One Whole St. Louis Room, Designed, for $1,349: What Designers Cost

Revised October 29, 2026

Quick answer

How much should I budget for an interior designer?

Most homeowners spend $1,900 to $11,200 on an interior designer, or $5 to $12 per square foot, according to HomeGuide’s cost survey, with hourly rates of $50 to $200 before furniture. In St. Louis, Olive + Opal Interiors prices one fully designed room at $1,349 and an in-home consultation package at $749, and PureWave Designs lists a $395 design consultation. Furnishings are billed on top of the design fee.

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You’ve moved the couch four times. Go ahead and admit it. In a brick bungalow in Southampton, it can’t go under the front window, because that’s where the cast iron radiator lives, painted the same cream as the plaster and ticking every time the boiler wakes up. It can’t float in the middle, because the rug is too small. So it’s back against the wall where it started, and you’re standing in the doorway with your coffee going cold, staring at the dead corner, knowing the room is wrong and not knowing why.

And you haven’t called a designer. Not because you don’t want help. Because you assume the first word out of her mouth is a number with a comma in it, and you’re a little afraid of her face when she sees the rug.

Here is the number, and it’s printed right on a St. Louis studio’s own website. Olive + Opal Interiors lists its Room Revival package at $1,349: an in-home design consultation, a full room floor plan and layout strategy, a visual design board for one room with shoppable product links, up to 3 rounds of revisions, and in-home styling. One whole room, planned on paper, with a designer standing in it twice. The couch question and the radiator question both live inside that price.

If you’d rather carry the plan out yourself, the same studio’s Style Jumpstart is $749 for an in-home design consultation and a follow-up email of shoppable links. Across town, PureWave Designs, another St. Louis studio, lists a $395 design consultation right on its home page. The scariest number in interior design turns out to be one you can read before you ever pick up the phone.

Color and placement do more than people expect in these houses. St. Louis Homes & Lifestyles once featured a Joni Spear project in which, with only cosmetic changes, the designer turned an uninspired house into a home bursting with colorful style. No walls moved. That matters here more than almost anywhere, because the walls in an old St. Louis house are the expensive part: plaster over wood lath that cracks and dusts when you cut it, brick that carries the floor above, radiators that can’t move without a plumber. The cheapest fix is usually the one that leaves them alone.

You aren’t paying for taste. You’re paying to stop guessing. Before that first hour, snap a photo of every wall in the room, measure the radiator and the windows, and decide the number you won’t go past. Bring the rug too. She’s seen worse.

How much should I budget for an interior designer?

Here is what that money looks like at night in a plaster-walled front room in Dutchtown: a floor plan spread across the coffee table, a design board with links you can actually click, a list of what stays and what goes, and a designer who is coming back to style the room. That’s the St. Louis package. Read it twice, because you get the plan whether or not you buy a single new piece. National numbers run much wider: the HomeGuide cost guide puts flat-rate fees at $1,000 to $12,000 per room and design-only work at $450 to $1,500 per room.

The same guide says most design firms charge between $1,500 and $4,900 a room on a flat fee, which makes that $1,349 St. Louis room package sit just under the band. Picture what the number is buying in a Shaw four-family where you own the top floor: plaster walls, a narrow front parlor, one good window. A plan you carry out yourself costs a fraction of a finished room, so decide which one you want before the first call.

Five ways the meter can run

Three neighbors can hire three designers for nearly the same living room and get three bills that look nothing alike. The work isn’t different. The meter is.

Hourly is the honest one and the dangerous one. You pay for exactly the time you use, which is perfect when the problem is a paint color and a furniture layout and the designer can solve it while standing on the oak floor of a Tower Grove South bungalow with a fan deck in her hand. It gets dangerous on a big job with no ceiling, because the clock runs during the weeks when nothing seems to happen: the emails, the backordered fabric, the call to the vendor. Ask for a not-to-exceed number in writing.

A flat fee per room is the friendliest for a fixed budget and the most likely to hide a scope fight. The number only means something if the paper behind it says how many revision rounds, how many site visits and whether install day is included. Olive + Opal’s published package is a good model of a clean scope: it names the 3 revision rounds and the 2 styling hours right next to the price. Cost-plus is the one that confuses people: the designer buys at trade pricing, shows you that cost, and adds a percentage. Done cleanly, you see both numbers on every line. A percentage of the whole project scales with the job, and you should ask exactly what it’s calculated on. Per square foot fits gut renovations and new builds, and it fits a single small room badly.

The question that saves the most money is the plainest one. Before you compare any two quotes, ask each designer which of these meters you are on, and whether a furniture markup stacks on top of it.

What the first paid hour should leave in your hands

A good first hour sounds like floorboards creaking in a Webster Groves Victorian. The designer walks every room you want touched, opens the closet, looks up at the light fixture, asks where you actually sit at night and where the dog sleeps. She is not selling. She is diagnosing.

By the end you should know what is possible in the space and what isn’t, a rough budget for the work you described, what has to happen before what, and any red flags she spotted, like a wall that may be carrying the floor above or wiring that won’t take a dozen new lights. If you walk away with none of that, you learned something useful for the price of one hour. And ask whether the fee comes back to you: Yours by Design, a St. Louis firm on Thumbtack, charges $150 for a one-hour consultation and credits it to the design fee if you hire the firm.

Fabric and paint samples spread across a table during a design consultation

The St. Louis house changes the bill

National cost articles stop being useful at the front door of a brick two-story in south city. Our housing stock is old, masonry-heavy and specific, and it changes both the design work and what it costs.

Plaster over wood lath is harder and more brittle than drywall, and running new wiring through it means real patching, the gritty white dust on every sill, not a quick mud-and-tape. Good designers plan runs to keep the plaster demolition small and price the patching honestly. If paint is part of the plan, our guide to interior painting in St. Louis covers the prep older walls need.

Cast iron radiators sit exactly where you want the sofa, tick and knock when the boiler kicks on, and can’t move without touching the piping. Any designer working an older St. Louis house should raise them without being asked. Old wiring is the other quiet budget killer: a lighting plan with recessed cans and new outlets is also an electrician’s bill, and our breakdown of what an electrician costs in St. Louis covers panel upgrades and what moves that price.

Reading a price list is a skill. Here’s the same trick on what a St. Louis hair salon really charges.

Then there’s the brick. A load-bearing brick wall isn’t a partition you knock out over a weekend while the neighbors listen to the sledgehammer. Cutting a new opening means a header, a structural professional and usually tuckpointing around the cut, and exterior brick limits where new windows can go. That one fact quietly rewrites a lot of open-concept dreams, and a designer who knows these houses will tell you in the first hour, before you’ve fallen for a plan the walls won’t allow.

Small original kitchens are the third St. Louis problem. They were built as work rooms, closed off, often next to a pantry or a back stair. The best design money in these houses is usually spent on space, not decoration: borrowing from the next room, reworking a doorway, moving the sink so it finally faces the window and the morning light over the backyard.

An interior designer showing a fabric sample to a couple on their living room sofa

Decorator, designer or architect?

A decorator works with the room as it is: furniture, fabric, color, lighting, layout. No walls move. If your rooms work and just look wrong, a decorator or a few paid designer hours may be all you need. An interior designer also works on the space itself, with built-ins, cabinetry, lighting plans and drawings a contractor can build from. When a bearing wall, a new opening in brick or an addition is on the table, you need an architect or structural engineer too.

Missouri’s Interior Design Council answers at 573.522.4683, so ask any designer whether they are registered before your job needs signed drawings. The builder is a separate check, and we walk through it in how to check if a contractor is licensed in Missouri.

The paint question, priced

What color makes a house look expensive?

The honest answer is the color chosen in your own light, on your own walls, by someone who has stood in the room. Olive + Opal Interiors bills additional design help at $175 an hour, and PureWave Designs lists a $395 design consultation. More rooms, more site visits and furnishing on top push the bill up from there.

Make two quotes comparable before you sign

Almost every design dispute traces back to a vague scope. A quote isn’t a scope. Get these in writing from every designer you talk to:

Which rooms are included, listed by name.
The deliverables: concept boards, floor plans, lighting plan, finish schedule, furniture specs.
How many revision rounds and site visits, and what one more costs.
The fee structure stated plainly, and whether a furniture markup is added on top.
Whether you’ll see trade cost and markup as separate lines.
The payment schedule, and what happens to money and drawings if either side walks.

Then think about the whole bill as three buckets: the design fee, the furnishings and the construction. The design fee is usually the one that scares people, and it’s often the smallest of the three once walls start moving. A one-room refresh with no construction is a design fee plus furniture. A kitchen or a whole first floor is all three, and the designer’s job is to keep the other two from running away. A light-touch engagement, one paid hour and a plan you carry out yourself on weekends, can be the best money in the whole project.

Two quotes aren’t comparable until they describe the same job. It’s the same discipline we argued for in our St. Louis concrete driveway cost guide.

A partly finished living room with a ladder, a wrapped rug and paint swatches on the wall

Frequently asked questions

How much should I pay for an interior designer?

Nationally, HomeGuide puts most projects at $1,900 to $11,200, with hourly rates of $50 to $200. In St. Louis, Olive + Opal Interiors prices one fully designed room at $1,349, and PureWave Designs lists a $395 design consultation. Furniture is extra.

What is a normal budget for interior design?

For one room on a flat fee, HomeGuide reports $1,000 to $12,000, and design-only help without furnishing runs $450 to $1,500 per room. Most design firms charge between $1,500 and $4,900 a room, and a St. Louis studio prices one fully designed room at $1,349, so decide first whether you need a plan or a finished room.

Is it worth paying for an interior designer?

If your rooms work and simply look unresolved, a single paid hour is often worth it, because it ends the guessing. If you are moving walls or redoing a kitchen, a designer earns the fee by catching the expensive mistakes before they are built, and in an old brick St. Louis house those mistakes hide behind plaster.

Is it cheaper to use an interior designer?

Rarely on the total, since you are adding a professional fee. Sometimes on furniture, when the designer buys at trade pricing and passes some of that through. Ask to see the trade cost and the markup as separate lines so you can tell.

What are red flags when hiring a designer?

A designer who won’t disclose the furniture markup. A quote with no written scope or revision count. A large retainer with no milestones. A percentage fee and a markup on the same furniture without saying so. And in an older house, a designer who never asks about the plaster, the radiators or the electrical panel.

Book the one hour before you move the couch a fifth time. St Louis Near Me Directory lists local interior designers and decorators across the metro, from one-room helpers to full-service studios that know plaster and radiators. Browse St. Louis interior designers →

If you’re the designer, the decorator or the one-person studio working out of a spare bedroom, the homeowner above is searching for you right now. List your studio and get more customers who already know what an hour of your time is worth.