If you have asked three interior designers in Kuala Lumpur what a project costs, you have probably gotten three different kinds of answers: a percentage of your budget, an hourly rate, a price per square foot, or an honest "it depends, let's talk." None of them are wrong. They are just different ways of pricing the same work, and each comes with its own trade-off.
The short answer
At Sundays in Bed, the design fee is a flat rate per room, agreed before any work begins. Interior styling is RM1,715 per standard room (RM2,635 for an open-plan living-dining space). Interior design — the complete service, from concept to move-in — is RM3,565 per standard room (RM5,485 for open-plan). That figure does not move if your renovation budget does. The other part of your total cost is the contractor works themselves: painting, flooring, carpentry, electrical and plumbing, which we estimate separately based on your finish level and square footage.
Why "it depends" is usually true
A percentage-of-budget fee means your design cost rises every time your furniture or renovation budget does, even though the amount of design work is often the same. An hourly rate rewards slow, cautious work over efficient work. A per-square-foot rate treats a large, simple room the same as a small, detail-heavy one. None of these are dishonest models — they are just built around different incentives. We chose a flat fee per room because it means the number you agree to at the start is the number you pay at the end, regardless of how your taste or your budget shifts along the way.
What a flat per-room fee actually looks like
Every standard room — bedroom, living room, dining room, kitchen, home office, balcony — is priced the same, whether it is 100 sq ft or 300 sq ft. Open-plan living-dining spaces (with or without an open kitchen) are priced as their own category, since they are treated and planned as one larger room rather than several small ones. Three finish levels sit on top of the base rate — Essential, Premium and Signature — which scale the fee by a fixed multiplier depending on how considered and detailed you want the materials and furnishing to be.
The other half of the number: contractor works
Sundays in Bed is a design consultation and project management studio, not a design-and-build contractor. Where physical works are needed — painting, flooring, carpentry, wiring, plumbing — we gather and compare quotes from reputable contractors across Kuala Lumpur and Selangor, and advise on how to split your budget between materials, carpentry and furniture. This means the contractor-works portion of your estimate is a planning range, refined once real quotes come in, rather than a number we invent and mark up.
A worked example
Take a two-bedroom condo: a living room, dining area (as one open-plan space), a kitchen, and two bedrooms — five chargeable spaces in total. On the Interior Design service at Premium finish, that is four standard rooms plus one open-plan space. The design fee is fixed the moment you agree on rooms and finish level; contractor works are then estimated against your square footage and the scope of work you choose (paint, flooring, kitchen carpentry, wardrobes and so on). Our cost calculator runs this exact maths — put in your own room count and finish level and it returns both halves of the number immediately.
What's included at no extra charge
A few things are folded into the fee rather than billed separately: a Klang Valley site visit is RM200, which is deducted from your project cost if you go ahead. Yard, utility and foyer spaces are designed at no charge on any project that includes a bedroom and an open-plan space. And if you take Interior Design, you get 50% off the styling fee for any additional rooms that only need restyling rather than a full redesign.
Get a number for your own home
The fastest way to see where you would land is to try it yourself. Our two-minute style quiz asks about your home and sends a personalised estimate straight to your inbox — or use the calculator directly if you already know your room count. If you would rather talk it through, our why us page walks through how the whole process works, start to finish.
