Why we don't price by the square foot.

Search "interior design price per square foot Malaysia" and you'll find numbers all over the map — RM8, RM15, RM30 per sq ft, sometimes on the same forum thread. That's not because designers disagree on value. It's because square footage is a construction metric wearing an interior design costume, and it breaks the moment you actually apply it.

A 120 sq ft bedroom and a 120 sq ft store room take wildly different amounts of design work — one needs a bed, wardrobe, lighting plan and a dozen material decisions; the other needs shelving. Fitting out a kitchen costs roughly the same whether the living area around it is 800 sq ft or 1,600 — the cabinetry run and the appliances don't stretch with the floor plate. Per-sq-ft pricing quietly assumes design effort scales with area. It doesn't. It scales with decisions.

Room count and room type. A condo with a bedroom, a bathroom and an open-plan living-dining area has a fundamentally different scope than a landed house with five bedrooms and a yard — not because of total square footage, but because of how many rooms need their own layout, material palette and furniture plan.

One flat design fee per room, the same whether that room is 100 sq ft or 300 sq ft: RM1,715 for interior styling (RM2,639 for an open-plan living-dining space), or RM3,565 for the complete interior design service (RM5,485 open-plan). A Klang Valley site visit is RM200, credited back if you go ahead. That's the whole design fee — agreed before anything begins, and it doesn't move if your renovation budget does.

The physical works — flooring, carpentry, electrical, plumbing — are a separate number, and that part genuinely does scale with your space and your chosen finish level (Essential, Premium or Signature). We estimate that honestly as a range based on your square footage and scope, then gather and compare real contractor quotes on your behalf, rather than folding a vague per-sq-ft figure into one opaque total.

So is there any "normal" per-sq-ft rate I should expect?

Not a reliable one for design fees — quoted per-sq-ft rates for design work in Malaysia vary so widely precisely because it's the wrong unit. It's a genuinely useful number for the construction side of a renovation, just not for what a designer charges to plan the space.

Isn't per-sq-ft pricing simpler to compare across designers?

It looks simpler, but it usually isn't apples-to-apples — one firm's per-sq-ft figure might include furniture, another's might not, and neither tells you what happens to a small, decision-heavy room. A flat fee per room is easier to compare because every room, however small, is charged the same.

What if my rooms are unusually large or unusually small?

The flat per-room fee holds either way — it's what makes it a fixed number you can plan around, rather than one that shifts as your measurements come in.