Interior Designer vs. Interior Decorator: What's the Difference (and Which One You Actually Need)

People use "interior designer" and "interior decorator" like they're the same job. They're not. And in a city where half the housing stock predates indoor plumbing, the difference isn't academic — it's the thing that determines what you're allowed to touch.

Here's the actual distinction.

An interior decorator works with the room you already have. Furniture, paint, fabric, lighting, layout within existing walls. No structural changes, no permits, no contractor coordination. If your bones are good and you just need it to look and feel right, a decorator is the right call — and often the more affordable one.

An interior designer works with the building itself. That means walls can move. Plumbing can relocate. A designer is trained to know what's load-bearing and what isn't, how to read a floor plan for what it's not telling you, and how to manage contractors, permits, and the fifteen small decisions that happen on-site and never make it into a mood board.

I trained as a licensed architect for twenty years before I ever touched a swatch book. That's not a credential I mention to sound impressive — it's the actual reason I can look at a hundred-year-old shotgun house and tell you, before demo starts, whether that wall between the kitchen and dining room is decorative or holding up your roof. A decorator can't answer that question. It's not part of the training. It's not supposed to be.

Here's where it actually matters in New Orleans specifically.

Our older homes — the shotguns, the center-halls, the raised basements in Old Metairie — were built long before central air, updated plumbing, or anyone thought about an open floor plan. Humidity has spent a century moving through the wood and plaster. Foundations shift. What looks like a simple "let's open this up" conversation is frequently a structural one the moment you're in a house built before 1930.

That's the moment a decorator has to bring in an architect anyway — adding a second professional, a second fee, and a second person who has to get up to speed on your house. A designer with architectural training skips that step. One person, one vision, from the wall coming down to the paint going up.

So which do you need?

Ask yourself one question: does anything need to move? If you're refreshing a room — new furniture, new palette, better flow within the walls you already have — a decorator does that well and affordably. If you're touching layout, structure, plumbing, or anything that requires a permit, you want a designer, and specifically one who understands how your particular house was actually built.

Most of the homes I work on in Uptown, the Garden District, and Old Metairie fall into the second category, whether the homeowner realized it going in or not. That's the real value of bringing in the right person from the start — not just someone who can make a room beautiful, but someone who understands why the room is shaped the way it is in the first place, and what it can become without losing what made you fall in love with it.