Orlando Soria Has Some Advice for You
Because of my presence on social media (follow me @mrorlandosoria!) and my upcoming TV show (Unspouse My House, on HGTV), I get a lot of strangers asking me for advice. I always find this to be such a nice compliment, a small way of someone telling me that I look successful from the outside. I get a lot of emails from people toiling away in careers they hate, dreaming of becoming interior designers. Generally, my internal response to these queries is Don't do it. In my replies, though, I try to be as encouraging as possible, but I always feel a little ridiculous giving advice to people. My career is a far-from-perfect example of how to make a living from interior design.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what working as an interior designer is actually like. In my experience, a lot of the interns and junior-level employees tend to expect it to be all about fluffing pillows and going shopping, or laughing while sipping iced coffee. What they don’t see are the hours measuring and remeasuring, drafting and redrafting, schlepping fabric swatches around town, cramming huge rolls of fabric into your car in downtown L.A. in 112-degree heat, choking on the smell of street meat and car exhaust. Interior design is an amazing, creative career—but it’s mostly logistics and psychology.
The number one question I get from strangers who email me is “How can I get my start in interior design?” I am, literally, the worst person to ask this question. Here’s how I got my start: I graduated from school with an MFA (I thought I wanted to be an art professor), worked as a graphic designer, got laid off, and couldn’t get a job for years (despite being massively overqualified and having multiple Ivy League degrees). I started working as a production designer and eventually was cast as an assistant on an HGTV show. I’d been designing spaces my entire life—interior design had always just been something I was innately good at, but that show taught me so much about the practicality of the profession. My role on that show led to me working with its host, Emily Henderson, as a design assistant and eventually to my own practice as an interior designer. It’s not an easy-to-emulate path, though, unless you feel like not having health insurance for 10 years, being broke for the entirety of your 20s, and having to rely on being magically cast on a TV show to finally get your big break.
Emily is a close friend of mine and someone who I look up to quite a bit. However, I don’t think she’d mind me saying that neither of us is an innately good businessperson. We are both creatives, people with artist brains who aren’t inherently profit-driven or aggressively savvy when it comes to charging people for our services. Post-HGTV, getting her interior design business set up was difficult. There were a lot of ups and downs, and people who swindled the business out of money. I experienced some of the same issues when I went out on my own and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Ultimately, it led me to make a major decision about how I would approach my career (which I’ll discuss in a bit—stay tuned).
This brings me to the piece of advice I always give in response to that “How do I get my start?” question. It’s a boring answer that no one wants to hear, but it’s the best thing to do: Learn CAD, learn Sketchup, learn every single drafting program possible and go work for a mid-to-large-size firm at a very junior level. This will help you figure out the business side of design. New designers are eager to do the fun stuff (selecting fabrics, sourcing furniture, choosing wall coverings) before they even learn design programs. Yet having a foundation in the business of interior design is crucial to figuring out how to make it into something that will actually make you money. The design stuff is the easy part; figuring out how to turn this luxury service into a livelihood is the part that’s nearly impossible.
Right before HGTV picked up my show, I was at a crossroads with my interior design business. I had a few clients cheat me out of thousands of dollars and was getting burnt out on the constant struggle of trying to get people to pay me for my time; of having people hire me for my portfolio and taste, only to railroad me and ignore my suggestions; and of the constant hand-holding and reassuring I had to do to get them to go along with my design plans. Interior design is 90 percent psychology, and 10 percent actual design work. Being a therapist was starting to get to me.
Because of HGTV, Apartment Therapy, and all the amazing content shared online, interior design is mainstream these days. However, hiring an actual interior designer is extremely expensive—too expensive for most people to afford. It’s a luxury service for wealthy clients. If you want to be a successful interior designer, someone who might be able to afford health care and maybe someday to buy a home of your own, you need to go after extremely wealthy clients. Interior designers need to be paid a living wage in order to work. And in order to make a living wage, you kind of have to work with very wealthy people. I hate saying that, because it sounds elitist, but the only successful interior designers I know have worked pretty much exclusively with the very wealthy. And to be honest, I myself sometimes wish I could afford an interior designer (just for fun, because I’m fans of so many of my peers). I can't afford them! It’s a service that, throughout history, has been reserved for the 1 percent, and it seems to me that it will remain that way.
This was eventually what led me to walk away from working with clients. I had one particularly bad experience with a wealthy, obnoxious Santa Monica couple who hired me to help them flip a house, rushed me to finish plans, then refused to pay me for my work while still using my plans. This is when I realized something about myself: I don’t really care that much about the needs of entitled rich people. I don’t want to be yet another service worker in their lives. This is when I decided I’d rather serve as an inspiration to thousands of people via my blog and social media than work as a coddler and hand-holder for the rich. My New Year’s resolution in 2018 was to stop working with clients. That was the year my book came out and the year my TV show, Unspouse My House, came into being. My goal was to use interior design as a conduit to talk about life, and to communicate with people in a real way. I’ve been lucky that I continue to get opportunities to do that.
I still work with clients, but I only take one at a time and I only do projects I can use to create content to share with my followers. I want to create content that inspires everyday people to make their homes as beautiful as possible. I don’t come from a background where interior design was accessible or part of my world. I was raised in a cabin inside Yosemite National Park—I doubt anyone for miles around us had an interior designer. But I’ve always questioned the perception that having a beautiful home is only for the super rich. It is my belief that everyone deserves the most beautiful home possible, that there are small things you can do to beautify your home, that caring for your space is a great way of showing care for yourself and those who enter your house.
This desire to talk to the masses about design rather than work for the über-wealthy is what has led me to HGTV and Unspouse My House. Every week I work with a newly single homeowner to renovate their home, restart their lives, and get them on the path to healing (the show derived from my own breakup story). The show is totally in alignment with my values, as it’s streaming to homes across America and it shows regular people how to transform their spaces in big and small ways. Yes, the heart of my show is dramatic renovations, but I also do a lot of DIY, showing people small, inexpensive things they can do in their homes that are still chic. It’s further confirmation that while I have great interior design skills, my true calling is talking to people about interior design and inspiring them to make their homes as beautiful as possible.
So, there you have it! My advice for people wondering how to break into interior design? Don't do it! Just kidding—totally do it, just work for a big firm first. It’s ironic that so many people ask me for career advice, considering how insanely difficult it would be to emulate my exact career: Be penniless, get on a TV show, become a designer, realize working with clients is annoying, move on to content. So I guess, in conclusion, my main advice would be: Don't do what I did!
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
