Evgeniy

Hello! We are Zhenya and Alyona. We are a young family. No children yet, but we do have a much-loved pet cat. We work a lot, we love an active holiday (snowboarding, cycling, rollerblading, hiking, rafting and so on) and we value comfort. This is our first flat, so we chose carefully, starting with the neighbourhood the building is in and ending with the interior details we had been dreaming about for years. We never doubted for a moment that we would work with a designer. Going by the reviews and the portfolio we settled on Oksana and, as everything that followed showed, we were not wrong at all!

The property is a two-room flat with a kitchen-living room and two bathrooms. A little over 60 m² in total. The developer handed it over in improved shell condition, so we had complete freedom. Or at least that is how it looked to us :) Before the work started we filled in the designer's questionnaires, where we set out our preferences on style and other general points, and the details we wanted for each room. We ordered a design project with design supervision from Oksana. We agreed every detail of the drawings with her and talked through what we wanted. Everything that could technically be built into the project was built into it. Anything that was difficult or impossible to achieve within our floor area and room sizes was taken out. And, strange as it sounds, that is exactly what we want to thank Oksana for! Because she found the right words and explained patiently, with arguments, why one thing or another would cause problems or simply made no sense in our situation. In the end that saved us a lot of time and money. Once the project was ready and approved we moved on to choosing the materials and the contractors needed to build it. At that stage our designer's experience and professionalism helped us again: taking our wishes into account, she was able to recommend specialists for every kind of work, both from her own experience of working with them and from what her colleagues had to say. So, under Oksana's careful guidance, we went the whole long way from imperfect concrete walls and empty rooms to a finished, comfortable home!

Most of the constraints came from what we wanted: Scandinavian style, as few open surfaces as possible (so that dust does not gather, we both have allergies), no unnecessary details, ecological materials. We are also very fussy about details, and that often became a constraint too. And of course there was a financial limit, since the flat was bought with a mortgage. With no experience of working with a designer or of a turnkey renovation in a new flat, we were probably expecting miracles :) We thought that all you have to do is imagine it and building it will be easy. In reality it is not like that at all. However good your designer is, and however good the trades are, difficult moments always come up during the build. And in most cases the decisions will still be yours to make, because you are the one who will live in the place once the work is over. Thanks to Oksana's design supervision we understood clearly how each of our decisions would affect the final result, and we could take them with our eyes open, backed by her long experience on other projects. In any case, we were completely set on the result ourselves and, once we had seen how Oksana works, we had no doubt left that it would all come together!

All in all, a little over two years passed between getting the keys and moving in. Looking back now at the amount of work that went into it, we certainly do not think that is a long time. Although we did run out of energy more than once along the way :) We moved in about two months ago and we have been enjoying every detail of our new flat ever since! We do not regret a single rouble, hour or ounce of effort, the result is definitely worth it! To anyone still wondering whether it is worth hiring a designer, we can give a straight answer: it is! And as for which designer to turn to, you have probably worked that out already :) Oksana, thank you so much!