Interior Design and Architecture for the Wealthy

The Million Dollar Question: In New York City, how much more per square foot do condos designed by famous “starchitects” sell for, compared with the top 100 Manhattan condos generally?
A) About 13% B) About 40% C) About 75% D) More than double

Read on for the answer.

Hiring a designer or a named architect is usually described as buying taste. It is mostly buying access and coordination — and the fee structures underneath it are stranger, and more contested, than the finished photographs suggest.

What it is

Three fairly different jobs get sold under the same word.

The first is decoration: furniture, fabrics, rugs, lighting, art placement, paint. Nothing structural moves. This is the job most people picture, and it is the one most designers actually do.

The second is interior architecture: walls relocated, ceilings reworked, millwork drawn from scratch, stone slabs selected individually, lighting designed as a system rather than picked from a catalog. At this level the designer is producing construction documents and running a build, and the line between “designer” and “architect” gets blurry enough that many firms carry both licenses in-house.

The third is a named-architect commission, where the building itself is the purchase. Tadao Ando, Peter Zumthor, Bjarke Ingels, Annabelle Selldorf, Robert A.M. Stern. Here the client is buying an authored object, and the interior is often executed by a separate firm working inside the architect’s envelope.

There is a continuous ladder underneath all three. At the bottom is a furniture retailer that will send someone to your house — Restoration Hardware and its competitors have built real businesses on offering a whole coordinated room to people who do not want to assemble one. Above that sit local and regional design firms. Above those, the roughly one hundred practices that Architectural Digest names each year to its AD100 list, which functions as the industry’s public leaderboard: not a ranking, but a signal that a firm has crossed from “successful” to “published.”

The distinction that actually matters at the top isn’t between good and bad taste. It’s between an interior that is decorated, one that is assembled with a coherent point of view, and one that is architecturally significant — meaning the space itself would be worth documenting even if every stick of furniture were removed. Only the third reliably survives a change of owner.

Who uses it

The bands look roughly like this, and they behave very differently.

At $1M–$5M in net worth, design is bought in pieces. A kitchen. A living room. Usually hourly, usually a local firm, usually a project measured in months. The median American design firm bills $200 an hour or less — this is the tier that number describes, and it is the overwhelming majority of the profession.

At $5M–$30M, a household typically hires one firm for a whole house, on a flat design fee plus a markup on everything purchased. The project runs a year or two. The designer is doing real coordination work — contractor, millworker, upholstery workroom, window treatments — but the client is still in the room for most decisions.

At $30M–$100M, the firm is likely to be an AD100-tier practice with a waiting list, and the engagement starts to resemble a small construction company. Multiple properties. Custom pieces commissioned rather than specified. Timelines of three to five years for an estate-grade project, which surprises almost everyone the first time.

At $100M+ and into $1B+, the purchase changes character again. Now the client is commissioning an author. Kanye West and Kim Kardashian hired the Belgian dealer and designer Axel Vervoordt for their Hidden Hills house and ended up with what Vervoordt described as a philosophy about how to live rather than a decorating scheme — pale plaster, Jean Royère sofas, Pierre Jeanneret chairs, almost nothing on the walls. Peter Marino, whose New York office employs roughly 160 people and keeps dedicated rooms for Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton and Tiffany, commissions site-specific artwork as part of the architecture.

And then there is the category nobody mentions: developers, who buy the name for resale rather than for themselves. That is a different transaction with a different logic, and it’s the one the market has actually priced.

Why they use it

Not taste. Or not mainly taste.

Time and coordination. A serious residential project involves several hundred separate vendors, deliveries, lead times, and approvals. Somebody has to hold that. A household where both principals work sixty-hour weeks does not have a spare person for it, and the designer is, functionally, that person.

Access. This is the underrated one. A large share of high-end furnishings and textiles are sold to the trade only — you cannot walk in and buy them at any price. New York’s Decoration & Design Building houses more than 100 showrooms on this basis, and entry to a trade account requires proof of professional standing. Trade pricing typically runs well below retail on comparable goods, but the more important fact is that much of the inventory has no retail price at all. Hiring a designer is, in part, buying a key.

Risk transfer. On a multi-year build, someone needs to own the mistakes: the slab that cracks, the sofa that won’t fit the elevator, the millwork that arrives in the wrong finish. A firm with a reputation absorbs that in a way an owner-managed project does not.

Resale and signal. For a certain slice of buyers, an authored interior is a marketing asset. That’s the thesis the starchitect market runs on, and it’s testable — which we’ll do below.

How it works

The trade economy. Most goods flow through showrooms that sell only to accredited professionals at a net price. The designer buys at net and bills the client above it. That spread is not a discount the client is failing to capture; it is one of the two mechanisms by which the profession is paid.

The four fee models, which get combined in practice:

• Hourly. Roughly $125–$450 an hour across most of the US market, with top-tier specialists in major metros billing higher for short, concentrated work.
• Flat design fee. A fixed number for a defined scope. Increasingly common — the Pearl Collective survey of more than 900 firm owners found 40% of firms using fixed fees, alone or alongside hourly — and consistently underpriced, according to the consultants who advise on it.
• Percentage of project cost. Commonly in the range of 8–12% of construction cost, or 10–30% of the furnishings budget, sometimes both.
• Cost-plus. A markup applied to everything purchased, most often quoted in the 15–35% band.

The residential default is a hybrid: a design fee for the thinking, plus a markup on the buying. The same survey found about 80% of firms still billing hourly or hourly-plus-markup in some form.

The team. On an estate-grade project the client is typically paying, in parallel: an architect, an interior designer, a general contractor, a construction manager or owner’s representative, a permit expediter, a landscape architect, a lighting designer, an audiovisual integrator, and — often — an art advisor. Each has its own fee basis. Coordinating them is a job too, which is why owner’s-rep firms exist.

The timeline. A whole-house renovation in a major city runs two to three years from first meeting to move-in. Ground-up estate projects routinely run four to six. Approvals, structural surprises, and made-to-order lead times of nine to eighteen months on individual pieces do most of the damage.

What it costs

Design fees, by band, as working ranges rather than quotes:

• $1M–$5M net worth: $10,000–$75,000 for a room-by-room or single-floor engagement, usually hourly plus markup.
• $5M–$30M: design fees commonly $75,000–$250,000 for a whole house, plus markup on furnishings. Total furnishings spend frequently lands in the mid-six figures.
• $30M–$100M: design fees running into the high six figures and past $1M on multi-property engagements, plus markup, plus separate architecture fees at 8–15% of construction.
• $100M+: effectively uncapped, because the fee scales with a construction budget that is itself uncapped.

Construction is the bigger line, and it varies enormously by market. Luxury custom building across most of the US sits around $350–$500 per square foot. In the ultra-high-end coastal markets it goes much further: Miami builders put well-appointed custom homes in premier neighborhoods at roughly $1,100–$1,800 per square foot, with a full range running from about $750 to $3,200. At those numbers a 10,000-square-foot house is a $15M–$18M construction project before a single chair is bought.

Furnishings on a decorated project frequently rival or exceed the construction budget, which surprises people who think of furniture as an afterthought. And at the ceiling, the art becomes its own line: Peter Marino has said his site-specific commissions for luxury retail interiors run between roughly $300,000 and $3 million per store. Residential commissions at the same tier are not cheaper.

Buying the finished article instead is its own market. At Tadao Ando’s only New York residential building, 152 Elizabeth Street — seven units in Nolita — sponsor apartments closed at an average of about $3,656 per square foot, among the highest ever recorded in lower Manhattan at the time, and the three-level penthouse closed in 2018 for $29.95 million — about 14% below its original $35M ask.

Hidden costs and tradeoffs

Markup opacity is the live fault line in this industry. In January 2025, Aaron Judge and his wife Samantha sued their Tampa-based designer, Drew Designs LLC, in Hillsborough County, alleging that a contract priced at a flat $10 per square foot — $68,000 for the Florida project and $75,000 for the New York one — concealed roughly $750,000 in undisclosed markups, including a custom sofa billed at $33,000 against an alleged market value of $18,100. The complaint asserts the designer assumed the clients would be too busy to check. The designer denied all allegations and countersued in March 2025, and the case has not been decided. What makes it worth citing is not the outcome but the structure: a flat-fee contract that looked like a ceiling, sitting on top of a procurement channel the client could not independently price.

Warehousing and receiving. Furniture ordered eighteen months before a house is finished has to live somewhere. Receiving warehouses charge for storage, inspection, and white-glove delivery, and on a large project this becomes a five-figure line nobody budgeted.

Change orders. The published construction number is a starting position. Owner-driven changes mid-build are the single most reliable source of overrun, and they are priced at whatever the moment allows.

The illiquidity of taste. A strongly authored interior is a bet that the next owner shares the bet. Highly specific work — a fully integrated Vervoordt-style plaster environment, a house organized around one collection — narrows the buyer pool. The building can hold value; the decoration usually doesn’t.

You may not live there. Two to five years is a long time to be somewhere else, and the households that handle it best treat the project as a separate residence with its own carrying cost rather than as an interruption.

The relationship. Designer and client spend years making thousands of small aesthetic judgments together. When it goes wrong it goes wrong the way a business partnership goes wrong, in public, with lawyers.

What people get wrong

The famous-name premium is much smaller than people assume — and it isn’t growing. CityRealty maintains an index of Manhattan and Brooklyn condos designed by architects “generally considered to be one of the preeminent architects in the world,” built from city recording data. That Starchitect Condos Index currently sits at $2,597 per square foot across 78 buildings, against $2,301 per square foot for the CityRealty 100, the blue-chip index of Manhattan’s top hundred condos. That’s a premium of roughly 13%. When 6sqft reported on the index at launch in 2016, the figures were $3,052 against $2,685 — a gap of about 14%. Ten years, essentially the same spread.

And the absolute number went backwards. The same index shows the starchitect segment at $2,915 per square foot in late 2020 and around $2,592 five years later. A famous architect appears to buy a durable but modest and non-compounding premium. It is a floor, not an engine.

“Interior designer” is not a single profession. Because the visible tier is so visible, people assume the whole field bills like Peter Marino. It does not. Nearly two-thirds of American firms charge $200 an hour or less, and the majority of newer and smaller firms charge under $150. The distance between the median designer and the AD100 designer is larger than the distance between the median designer and no designer at all.

The trade discount is not a discount to you. Clients frequently ask to be passed the net price. If a designer does that, the design fee has to rise to cover it, because the markup is compensation, not a fee they’re double-dipping on. The genuine value of the trade channel to a client is access to goods that aren’t otherwise purchasable, not a lower bill.

Decorated is not the same as architecturally significant. A great deal of money is spent making rooms look expensive in ways that are entirely reversible and carry no value forward. The work that holds is structural: light, proportion, circulation, materials that age well. Those are architecture decisions, and they’re mostly made early, before anybody picks a fabric.

Nobody is really buying taste. They’re buying logistics with taste attached. The scarce input at the top of this market is not aesthetic judgment — there is plenty of that — but the ability to run a multi-year, multi-hundred-vendor project to a fixed standard without the client having to manage it. That’s the product.

Bottom line

The answer is A — about 13%. CityRealty’s Starchitect Condos Index sits at $2,597 per square foot against $2,301 for the CityRealty 100. It’s a real, measurable premium for a famous name on the drawings, and it is roughly the same premium the same two indices showed a decade ago — while the starchitect segment’s absolute price per square foot has drifted down since 2020.

That number is the honest frame for the whole category. A named architect or an AD100 firm buys a modest, stable uplift and, more importantly, a much lower-variance outcome: the project finishes, the proportions are right, the thing photographs. What it does not buy is an appreciating asset or an escape from the arithmetic — construction still costs $350 to $1,800 a square foot depending on where you build, furnishings still routinely rival construction, and the fee is still a percentage of a number you control. The households that come out of these projects happy tend to be the ones who understood, going in, that they were hiring a general contractor for their own attention.

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Related reading: Houses: What the Wealthy Actually Buy · Branded Residences: Buying the Name on the Building · Old Money and New Money: Different Styles of Wealth · Art: Collecting, Advising, and the Money Behind the Market · ZIP Codes: Where Wealth Actually Concentrates