Could anyone here recommend a good interior designer. Does anyone here in Chiang Mai have experience with one.

We are currently building and have a builder who is also very good with wood work as we have seen in houses he previously built.

While all of us have ideas our design skills and material knowledge are very limited.

I would like to consult a professional to turn our ideas into reality.

Here are my questions:

How do the interior designers work here in Thailand?

Do they create the designs to your ideas and then bring their own crew to carry out the work?

If you have your own crew - which we do - do they charge a consultancy fee?

How do they charge for their services ?

Could one hire a designer to just come up with some ideas / drawings and then have our builder realising them?

Any advise and help would be very much appreciated.

No need for an interior designer if you already know what you want.

The best way to "turn our ideas into reality" is to use Google Sketchup. It is the tool for just that (sketching ideas) and its free.

I've used them my self for modeling my house and print them out for the builder just like that.

By the way congratulation on having good builders they are a rare breed in Thailand.

http://sketchup.google.com/

Did you know, at bookstores (like B2S Central) they sell very nice interior decoration books (only 200-250b each, the rest paid by advertisers) with room/kichen/bathroom and various other themes and great pictures of interior/exterior in contemporary Thai style. They give great ideas and inspirations and very useful even before you start building.

If you ever find one let me know! I had a similar thread recently... nothing came out of it - bit of a market gap