What is eDesign? How online interior design really works
The word’s American, the idea’s simple, and the price has far less to do with the design than with everything that usually surrounds it.
Rachel Hannah
Someone tells you the room needs a designer. You look at what that costs, put the phone straight back down, and go back to shifting the sofa a few inches and hoping for the best. That’s usually about the time the word eDesign turns up.
So what actually is eDesign?
eDesign is interior design done from a distance. You photograph your room, measure it roughly, answer a few questions about how you actually live in it, and send the lot over to a designer. The studio designs the room and sends it back to you. Nobody sets foot in your house.
The word itself is American, short for electronic design, and it came over here with the studios that made it popular. In plain English it’s just online design. If you’ve seen it written eDesign, e-design or virtual design, they’re all the same thing.
What actually lands in your inbox
A design, not a build.
You get a concept board first, showing where the room’s heading before any of the detail is nailed down. Then the final design board, once you’ve had your say. A layout drawn to scale, so you know the sofa fits before it turns up, not after. And a clickable shopping list of things you can genuinely go and buy.
Then you order what you like, when you like, and put the room together at your own pace. A weekend, or eighteen months. Nobody’s tapping their watch.
The concept board is the bit that protects you. Nothing’s been drawn in detail yet and nothing’s been bought, so it’s your moment to say you hate the green, or that you’d never sit in that corner, or that the whole direction’s wrong. Saying so costs you nothing at that stage, which is the entire reason it comes first.
Why it costs less
eDesign isn’t a lesser design. It’s the same work with a lot less around it.
Designing in person carries real costs, and those costs have to land somewhere. Driving to you. The hours a site visit eats up, which is proper work. Often a showroom, premises and a team on top. It’s all genuine, and it’s all fairly baked into the price.
Online, most of that simply isn’t there. No travel to bill, no premises to keep the lights on in. You’re paying for the design and very little else.
Room in a box: eDesign, ready-made
Sunday Ambience takes it one step further. Instead of designing one room at a time for one person, every design here is ready-made: a complete rustic luxury room, created once in real depth and sold as a download. That’s often called room in a box.
You browse the rooms, choose the one that feels like home, and it downloads straight away. The concept board, the visuals, a layout drawn to scale with notes on adapting it to your own room, the colour, finishes and lighting plan, and the clickable shopping list. No forms, no waiting, and nothing to book.
Sunday Signature designs also include a pre-recorded walk-through, where I take you through the room in a video, for you to watch in your own time and as often as you like.
Will a ready-made design fit my room?
The look travels better than you might think. It lives in the palette, the materials, the lighting and the way pieces sit together, and all of that carries into rooms of different shapes and sizes. The notes with each layout tell you what to keep the same and what can shift.
What eDesign isn’t
Four things it isn’t, so nobody’s disappointed later.
It isn’t project management. I’m not booking your builder or chasing your delivery. It isn’t a shopping service either: the list is clickable, but every purchase stays yours, which does mean you can spread the cost over as long as you like. It isn’t structural, because moving a wall needs someone standing in the room. And it isn’t a machine. Every design here is directed and approved by me, and nothing’s churned out for you by software.
Who it suits, and who it doesn’t
It suits you if you’re renting and can’t change anything structural but want the room to work anyway. If your room’s small, or an awkward shape, or you’ve painted it three times and it’s still not right. If you live nowhere near a designer whose work you actually like. Or if, honestly, you’d rather not have a stranger wandering round your house at all.
It suits you less well if you want someone on site making calls in real time, or if the job’s really a build rather than a room. Those are good reasons to hire someone local, and better to know now.
If you’re on the first list
The Sunday Ambience room designs are coming soon to Etsy as instant downloads. A living room, a bedroom, a kitchen, and more. Any questions, send me a message there. I read every message myself.