Interior Architecture Editing and Proofreading Services

A client tells their interior architect they want "a collaborative, open, flexible workspace," and the design that comes back six weeks later is a large open-plan floor with no enclosed rooms at all. The client is unhappy, not because the design failed to be collaborative or open, but because "flexible" meant, to them, that they also needed four private rooms for confidential calls and two rooms rated for sound insulation, needs they mentioned in a single sentence during the first meeting that never made it into anything the designer was actually working from.

We edit what interior architects produce to translate a client's stated needs into an actual design programme — space programming and needs assessment documents, room count and adjacency requirement disclosures, functional requirement translation from client language, and the correspondence confirming what a client's stated priorities actually require in square footage and room count. Our editors work on the gap between what a client says they want and the specific, measurable programme a design is actually built from.

The translated space programme is what a client's stated priorities actually need behind them before a design begins, and its failure is a design proceeding directly from a client's descriptive language with no intermediate document confirming what that language was translated into. Collaborative, open, and flexible describes a feeling a client wants the space to produce; it does not specify how many enclosed rooms are needed, what they are for, or how large the open area should be relative to them, and a designer working straight from the client's words has filled in those specifics themselves, without confirming the fill was correct. We work through these so a client's stated priorities are translated into an actual room list with count, approximate size, and function — 4 phone rooms, 2 acoustically-rated meeting rooms, an open area for 40 desks — and this list is confirmed with the client before design begins, since a document the client can check against their own mental picture catches a mismatch before six weeks of design work rather than after; so any requirement mentioned informally during early conversations is captured and confirmed explicitly, given that a need mentioned once, in passing, is easy for a designer to miss and easy for a client to assume was heard; so adjacency requirements are stated specifically, because "collaborative" often implies a spatial relationship between teams that needs to be named rather than assumed to follow automatically from an open plan; so any requirement with a technical implication — acoustic rating, a specific room count for confidentiality — is flagged as a distinct, measurable item rather than absorbed into a general descriptive word; and so a client's review of the programme is an actual checkpoint, with a specific confirmation requested, rather than an assumption that silence means agreement. Programmes written this way mean the design that comes back six weeks later actually matches what the client asked for, because what they asked for was confirmed before anyone started designing.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including client requirements, space programmes and correspondence. We are editors rather than interior architects, space planners or design consultants, and we offer no view on programming, space allocation or design decisions. What we can do is make sure the client's stated needs were actually translated and confirmed before the design began.