Design is often one of the first places people look to save money.
It’s understandable. It sits early in the process, before anything physical exists, and can feel less tangible than the build itself.
But in reality, it’s the point where the success of the entire project is decided.
Long before anything is on site.
When we start a project, we’re not thinking about finishes or furniture first. We’re thinking about how the space needs to work.
How people will move through it.
How it will feel at different times of day.
What happens when it’s busy, not just when it’s empty.
In hospitality, that might mean understanding how a space handles pressure at peak, how long people stay, and what encourages them to stay longer. In workplaces, it’s about how people use the space across a full day — where they focus, where they collaborate, and whether the environment actually supports that.
Those things aren’t layered on at the end. They’re set early, through design decisions that often aren’t immediately visible.
That’s why design fees can feel variable.
From the outside, it can look like a percentage or a number attached to a stage. But in practice, it reflects how much thinking, testing and coordination a project requires to work properly.
A straightforward office refurb might sit at around ten percent of the build cost. A more complex hospitality project might go higher, simply because there are more moving parts, more pressure on the space, and more detail to resolve.
Sometimes a fixed fee makes more sense. Sometimes a project starts with a short piece of focused work before it develops further.
The structure changes, but the role of design doesn’t.
A simple example would be a mid-range office refurbishment in London.
At around £850 per square metre, a 500 square metre space comes in at roughly £425,000 for construction. A typical design fee might sit at around ten percent of that.
It’s easy to look at that number in isolation.
But what it represents is everything that shapes how that space performs over the next five or ten years. How it feels to work in. How effectively it’s used. Whether it supports the people in it, or quietly works against them.
That’s where the real value sits.
Where projects tend to struggle is when design is compressed or treated as a step to move through quickly.
Decisions get made without enough testing. Assumptions aren’t challenged. Details that seem small at the time carry through into the finished space.
And once the build is complete, those things are difficult to undo.
You can’t easily rework flow. You can’t quietly fix how a space feels at peak. You’re left working around decisions that were locked in early.
We see design as the foundation of the project, not a layer on top of it.
It’s where the commercial and operational thinking comes together and gets translated into something physical.
When that’s done properly, everything that follows becomes clearer. Costs are easier to control. The build runs more smoothly. And the end result does what it’s supposed to do.
So when you’re looking at a design fee, it’s worth stepping back from the number itself.
Because you’re not just paying for drawings or concepts.
You’re investing in how the space will perform, day in and day out, long after the project has finished.
And that’s what makes the difference.
