Interior decorating and furniture selection in Batumi

What an interior decorator does and when you need one

We do interior decorating in Batumi in apartments where the building work is already finished: a developer's renovation, fresh finishes to a design, or a home that has been lived in for several years. A decorator doesn't touch the walls, sockets or tiles. The decorator decides which furniture goes into the room, what fabrics the bedspreads and cushions will be made of, where a lamp will go, what to hang on the walls and where to put plants, and brings all of this together into one list with prices.

There are no drawings for a crew in this work: everything that changes is brought in and arranged. It differs from furnishing in the order of things: first the idea for the room, then the list of items to suit it, rather than buying to a ready-made specification. Made-to-measure wardrobes are rare here, and if they can't be avoided, they are ordered the same way as with a furniture package, while curtains made to measure, with their poles, are sewn as part of the textiles package for the apartment.

Where we start: what stays and what changes

On the first visit the decorator measures the rooms and everything you are keeping: the sofa, the bed, the wardrobe, the dining table. We photograph the apartment in the morning and in the evening, because the light from large windows changes a lot over the day, and the colour of the walls and fabrics changes with it. We note the sockets, the ceiling light points, the radiators and the air conditioner units, in other words everything that will end up behind the furniture.

Then we talk about life in the apartment: how many people live there permanently, who comes to stay, where someone works on a laptop, what will come here from your previous home. If the apartment is to be let, we decide who for: guests staying three nights or a tenant staying a year. For an apartment being prepared for sale or for its first photo shoot before letting, there is a separate format, home staging, where items are chosen for the camera and for the buyer.

Concept, mood board and furniture layout

We present the concept as a mood board for each room: the palette, textures, fabric samples, and photos of furniture and light fittings that are actually on sale. The mood board is agreed before any purchases, because this is the stage where changing your mind costs the least. Then we draw a furniture layout to scale: the sizes of the sofa and the rug, the distance to the TV, the place for a floor lamp and an armchair.

We check the rug size on the plan straight away. In the living room we choose one large enough for at least the front legs of the sofa and armchairs to stand on it; in the bedroom, one that extends 50–60 cm beyond the bed on each side, so that in the morning your feet land on the pile rather than on cold porcelain tiles. In apartments furnished without a plan, what we see most often is a small rug in the middle of the room and a sofa blocking the way through. The number of revision rounds for the concept and the layout is written into the contract.

Lighting without new wiring

In a developer's renovation a room often has a single ceiling point in the middle and a couple of sockets near the floor. There is no need to rewire for the sake of decor. We build the lighting from floor lamps, table lamps and plug-in wall lights with fabric-covered cable, and the pendant over the dining table is moved from the central point to a ceiling hook, with its cable swagged across the ceiling. If you want built-in lighting with circuits and scenes, that is a job for a lighting design.

All the light fittings get bulbs of the same colour temperature, usually 2700–3000 K in living rooms, and we look at the colour rendering index: under a bulb with a low CRI, a beige wall looks grey in the evening. In an apartment you visit only from time to time, smart bulbs are useful: they switch on on a schedule, so the windows aren't dark in the evening.

Textiles, artwork and things on the walls

In decorating, textiles do the work of colour. The bedspread, cushions, throw and curtains pull a room together into one colour scheme and can be changed in a day when you tire of them. That is why we usually keep the big items, the sofa and the curtains, calm, and bring in colour through things that are easy to replace.

We choose artwork to suit the wall. Over a sofa 220 cm wide a small poster gets lost, while two or three works from one series hold the wall. We hang the centre of a picture at about 150 cm from the floor, and over a sofa the bottom edge goes 20–25 cm above the backrest. A group is first laid out on the floor or tried on the wall with paper templates, and only then is the wall drilled, so that no extra holes are left. A large mirror goes where it reflects the window, not the front door or the TV.

Plants as part of the interior

For a decorator, a plant is as big an item as an armchair or a floor lamp. One tall plant in a floor planter fills the empty corner behind the sofa better than a dozen pots on the windowsill, which also get in the way when you open the window and clean the glass. We choose the planter to match the room's palette, together with the vases and lamps, and check its size on the furniture layout so that it doesn't block a walkway or a radiator.

Someone has to water a live plant, and this is decided before buying it. In an apartment you visit only from time to time, and in one that is let, we agree the care with the property manager and replace some of the live plants with large artificial branches in floor vases. How to choose species for the light by the window and for missed waterings is covered on the page about eco style in the interior, while for an open balcony or a roof the selection is different: it is chosen for salt and wind in a terrace design.

Buying from the list and the styling day

Once the concept is approved, the decorator compiles the list: every item has a photo, size, price, shop and delivery time. Some items are available in Batumi showrooms, others only from suppliers in Tbilisi or to order, and items with long lead times are approved first. You cross out what you don't need, we order the rest and attach the receipts to the report. A sofa or a rug that you want to touch can be chosen on a tour of the showrooms with the designer.

Arranging takes one or two days, once all the large items have arrived: we place the furniture to the plan, hang the artwork and wall lights, lay out the textiles, and arrange the plants and small things. At the end we photograph the rooms and hand over a list of items with product codes, so that a broken vase or a worn cushion can be replaced with an identical one. If you are abroad, we send the options with photos and prices, show the fabrics by video in daylight, and on the styling day we walk through the apartment together on a video call.

How much interior decorating costs in Batumi

A decorator's work costs from 49 to 65 ₾ per m² of the apartment. The price covers the concept, the choice of furniture, textiles, lighting and decor, ordering and arranging; the purchases themselves are paid for separately, against receipts. Decorating a single room costs 1,140–1,680 ₾, and a mood board for one room without further selection 330–480 ₾. A trip to shops and showrooms with the designer, of up to four hours, costs 360–480 ₾.

As a guide to purchases: mid-range furniture and appliances for an empty apartment come to 360–480 ₾ per m², and if some of the furniture stays, the total is noticeably lower. The fee for the work comes closer to the upper limit when an apartment is furnished from scratch and many items are made to order, with deliveries that have to be tracked. An apartment where most of the furniture stays and the textiles, lighting and decor change costs less. The final cost is set after the measured survey, once the concept is agreed.