To-The-Trade Episode Summary
Yvonne Christensen, co-owner of House West Design, joined Laurie Laizure on To-The-Trade for Interior Design Community to talk about the business partnership she built with fellow designer Nicole, almost by accident, and how they have kept it running for nearly six years across two Utah cities.
Christensen, based in St. George, and Nicole, based in Salt Lake City, had only met once when a client of Christensen’s needed help furnishing a home that had turned into a Parade of Homes entry. Christensen was expecting a baby and didn’t want to take on the staging phase, so she messaged Nicole, a designer she knew mostly through Instagram. Nicole said yes right away, and the project became one of the best either of them had done. They kept collaborating informally for three years before formally merging.
Christensen and Nicole started by merging their furniture buying power and opening joint bank accounts and credit cards, while still billing separately for their own hours in the early years. They worked with a lawyer to build a solid operating agreement from the start, one Christensen says is treated as a living document, not something signed once and filed away. Her advice to a friend recently considering a similar merger was simple: go slow. It’s a theme that comes up often for designers weighing the roles, money, and risk of teaming up with another business.
A year ago, the partners brought on a business coach who typically works with CEOs of major companies. They meet with him for three hours every Monday. He helped them build an organizational chart, something they’d never had, and pushed them to sit down regularly and talk through decisions they’d otherwise put off. Christensen says the biggest surprise of running the business together wasn’t the partnership itself. It was how much extra work having employees created on the back end.
Christensen walks through how she prices new builds: hourly until plans go to engineering, then a flat fee once square footage is assigned, reverting to hourly if a project runs past 18 months. Before quoting, she spends about ninety minutes consulting with the client, then calls the builder directly to find out what documentation and job-site involvement they’ll expect, since clients often don’t know their own builder’s requirements. A traditional home heavy on millwork takes far more design hours than a modern one, which shifts the per-square-foot price, and local hourly rates vary by market too.
Furniture is billed hourly with a retainer up front. Clients pay one hundred percent of furniture costs before any order is placed, and a second retainer is collected before staging begins, so no one is hit with a surprise warehouse bill at the end of a project. “I’m not a bank,” Christensen says. “I can’t afford to be their bank.” She sees this as where a lot of designers get burned: eighty hours into a design, then leaving the client with a large bill they signed off on a year earlier and forgot about. Structuring the retainer this way usually means the project ends with a zero balance, sometimes even a credit back.
Consistent relationships with a small group of local builders are, in Christensen’s view, the single biggest driver of efficiency and staffing stability. Working repeatedly with the same builders means less time spent learning new subcontractors and allowance structures on every job. She’s clear that builders negotiating hard on price is simply part of their job, not a lack of respect for design fees. The friction that does show up is almost always about communication, and it fades with a longer working history.
Christensen assumed furniture produced higher profit margins than design fees. It doesn’t, not as a percentage, but it does produce higher total dollars, since there’s no real ceiling on how much furniture a client can buy. Margins also vary by builder, depending on how much hand-holding a project requires, which is part of why markup and margin are worth understanding as two different numbers. To protect against clients who eat up hours with slow decisions, the firm now builds maximum-hour caps into contracts, with a standing rule to flag scope once a project hits 75 percent of its budgeted hours.
The firm has placed one to three homes in Parade of Homes every year for a decade, but opted out entirely this year. Designers are typically handed the home last, often with just days before the parade opens, after every other trade has had the full year. Christensen and Nicole decided they needed the break and wanted to give their current full-build clients complete attention instead. The parade has still driven long-term, high-value work. Christensen mentions a recent consult that came from a client who toured one of her parade homes back in 2021, the kind of payoff worth weighing against the real ROI of a showhouse before signing up for one.
Both partners are interested in product licensing as their next creative stretch. Christensen recently joined the Moen Design Council, a relationship that grew out of a single conversation at an industry event rather than any formal pitch. Her take is that licensing deals start the same way most good trade relationships do: show up, build the relationship, and let the work speak for itself.
Christensen’s favorite rooms to design are libraries and additional sitting rooms, spaces with their own purpose and personality. Asked to finish the sentence “a house should always feel,” her answer was immediate: personal. Her favorite project to date is a ranch home in Kanab, Utah, where the client handed her a fistful of found rocks to set the entire material and color palette.
Learn more about Yvonne Christensen’s work at House West Design (housewestdesign.com) and on Instagram at @housewestdesign.
Timestamp Guide
00:00 – Intro and comparison to Pulp Design Studios
01:14 – How Yvonne and Nicole’s practices merged, starting with a Parade of Homes project
03:04 – Was merging scary? Trusting a partner’s work before formalizing anything
04:22 – What six years of partnership has changed about the business
06:12 – How they structured the merger: joint furniture buying power, separate billing at first
07:17 – The operating agreement, working with a lawyer, and revisiting it as roles change
07:42 – Hiring a business coach who typically works with CEOs
09:17 – Biggest surprise: how much back-end work employees created
10:29 – Hardest part of merging: marketing two different design styles and a two-city split
14:01 – How they divide projects and use an org chart for communication
16:03 – Parade of Homes: ten years of entries, why they’re taking a gap year
21:34 – How Yvonne calculates design fees for new builds
25:03 – Retainers, billing structure, and requiring full payment before furniture orders
28:46 – Why consistent builder relationships drive efficiency and staffing
32:02 – Profit margins: furniture dollars vs. design fee margins, and capping hours in contracts
36:37 – Team structure and staying deliberately small for quality of life
39:09 – Future goals: product licensing and joining the Moen Design Council
43:11 – Quick-fire: favorite room to design and finishing the sentence “a house should always feel…”
44:37 – Favorite project: a rock and clay inspired ranch home in Kanab, Utah
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