You already have a feeling for how you want your home to feel. Maybe it is warmth in winter, or the way morning light lands on the kitchen bench on a grey Dunedin day. Knowing whether the wall colour you love will still look great next to your floor is a bit of a challenge. And getting it wrong is painfully expensive. An interior designer Dunedin residents trust turns that feeling into something you can see and change, before any money goes into materials.
In short, an interior designer plans how the rooms inside your home look and work, the layout, the lighting, the colour on the walls, and the materials underfoot. At Eco Workshop, that work sits inside an architectural design studio, so the people choosing your finishes are the same team drawing your plans. You see the result as photorealistic renders and a 3D walkthrough before the build starts. This means you change your mind on screen rather than on site. The studio works on new builds and renovations, including older Dunedin homes that need warming up. Your first meeting is free.
Thinking about the look and feel of your new build or renovation? Give us a call on (03) 455 1505 or use our Contact Form and we will get back to you within the day. The first meeting is on us.
An interior designer plans the inside of your home so it works for the way you live and feels the way you want. The work runs from the layout of each room and the way light moves through it, to the colours on the walls and the materials you live in every day.
Most of it is practical. Where does the bench go so two people can cook without colliding? Which wall gets the morning sun? Light-coloured, reflective finishes lift the daylight reaching into a room with reflectance running up to 80 percent off ceilings and 50 to 70 percent off walls, according to BRANZ guidance on daylighting in the home. In a Dunedin winter, when the sun sits low and the days are short, that is the difference between a room you use and one you avoid.
Working with an interior designer usually starts with a conversation about how you actually live, then moves into the layout and finishes that make a renovation or new build feel like yours.
The difference comes down to scope. An architectural designer is responsible for the building itself and getting it through consent. Interior design covers everything you see and touch once you are inside it. Here is how the two roles compare and where they meet.
| Architectural designer | Interior designer | |
|---|---|---|
| What they shape | The building itself: its structure and footprint. | The rooms inside it: layout, light, colour, and finishes. |
| Main output | Consent-ready plans and the building consent. | A material palette and renders you can walk through. |
| When they start | At the very start, before the footprint is fixed. | Once the rooms are taking shape, often alongside the architecture. |
| What they ensure | The home stands up and passes consent. | Each room works for how you live and feels right. |
| How they complement | Sets the shell and where the windows go. | Plans the light and finishes inside that shell. |
Both work best together. When the interior is considered while the architecture is still on the drawing board, a window can land where you want morning light rather than where it suits the framing, and storage gets planned before the walls are fixed.
At Eco Workshop, our architectural and interior designers ensure nothing is lost during the handover between them. Every designer holds LBP Design 2 accreditation, a Licensed Building Practitioner qualification that means they are legally able to design residential buildings, and the team is members of the Architectural Designers New Zealand. You get the design eye and the technical grounding from one team.
Yes, you can see your interior before the build starts. The studio builds a 3D model of your home and turns it into photorealistic renders and a walkthrough you can move through, so you can stand in a room that does not exist yet and decide whether the floor and the wall colour belong together before either is ordered.
This matters more than it sounds. Daylight and material choices shape how healthy and comfortable a home feels, which is why BRANZ recommends using natural light as much as possible when a house is designed. Getting those calls right on screen, while they are still free to change, beats finding a problem after the tiler has finished. The studio’s photorealistic 3D walkthroughs are built for exactly that: certainty before you commit.
Bring your photos, a Pinterest board, or just a rough sense of the feeling you want. We will walk through what an interior design package involves and what it is likely to cost. No obligation. No pressure. Call (03) 455 1505 or contact us online.
An interior designer adds value at two distinct moments: during a new build, where decisions made early in the process are far easier to change, and during a renovation, where a clear brief prevents costly scope creep. On a new build, the interior is planned alongside the architecture from the first sketch. A renovation is different: the job is often about making a cold older home work harder without stripping out the character you bought it for.
That second case is common across Dunedin, where plenty of homes went up long before anyone thought about insulation. The national Healthy Homes Standards set a benchmark of an 18-degree living room as the mark of a warm, dry home. Good interior design works alongside the building work to get an older villa or bungalow. Interior design in Dunedin is rarely only about how a room looks, it is about how that room feels to live in through a real winter. Whatever the project, your first meeting is free, and you get a clear fee proposal before you commit.
It depends on the size and scope of the project, so there is no single price. A full home interior costs more than refreshing one room, and whether the work is quoted as a fixed fee or an hourly rate depends on what you need. Your first meeting at Eco Workshop is free, and you get a clear fee proposal before you commit to anything.
An architect or architectural designer is responsible for the building itself, from its structure to getting it through consent. The interior designer is responsible for what happens inside, how the rooms are laid out, and how they look and feel. At Eco Workshop, our architectural and interior designers ensure that the inside and the outside of your home are designed together.
It starts with a conversation about how you live and what you want your home to feel like. From there, the studio turns it into a design concept, then shows you materials and a walkthrough before anything is ordered or built. You stay in control of the decisions the whole way through.
Yes. The studio produces photorealistic renders and a 3D walkthrough of your home, so you can see the colours and materials in place and move through the rooms before construction begins. Changing a finish on screen costs nothing. On-site, it costs plenty.
Both projects will benefit from having an interior designer on board. Planning the interior early on a new build means the architecture and the finishes work together from the start. For a renovation, an interior designer helps an older Dunedin home feel warmer and work better without losing what you love about it.
The first step is always a conversation. No obligation. No pressure. Just a chat over a cup of coffee about how you want your home to look and feel.
Call (03) 455 1505 │ Visit 31e Stafford Street, Dunedin │ Send us a message
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