Can You Fast-Track Great Design?
The short answer: yes. The honest answer: But it will cost you.
Interior designer Brandon Schubert recently wrote about the jaw-dropping cost of “instant decorating.” He walked into a showroom to source dining chairs and was quoted nearly £6,000 per chair—plus £1,500 for the leather upholstery. Multiply by ten and suddenly a dining room costs more than some people’s entire down payment.
This is the true price of throwing together a room overnight: you’re not just paying for furniture, you’re paying for speed, convenience, and the certainty that every item will arrive perfectly, as planned. If you have the budget, you can absolutely build an entire houseful of “curated” treasures in six months. But for the rest of us? That kind of decorating sprint is impossible without mortgaging your future.
If You Don’t Want to Spend a Fortune, You Have to Take the Long Road
The alternative to writing enormous cheques is patience—a willingness to curate a space over time rather than force it into existence all at once. Authentic, soulful interiors are built through years of decision-making: one well-chosen chair here, a vintage rug there, a handmade lamp discovered on holiday or at a flea market.
This slower approach has three big advantages:
Your home gains character. When every object has a story, your rooms feel alive—not showroom sterile.
Your budget stretches further. Thrift shops, auctions, estate sales, and small makers offer remarkable quality for modest prices—but only to those willing to hunt and wait.
The Myth of the Effortless Room
Those magazine-ready interiors that look so casually collected? Don’t be fooled. They’re almost always the product of either:
Massive financial investment upfront, or
Years of collecting, editing, and refining.
Great design is never truly instant. Even if you have money to burn, someone still has to make a thousand tiny decisions: fabric swatches, light fixtures, trim details, hardware finishes. That sort of layered beauty simply can’t be purchased in a single afternoon—it must be lived into.
Conclusion: Good Things Take Time
Yes, you can create a home full of high-quality, one-of-a-kind pieces on a modest budget. But only if you embrace the long game.
Skip the panic-buying and let your space evolve. The result won’t just be affordable—it will be authentically yours, a room that feels collected rather than assembled, and lived-in rather than staged.
Because in decorating, as in life, you can have it fast or you can have it good—but rarely both.
-Juliette