SCW Interiors, LLC review: Bad interior designer with poor customer service and questionable billing practices

We had such a bad experience with SCW Interiors, it's hard to know where to begin. There's no point in going through the entire list of incidents we had with her (the list is long), but I have to at least mention the top two reasons we regret hiring her as our interior designer, as most of the incidents fall into one of these two categories:

1. Her condescending, arrogant, and dismissive attitude.

In a nutshell, this designer is bossy, hostile, and irritable. Getting into the details wouldn't serve any purpose. Suffice it to say that before you hire her, don't just rely on the interview, during which she will be on her best behavior. Ask to speak with actual customer references. Talk to them about what she's really like to work with. Or ask to speak with the contractors she works with. See what they have to say about her. She was a constant headache for us. She always acted like she resented working on our project.

2. Her billing practices.

The first thing that stands out when you get a bill from SCW Interiors is that there is no detailed description of the activity you're getting billed for or how long each activity took. Instead, you'll get something like "Design Time: 38 hours" and that's it. If you question her about it, be prepared for a lecture about how interior decorating is very complex and to just assume that those hours were spent doing very complex, hard-to-understand things. When we noticed her adding 8.25% sales tax and questioned her about it (since that's not the usual rate here in Virginia), she resisted giving us an explanation. We also came to realize over time that SCW was using one or more assistants for the work we hired the lead designer to do and billing them at the same hourly rate as the lead designer's rate. Very unprofessional. Oh, I almost forgot this: she secretly tried increasing her hourly rate by nearly 30%. We noticed and fired her. (Her response, by the way, was to tell us we "weren't a good fit" for SCW anyway--typical of her attitude).



Overall, she's an overpriced, self-important interior designer who shows nothing but contempt for her customers. And there's nothing special about her work, either. Just a terrible waste of six figures. Someone needed to say something.