it is entirely organisational. A wardrobe detailed off an architect's PDF will not fit a wall that was skimmed twice.

3. Residential interior design and commercial interior design weight the list differently

The nine checks apply to both. What changes is which rows carry the penalty. In residential interior design the client lives with the result daily and forgives nothing at eye level. Touch matters more than abrasion class. Door and drawer fronts need a finish that survives cleaning by staff who were not trained on it, and the light needs to be warm enough that timber and linen still read warm at nine in the evening. Bedrooms want 2700–3000 K at CRI 90 or above, not the 4000 K that a contractor installs by default.

In commercial interior design the arithmetic flips. A hotel lobby, a clinic reception or a bank branch is judged by traffic, cleaning chemicals and the cost of closing a zone to repair it. Floors move from timber to terrazzo, stone or a high-grade porcelain with a PEI V surface. Wall systems become modular so a single damaged panel can be swapped overnight. Every specification should assume daily disinfectant on touch surfaces, because in a clinic it will get exactly that.

Both types share one failure point, and it sits between the schedule and the site. Furniture and joinery are the items most often bought outside the design package, and the gap shows. Our guide to Furniture Materials for Hot-Climate Interiors covers the substrate choices, and the wider palette logic is set out in Modern Interior Design: The Warm-Climate Spec Guide if you are still fixing the look.

4. Incoterms, packing, and the 30 to 45 day sea leg

Most disputes we see are not about quality. They are about who owned the goods at the moment they were damaged, and that question is answered by a three-letter term on the invoice. An interior package shipped FOB leaves the supplier's risk at the port of loading; CIF carries it to the destination port but not to your door; DAP puts it on site. Pick one term per shipment and write it into the purchase order, because the ICC Incoterms rules allocate cost, insurance and risk by that term alone.

Packing is the physical half of the same problem. Board and panel goods travel best flat-packed, with corner protection on every bundle and a moisture barrier inside the container, because a steel box crossing the Gulf in August condenses water on the underside of its roof. Ceramic and stone crates need to be stood on edge, never laid flat, and labelled by room so the site does not open all forty crates to find one vanity top. A packing list that matches the room schedule saves a week at handover.

Time is the third variable, and it is routinely underestimated in the programme. A 30 to 45 day sea transit is normal to East Africa, and port clearance adds one to three weeks depending on documentation. A design studio that has never shipped will build a programme that assumes a truck. Our analysis of East Africa Quote-to-Order: Why 135 Quotations Stall shows how often the delay sits in exactly this handover between design approval and freight booking.

Need the schedule before you sign with an interior design company?

Send the drawings and the city. We return a room-by-room material schedule with the climate figures filled in, a sample set, and one quoted package delivered to your port under a single Incoterm.

Request a Material Schedule →