Enlisting an interior designer to help with your home search makes sense on multiple levels, according to well-known NYC designer Benjamin Noriega Ortiz.
Ortiz said he’s accompanied longtime repeat clients and their realtors on countless showings over the years, but homebuyers that are thinking of hiring a designer for an upcoming purchase would be wise to utilize the search itself as a way to interview prospective designers.
Literary agent and lifelong New Yorker David Vigliano is in the midst of searching for his next New York City Apartment. He’s hired Ortiz in the past, most notably to decorate his Park Avenue property, so he thinks it made complete sense to have Ortiz’ watchful eye during showings.
“He’s able to point things out that I might not consider,” Vigliano said of Ortiz. “As a buyer you have a real emotional reaction to a space. It’s easy to fall in love with some aspect of it and get carried away by that.”
Anyone can look at a designer’s work in a magazine or through pictures online, but Ortiz said that photos are not necessarily the ultimate test and shouldn’t always be the deciding factor when determining who to hire. He said it’s just as important to have chemistry, a connection, and the ability to communicate and get along with your designer.
“You have to remember that you have to deal with the designer very intimately,” he said. “They are going to ask questions like ‘what’s in your night table drawer?’ If you’re not comfortable with a designer, they’re not for you.”
Ortiz helped Debbie and Mitchell Rechler decorate four rental properties as well as a home on Long Island and most recently, their Manhattan apartment.
Debbie Rechler said when she first met Ortiz, he wanted to know about all of her family’s habits – their eating habits, when and where they watch television, where they hung their coats. But now, after collaborating so many times, she said that Ortiz can easily extract what he needs from her and her husband to create a look and a feel that makes their family feel at home.
“It’s like being with a really close friend that knows how you live,” Rechler said. “He gets in our head. He can take things out of my brain and then he can implement it.”
Consider looking at the same place three times with three different designers, Ortiz said. Without giving away all of their secrets, a lot of designers would likely do that for free, considering it an initial consultation.
A lot of brokers might frown upon investing the extra time showing properties to clients and to their interior designers, but Jeff Adler and Marie Espinal of the Espinal Adler team at Douglas Elliman said they would fully endorse an arrangement like that because ultimately, it could help everyone.
“Design is so crucial in real estate,” according to Espinal. “A designer can really lay the groundwork for a vision. Sometimes they can tell a story in a way that a person can’t do on their own.”
“If the designer has a bad feeling about an apartment, we want to know about it,” Adler said.
Ortiz knows some of his repeat clients so well and has earned their trust enough that they’ll ask him to preview apartments with a realtor so he can narrow their search before they even step foot in an apartment. Sometimes, he can immediately dismiss certain spaces. For example, he can tell the client that a unit faces south, and they’ll need blackout shades; he’ll know if a new building is set to go up across the street and will soon block their amazing views; he’ll know if their custom furniture will fit or make sense in a particular space; and he can rule out apartments that don’t have enough flat walls to hang paintings for his clients that are collectors.
“I’ll tell them, you don’t live like this. This is a mistake.” But, Ortiz said, he can provide specific feedback that could actually make the real estate broker’s job easier. “I’ll go to two or three or four apartments with the realtor, and then I’ll say, ‘okay, you can show this one.’ Then the client comes in and says, okay [the search] is done.”
Selling Your Property (Design vs Staging)
Ortiz’ designs tend to be very personal. A client might show him a painting and ask him to convey the feeling of that painting throughout their living space. Always prioritizing functionality, he uses paint colors, artwork, furniture, shapes, and lighting to create the concept his client is looking for. Ortiz said he almost always includes the color green somewhere and you’ll almost always see a circle of some kind incorporated into the design. No matter the outcome, and no matter what he thinks about the look he’s created, only the client can determine if he was successful.
“If the client says it’s good, it’s good, because it’s their place.”
It’s a designer’s job to appeal to an individual’s or a couple’s very specific set of tastes. They want to love the space they live in. But when someone is selling their property, appealing to a much larger audience is the obvious priority. Even though interior design and staging are two completely different things, Ortiz said that good staging is “really a work of art.” He regularly sees brilliant staging in New York City where a good stager can properly convey scale (so people know that their furniture will fit) and the stager can use a non-threatening pallet to make a space look beautiful.
The good news for property sellers, according to Ortiz, it doesn’t take much to make a very personal space much less personal. “Sometimes all you need to do is change the paint and immediately it becomes less personal.”
The Impact Design Has on the Way We Feel
New York City moves fast. Its residents are always on the run and so many of them have demanding high-stress jobs. Like most interior designers, Ortiz said a person’s living space can have an amazingly positive impact on their personal well-being. Spending time thinking about the environment you live in is “crucial” and as soon as you walk into your living space, you should be able to catch your breath and it should feel like home.
“You have to be able to wake up and feel happy,” Ortiz said. “And that feeling can guide you through your day… [and] through your life.”
Ortiz said it’s entirely possible to create those feelings through interior design no matter where you live, whether it’s a 5,000 square foot home or a tiny studio apartment, your living space should also be diverse and accommodating. “Sometimes we want to feel active… Feel sleepy… Feel fun,” he said. “In a house or an apartment, you can do all of that.”
Marie Espinal, Benjamin Noriega Ortiz, Jeff Adler
