Dan Heath:
I want to start today's show with a public service announcement from a professional interior designer. I asked her how those of us without an interior designer could spruce up our homes. And she said, "First of all, your house is probably too cluttered and there's an easy solution."

Julie Anne Burch:
Let go of things. Let go. Clear out. Clean out.

Dan Heath:
That's Julie Anne Burch. She's an interior designer based in New York City.

Julie Anne Burch:
Just letting go of things and clearing things out. We all have that pair of shoes we don't want to throw away or that whatever. Probably that's the first thing that comes to mind it's just clearing space for new, the things that accumulate. And I'd say leather sofas. Sorry, I can't.

Dan Heath:
You couldn't resist.

Julie Anne Burch:
I see leather sofas and I just think about sticking to them. They're never a good idea, but you see them all over the place. It's funny, I love to do Airbnbs and things. That's the first thing I look at is no leather sofas.

Dan Heath:
That should be one of the options on the filtering.

Julie Anne Burch:
Exactly. Maybe it will be now. Hey.

Dan Heath:
I'm Dan Heath, and this is What It's Like To Be... In every episode we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession. A creative director, an ocean lifeguard, a high school principal, we want to know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Julie Anne Burch, what it's like to be an interior designer. We'll talk about how interior designers get paid, how you get a piano out of a high floor building in Manhattan, and what a designer means when they talk about a moment in a home. Stay with us.

Zachary Crockett:
Hey, I am Zachary Crockett, host of a podcast called The Economics of Everyday Things. Each week we zero in on one thing and ask what's the deal with that? Things like used hotel soaps; the song, My Sharona; or weirder yet, man, how many times do you get to meet the world's foremost expert on dinosaur vomit?

Speaker 4:
It's truly an honor.

Zachary Crockett:
Check out The Economics of Everyday Things. It's from the Freakonomics Radio Network.

Dan Heath:
Julie Anne told me this insane story. She had a client with a penthouse on the Upper West Side of New York City. The client was going away with his family for a holiday weekend, and he wanted to come back and surprise his wife with their new apartment on the Upper East Side. That thing we all do where you come back from a weekend and you have a new home. Yeah, that. It's actually one of the services she offers her clients. And everything was moving smoothly with this plan except for the piano.

Julie Anne Burch:
The only way to get that piano out of that apartment was through the roof.

Dan Heath:
And the only way to get it out through the roof was with a crane in New York City.

Julie Anne Burch:
I've done homes all over the world, but New York City is certainly the place where all of the most stressful stories occur. So we had to go through all of the hoops to organize for the crane on the street during a holiday weekend and oversee that whole process. And it was a success, but a stressful success, I'll tell you that.

Dan Heath:
Just picture that piano dangling in the sky held up by a crane. It worked by the way. She pulled it off. The three-day guerrilla weekend move was a success. And that wasn't even the craziest logistical story she had.

Julie Anne Burch:
A client, we ordered a very long heavy table from Holland and it was shipped over on a boat in a big carton. And when it arrived to New York, we realized that it was absolutely not going to fit into the elevator, which any designer in New York will be rolling their eyes because it's always about measuring the elevator and what can fit and what can't fit. And this table was going to have to go into a very high floor in a building right across from the town hall in New York, in Tribeca.
So that was terrifying because what we have to do in that kind of circumstance is every building has a certain elevator company that manages that building. So the super of the building, which is the manager of the building, we have to coordinate with the super and all of the staff in the building. And then we have to get permission permits from the elevator company, and then hire movers. It involves about 12 people, the whole process. And get certain movers to ride on top of the elevator.

Dan Heath:
What? Wait, so you take this ginormous table and then the movers ride with it on top of the elevator?

Julie Anne Burch:
That's right. So we schedule a time, it's usually in the day when it's not rush hour traffic on the elevators, and why it was so stressful, it had to go so high up. It was one of the highest floors. And so they drop the elevator down, they load the piece onto the top of the elevator. There's four or five guys, and what they have to do is they have to hold it so it doesn't touch the sides of the elevator, you see, going all the way up. It's incredibly dangerous.
So it was a success, but boy, when you're waiting for the elevator doors to open on the other end, you're holding your breath because you just don't know somebody could have gotten hurt or all of these certain things could have happened. And what was even more wild about this particular situation is the client loved the table, and it was a table that had these wooden patchwork with this certain shellac on top of it. And a few months into having the table, it started to make these incredible loud cracking noises like gunshots. So we ended up, they did a recall, we recalled it back to Holland. So we had to not only-

Dan Heath:
I'm surprised the movers took that call, "Can you undo that thing that you just did?"

Julie Anne Burch:
Oh, yeah. So we had to ride it back down. Then not only that, they fixed the table. So then it had to go back on the ship, back over to Holland. They fixed the table, brought it back, and we had to ride it back, do the whole process all over again.

Dan Heath:
I hadn't thought about just how much of your work, especially in New York City or another very dense metropolitan area, would be gated by something as prosaic as the dimensions of an elevator. Because there's no other way to get to the 33rd floor or whatever, right?

Julie Anne Burch:
Well, that's right. And in fact, that same client with a piano that was really earlier on, I started in 2006 in the city, and that was the hard lesson where the last minute you wake up in the middle of the night and think, "Oh, did I measure that elevator?" And that same client, they actually had a sofa that couldn't fit in the elevator, and we didn't have time to organize it because it was such a last minute project. So we didn't have time to organize for it to ride on top of the furniture. So on my speed dial, there's a place called Dr. Sofa, and they're literally the 911 emergency rescue service for furniture that doesn't fit in an elevator. And so they're on my speed dial, so I try it-

Dan Heath:
Wait, so how do they solve that problem?

Julie Anne Burch:
They literally come over and they take the sofa completely apart and put it back together again in one day.

Dan Heath:
There's no Frankenstein stitches on it or?

Julie Anne Burch:
No, they do it. They're excellent. They're just excellent at what they do. They're the best. In fact, that particular situation was definitely on me because I hadn't prepared. Anyway, it was one thing after the next. And I didn't even let the client know that we had to do that because it was bad.

Dan Heath:
Well, they just found out.

Julie Anne Burch:
They just found out. You have to absorb things like that so that they don't panic, and the sofa is exactly the way that it was in their old house. So it works.

Dan Heath:
Listeners, if you ever need your sofa cut in half in an emergency situation, call Dr. Sofa.

Julie Anne Burch:
That's right. In The Bronx, they're the best.

Dan Heath:
I never thought about what a logistics and supply chain aspect of your work there is. That seems like a big part of this is just getting physical assets from one place to another on a certain timeline.

Julie Anne Burch:
Oh, it's 90% of the job. It really is.

Dan Heath:
Wow.

Julie Anne Burch:
There's so many moving parts. Even just picking a fabric, you go to the design center. There's millions of options. You write down your fabric selections, you hand in the little slip, they give you back fabric samples that you take with you. You present those to the client. It's a whole process, all the ordering and shipping. In fact, firms usually they have one person devoted only to orders, full-time job for orders.

Dan Heath:
Wow. Wow.

Julie Anne Burch:
It's a lot. And it's stressful when it's out of your hands. Lead times and with the pandemic and so much material is coming from overseas. I have all the fabric coming from Italy, from France. So you're not only navigating your time, language, then you have everybody goes on vacation in August, so you can't expect anything to come out of Europe in August. There's just so many moving parts. It is a small miracle when a house comes together.

Dan Heath:
So do clients come to you because they like your taste, they're hiring your taste? Or are they hiring you because you have a good reputation and then they want you to run with their taste? Or how does that dance work?

Julie Anne Burch:
That's a great question. I always categorize it as there's three types of designers, just generally. There's the type of designer that you're mentioning there where you really hire them for their particular taste, their particular style. Then there's the type of designer you hire to work on some resale value. Like if you're about to sell your home and you want to stage it or do anything to do, reselling it. So you're not really worried about your own taste or the designer. It's just what's going to sell the best. And then the third type, which is where I fall, is translating my client's taste. I always make sure that they know it's absolutely their space, not mine. It has to absolutely reflect what they're wanting, not me.

Dan Heath:
Hey, folks, Dan here. First of all, next time, we've got a great show, Marine Biologist. The guest is totally fascinating. Don't miss it. And thanks by the way, for your ideas about a profession for the holiday season. We've actually ended up with three episodes in a row coming up that are winter or holiday themed. I'm going to leave you in suspense about two of them. But the third, which will be recording really soon, is with a Christmas tree farmer. What would you like to know from a Christmas tree farmer? Send us your questions to jobs@whatitslike.com. And as always, thanks for listening.
Julie Anne told me that sometimes she's hired to do a refresh on a home, come in, update the look and feel or the colors or spruce up the furnishings. But what surprised me was that a lot of her work involved new construction, and she serves as one of the key team members that's on the project from the start.

Julie Anne Burch:
So it's almost like putting a movie together. You have the producer, the director. So you have the designer, you have the architect, you have the contractor, the builder, you have the subs that come with all of those people. So the very first step is putting together the right team. If we're doing a new build, though, it's putting together the team. If I'm just coming and doing a refresh, it's just a thorough interview with the client and building a list of items needing completion.

Dan Heath:
On a new construction the architect gets to work first designing the structure of the house?

Julie Anne Burch:
Every architect works differently, but generally it's a good idea to, the architect will come up with either one drawing to work off of or a couple of options, just depending on what they're looking for. And then once, and then those meetings happen and we tweak those drawings until they're satisfied with the look and the feel of it. And that's a long process because that's really the bones of the whole project.
And then once they sign off on the drawing and they're comfortable with it, the builder steps in and puts together the estimates and the pricing on what it's going to take to build it. Then I step in and do what's called the hard finishes. So that's all of the floors, and the walls, and what we call elevations. So that's every wall is drawn out, what every wall looks like, the built-ins, where there are going to be bookcases, just all of the hard finishes. And then the kitchen design, and all the closets.

Dan Heath:
Next up is for Julie Anne to work on what are called the soft finishes.

Julie Anne Burch:
So that's all of the furniture, the furniture layout. I do furniture layouts first. And so, let's take a living room for example. I usually provide two or three, maybe four, depending on the shape of the space. And depending on, sometimes clients like more options. Sometimes they say, "Just give me a few. It's overwhelming." So I'll give them, for example, two or three options of a living room layout. So those are drawings of how they want to live in each space. And then once they sign off on that, then we come up with the color palette and the feel and the tone, the texture, how they want to live in this space with the feel of it. So then that's a separate meeting and we decide on all of that.
And then we come up with an items needed list. So that's basically the shopping list of the whole project. And then the work needing completed list. And then once they sign off on all of that, I present to them options with all of the furniture options and then fabric options and color palette, all of those options. And it's quite a process. It sounds like it's-

Dan Heath:
Let me just pause there for-

Julie Anne Burch:
Sure.

Dan Heath:
Once you have the items needed. This is incredibly clear, by the way. I just feel like you're giving me the perfect overview of a project.

Julie Anne Burch:
Oh, good.

Dan Heath:
When you start looking for particular pieces, you know need an end table here, and a floor lamp here, and a sofa here. How do you know where to go to provide those pieces? Are you using the same suppliers repeatedly or are you like the rest of us, Googling, "minimalist floor lamp" online, and looking for options?

Julie Anne Burch:
I love that question and it's one of my favorites, because what I think the biggest misconception, or the biggest surprise I think that people are always fascinated by is the amount of options we have available. That's what's wonderful about this profession is the longer you spend doing it, the better you become. The more resources you have, the more source... It's called sourcing. So the longer you spend doing it, the more places you can source from and the more educated you become on where to go for what. For example, if I'm doing a living room, and it's also dependent on budget, so all of that comes into play. So I would ask you, "Okay, what kind of pieces..." There is also, what pieces do you really want to invest in and what do you not care to invest in so much?

Dan Heath:
That strikes me, the sourcing aspect strikes me as where your experience would really accumulate over time.

Julie Anne Burch:
That's right.

Dan Heath:
Just knowing where to go to get different kinds of items, knowing who to trust in terms of quality, who can turn it around.

Julie Anne Burch:
That's right. And also my team of artisans. Most of my... It's changed. The industry is changing, but most of my artisans, my furniture makers, my rug makers, my wood cabinet tree makers, everyone, they only will work with designers. It's to the trade only. So that's what's called to the trade only. So you really hire a designer for their resources because they have their tried and true team of window treatment makers, curtain, all of the different resources that you... And that's the biggest factor, I would say. When you're hiring an interior designer is you're hiring their people.

Dan Heath:
And when you're working with folks like that, what is the level of specificity of the instructions you give to them? Is it more of an inspiration like, "We need something like X." Or is it quite detailed?

Julie Anne Burch:
It starts casual and ends up very detailed. So for example, I wanted my woodworker here in Vermont to make a desk with iron legs. So it starts like that. And I want to make it a desk that it could also be a dining table and it needs to have four chairs. It needs to be rectangle, smooth edges. What do you recommend? Here's where it's going to go. It's going to sit outside, but it does have awnings, so it can be partially covered in the wintertime. I don't micromanage, and you take their lead. So you throw those few general ideas out there. And then they always, that's the fun part about inspiring good people and paying them well to do their best work because they get so excited to really show off, to show off what they can do. So then he'll come back with drawings and some ideas, two or three options.
When you're presenting to someone, you always want to be able to answer question, why? So, let's do this wood. Why? Because it's going to work in this climate and these temperatures. You always want to be able to answer why to anything you're presenting to a client. So then he'll come up with, for example, three or four drawings. He'll say, "Oh, I happen to have this curly cherry wood in my shop and it's gorgeous, and this would be the perfect table for it." So I present that to the client. And then we say, "We want iron legs." And he says, "Well, why don't we do it like this? I just discovered this new company who makes the iron legs curved and like this." And then you present it to the client and then he says, "Oh, I would never thought to do curved legs. That's brilliant. So much softer." So it's a conversation, it's back and forth.
But by the end of it, when you're having someone sign off on a piece, it's every single detail they need to approve. So it's even a signature on the drawing so that they know exactly what they're going to get.

Dan Heath:
It's important that clients aren't surprised by anything in the process. Obviously, Julie Anne wants them to be happy, and their happiness is also a business imperative because happy clients tend to bring in other clients.

Julie Anne Burch:
Word of mouth is probably 90, well, it's probably a hundred percent of my business right now. And my biggest source of referrals always come from real estate agents or anyone else in the business, or architects or any of us who are in the same home making business. Just the word gets out. It is funny that I'll start working for a particular demographic, I'd say, maybe a doctor, and then all of a sudden I have a year where I'm doing all doctors. And then there was one year where I was just working with all the bankers, a lot of Wall Street people. It just naturally shows up.

Dan Heath:
Who was the most difficult client you've ever worked with?

Julie Anne Burch:
A divorce. There was a divorce. It was just difficult because they were going through a really nasty divorce, and just the tension of it. And there was a lot, you just get in between a lot of that. Usually it's the client, it's the couples, because you have to be really delicate on navigating those waters. But it was just a really nasty divorce. It worked out, but it was just a lot of handholding and patience.

Dan Heath:
I asked Julie Anne how she gets paid. And she says, "Interior designers handle payment really differently. Some might charge a flat fee by a project, some do hourly, others might just take a cut of the furniture they're buying." So one thing you may or may not know is that designers get huge discounts on furnishings, from 15%, sometimes up to 75%. So they could keep the difference between the regular price and their discounted designer price. But Julie Anne does it a little differently.

Julie Anne Burch:
What I found works the best for me is I do a flat retainer fee per month and then plus an hourly of any face time I'm spent. So the retainer covers all communication, telephone call, all of that just to have me on the project. Then any physical time I'm spending, I charge an hourly rate. And then I mark 15% up my vendors, so that means if I'm hiring my window treat... anybody that I'm overseeing. So any workers, vendors that I'm overseeing, I mark that 15% up and then I extend my designer discount to the client.

Dan Heath:
What's the most stressful part of the job?

Julie Anne Burch:
Installation day at the final installation. Installations can happen in different ways. So for example, if you're doing a new build and you have the space, as things are becoming available and as orders are being completed, and lead times for furniture is always different. So something could take 10 weeks to make, something could be available immediately. So sometimes you move things in as they're available if the space is available. And sometimes if you're doing a new build, for example, and you want to do an installation all at the same time, we rent a storage unit and have all the pieces in the storage unit and then move everything in one day. And that's just stressful because it's just hectic.
Also, it's stressful when you've ordered something that has taken a long time and it's very expensive, and you've had a particular fabric put on it or something. It's always a bit of a panic when it arrives. And I always inspect it before it goes up into the apartment. You'd always hold your breath when they unwrap it because it could be the wrong color, the wrong fabric. You just never quite know. So that's probably the most stressful part is the installation.

Dan Heath:
And that's the culmination of the project?

Julie Anne Burch:
That's it. It's game day. It's everything goes in.

Dan Heath:
So Julie Anne we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Let me fire away here. First, what's a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know? And what does it mean?

Julie Anne Burch:
I'm going to pick my favorite, which is a moment.

Dan Heath:
A moment.

Julie Anne Burch:
So a moment. And it's when, if I walk into a room and let's say I'm speaking with maybe one of my assistants, I'll say, "This is a really good moment." And what that means is I might be pointing to a corner of the room that has a pillow on a chair with a cup of something. A designer will say, "Oh, that's a really good moment." Or it encourages the pause and that synergy between what it looks like visually, what it feels like, and it just is the pause to have the experience of it.

Dan Heath:
What's the most insulting thing you could say about an interior designer's work?

Julie Anne Burch:
I would say if someone says something is pedestrian.

Dan Heath:
Fighting words.

Julie Anne Burch:
Right. And you hear a lot of designers will say, "Oh, that's so pedestrian." Which just means ordinary and not at all interesting. And it's funny because I knew you were going to ask me that question, so I looked it up what that word just to make sure I got it right. And yes, it says ordinary and not at all interesting. So you don't want someone to call your work pedestrian.

Dan Heath:
What phrase or sentence strikes fear in the heart of an interior designer?

Julie Anne Burch:
It would be any communication that comes in the middle of the night. You don't want to hear from your clients in the middle of the night about anything. That's when you wake-

Dan Heath:
Have you ever heard from clients in the middle of the night?

Julie Anne Burch:
Oh, yeah. Two things ring a bell. Usually high drama clients who just happened to operate during those hours. But there was one where we had done a library on Upper West, and she had a Picasso, a very important painting, and the mover had put it in the wrong place and she couldn't find it in her whole home. And that was-

Dan Heath:
Oh, my... When you can't find the Picasso-

Julie Anne Burch:
That's right.

Dan Heath:
I think I would get out of bed to call somebody for that too.

Julie Anne Burch:
That's right. That's right. The fear is when you check your... You don't want to hear from your clients during the night. So if you check your phone first thing in the morning and you've heard from someone, fear will be ignited.

Dan Heath:
Do you feel an obligation to be on call at odd hours? Is it that sort of relationship?

Julie Anne Burch:
No, no, no. Clients are respectful. I think earlier on, I'd have to say I had some wild clients who were doing a lot of drugs and having lots of girlfriends and things. So I'd hear from... But the clients are pretty respectful of hours and time. The one thing is you do have to get used to in the profession, you always have to understand that this is our job. So I accommodate. I have meetings a lot of the time on the weekends and after hours and things like that because they have a job during the day. And this is a fun thing for them. This isn't their job. So you have to get used to accommodating to your client's schedules, but that doesn't mean any emergency phone calls.

Dan Heath:
It seems to me there would be an ongoing tension between the nesting aspect of what you do, helping the environment fit the clients and the way they want to use the space and the things they do in their life and the branding aspect of it, presenting an image to the public and to guests. Is that a real tension? And if so, how does it show up in your work?

Julie Anne Burch:
Oh, it shows up right away. You always can tell exactly. There's really... It's all of us, it's where we have been. Let's say if we're doing a home, what is home to that person? Which is what fascinates me the most. What is home to that person, where they've been, where they are and where they want to go? And to navigate that, to negotiate what that is. And then if you throw on top of that, the clients who really are interested in bragging rights, which is fair. The keeping up with the Jones attitude. How often they entertain?
I remember when I worked for, who mentored me, she had zero budget. In other words, we could go, there was no limit. And her life was just really focused around her children and her children's friends. So she had a gorgeous apartment on the Upper East Side and this lavish, beautiful dining room that she had us turn into a playroom. And so, she really didn't have bragging rights situations. She just wanted to have, it was child-focused. But then there'd be other clients who they entertain a lot and they just want to really show off their hard-earned dollars.
But really it's more about negotiating or navigating through what they're telling you and what they really want, and figuring that out.

Dan Heath:
She says, when an interior designer does figure it out and everything comes together, you can tell.

Julie Anne Burch:
It feels right. There's a feeling to the space and all of your senses are engaged and it just somehow works. And I think that's the brilliance of our profession is finding that sweet spot. And it doesn't even really have to do with the colors, the style. It's a feeling. It's the perfect pitch or it's that song that just has that magical thing. And so, I think that that's the best part of being an interior designer and making homes is when you feel that and you hit that, you just want to always keep doing it forever after.

I just feel so grateful that I found it. Every day I'm just so blessed and so grateful that I have devoted my life to making spaces for people. It's just an environment. It's just, I can't think of anything more important. Even all of the people who do such incredibly important work, doctors and who are really saving lives, I still get to make their home. I still get to decide what bed they come home and sleep in. I just think that's extraordinary.

Dan Heath:
Julie Anne Birch is an interior designer based in New York City. What I kept thinking about after the interview was how a lot of the value Julie Anne brings to her clients is those relationships that she has with artisans and crafts people. You're not just hiring her, you're hiring her team. I was trying to think about other examples of professions that had that same trait. Event or wedding planners seemed similar. When you hire a wedding planner, you're also hiring their network of venues and caterers and photographers and florists. Same thing with the Hollywood camera operator we talked to a few episodes back. She said, "A director of photography will often bring her along." She's one of the DP's people.

And the other one that came to mind was the crisis PR consultant. You're hiring the consultant's network of media contacts. The other interesting similarity between the PR consultant and the interior designer is how close the relationships can get with their clients. Partly that's just a function of time. They spend so many months collaborating closely. But it's also about how in those professions you become the client's advocate. You are the person trusted to be their voice. Collaborating with artisans, perfecting the soft finishes, ordering the fabrics, moving the pianos, bringing an aesthetic vision to life, and ultimately, making a home for someone. Folks, that's what it's like to be an interior designer.
A shout-out to recent Apple Podcast reviewers, AMackin, AllenB2013, and GreenMama229. This show was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.