When Meri first starts working with a client, she sits down to understand their tastes, how they want a room or entire home to feel, what they like, what they dislike, and what has worked for them in a past. All of these questions create data points that allow interior design expert Meri Goldstein to begin crafting personalized, custom-designed spaces for her clients. For her, knowing her clients as people is the first step to creating a space that they’ll love.
After she gathers all the information she needs, she gets to work, providing a look book, collecting design samples, and adding in color and texture swatches before going through a detailed revision process with her clients. It’s much easier to make changes to a look book than it is once a room is designed and furnished, so Meri spends a lot of time on the upfront portion of designing an interior space.
During that time, her clients form a bond with Meri, trusting her design instincts and expertise to get them the results they want. As an interior designer, Meri knows about so much more than colors and textures; she is an expert in space planning, sustainability, software design applications, structural requirements, building codes, and other health and safety issues. Throughout the design process, she partners with contractors, architects, engineers, millworker, and furniture vendors, all or some of which might be needed to turn her designs into reality.
Meri’s level of professionalism and expert design process make it seem as if she’s been in the industry for decades. However, having graduated recently from the New York School of Interior Design, Meri started her business straighter after as clients started to request her interior design services named “Infinite Interiors New York,” Meri’s specialized design firm takes her from penthouses in Manhattan all the way to suburban homes in New Jersey and Connecticut.
Understanding that the interior designs of residential spaces help her clients tell their personalized stories, Meri caters to their design requests even when they seem impossible. She recalls one of her most “uh oh” moments in her career, detailing the story about a time a large, bean-shaped couch arrived for her client that lived on the Upper East Side of New York. The couch wouldn’t fit in the elevator and couldn’t turn up the stairs, and the agreed-upon delivery timeline with the building ran out quickly. Instead of giving up, she had a solution right up her sleeve. Meri called a service by the name Doctor Sofa a that came in, took the couch apart, got it into the apartment, and reassembled it, all on a Friday afternoon.
Her willingness to go above and beyond helps Meri stay a cut above the rest. Since her clients know that she will go to the ends of the earth to make them happy, they recommend her to their loved ones and friends. Much of her business comes from word-of-mouth referrals, but due to the excellency of her work, the referrals keep coming. Interior designers can be brought from anywhere in the world to design a space, so her competition isn’t limited to designers in New York City ; she competes with the entire world of designers to land clients.
As Meri continues to grow her business and expand her interior design firm, she will never compromise the quality of the client experience. To her, this work is art, and art must always capture a feeling through visual means. She uses Nordic design techniques and brings in sustainable features to help her clients feel at home in thoughtful, feel-good spaces, and so far, her strategy has paid off.
This article was written in cooperation with Craig Lebrau