Interior Procurement: Where 30% of the Budget Vanishes

The house was finished. Fifteen hundred square metres, limestone facade, floor-to-ceiling oak windows, underfloor heating warmed up, lighting scenes programmed. The client came on a Friday to take the keys — and spent three hours walking through empty rooms furnished with four chairs out of twenty-eight. The rest was still travelling. Some of it from Brianza, some from a workshop outside Verona, the kitchen stuck in a warehouse in Almaty. Fridays like that make one thing very clear: furnishing and procurement for a private mansion is not a closing formality. It is a separate project inside the project — and it fails more often than the frame, the roof and the engineering systems combined.

In twenty years I have watched this scene play out dozens of times. The square metres change, the styles change, the sums change. One thing does not: on the home straight, somewhere between 15 and 30 per cent of the budget disappears, and the client has no idea where until the very end.

Why the money goes at the end

Construction is disciplined work. There is a cost estimate, there are stages, there are sign-off documents and units everyone understands: cubic metres of concrete, square metres of masonry, linear metres of pipe. You can still make mistakes, but a mistake is visible immediately and costs a predictable amount.

Procurement works differently. For a house above 800 square metres we are typically dealing with 200 to 400 line items from 25 to 40 suppliers — and that is our own practice; for a 150-square-metre apartment, specialist studios quote 30 to 60 items from 15 to 25 suppliers. Every supplier has its own production time, its own payment schedule, its own logistics, its own rules for claims. None of these variables line up with any other. Two hundred items means two hundred small contracts, each of which can run late.

Here is where it gets interesting. It is never “the furniture” that is late. It is always one particular item — and almost always the one the whole room was built around. The sofa the living room was chosen for. The chandelier the slab was reinforced for. The stone worktop the cabinet was cut for. And while it travels, the entire room stands still, and with it the installation crew, who are now working to a schedule made of downtime.

What procurement actually covers

Formally, everything not glued to the building: furniture, lighting, textiles, sanitaryware, appliances, rugs, decorative objects, art, the china for the formal dining room. In practice, four more line items that almost never appear in the first version of the budget.

Logistics. International FF&E studies put logistics at 6 to 25 per cent of the product cost, depending on project type; for a private residence with a heavy import share, 15 to 20 is the sensible assumption. White-glove delivery — unpacking, carrying, on-site assembly, packaging removal — adds another 5 to 8 per cent on top of the product price, and over the past two years that service has risen roughly a fifth in cost, simply because there are fewer people who can carry marble without breaking it.

Customs and taxes. Import duty on furniture runs from 0 to 15 per cent depending on material and intended use, plus 20 per cent VAT, plus the customs processing fee. In May 2026 the Russian government was discussing prohibitive duties on furniture from unfriendly countries. The measure has not been adopted, but the mere fact of the discussion means an import budget cannot be calculated once and forgotten.

Storage. Furniture arrives on its own logic, not on yours. A chest of drawers built in eight weeks waits for a house that takes twenty weeks to finish. Responsible storage in standard supplier contracts runs around 500 roubles a day per item; across forty items over three months, that is the budget of a decent rug.

Replacements and damage. Not “if” but “how much”. On a normal project, 3 to 7 per cent of items get replaced: a chipped edge, the wrong veneer tone, the wrong fabric batch, broken glass. That is the ordinary physics of transport, not anyone’s bad faith. What is not normal is having neither a reserve in the budget nor room in the schedule for it.

Five places where the budget leaks

1. The specification is written before lead times are checked

A classic. The designer assembles the selection, the client falls in love with an armchair, the armchair is approved — and a month later it turns out the factory needs sixteen weeks to build it and another six to ship it. Italian factories currently quote 8 to 16 weeks of production plus 4 to 8 weeks of road freight; Scandinavians 6 to 12 plus 2 to 4; Spanish and Portuguese makers 8 to 14 plus 2 to 6. Parallel channels through the UAE, Kazakhstan or Georgia take 3 to 5 months from order to site; working directly through an agent in Italy takes 2 to 4 months, with far better predictability.

The correct order is the reverse: lead times first, love second. We keep an internal table of real lead times for the factories we work with and refresh it every quarter — because numbers from two years ago now lie by a factor of one and a half.

2. There is no second choice

In Western practice this is called double-specifying: for every critical item, a backup is approved in advance — a different factory, a different channel, half the lead time. The client looks at both once and agrees once. After that, if the primary supplier suddenly announces a twenty-week queue, the decision takes an hour instead of a month of correspondence and re-approvals.

It is a discipline that costs nothing upfront and saves weeks at the other end.

3. Everything travels separately

Twenty suppliers means twenty trucks, twenty deliveries to receive, twenty chances of damage and twenty freight invoices. Consolidating the load at a single warehouse before the final run to site saves around 12 per cent on freight on average — and, more importantly, turns twenty receiving events into two or three, with a proper count and inspection.

4. Inspection by eye

This is where most people get it wrong. A supplier will consider a claim under three conditions: original factory packaging, no signs of assembly, and a damage report drawn up at the moment of delivery. Sign the waybill, unpack, assemble, notice a chip a week later — and the chip is now yours. One missed report on a two-million-rouble sofa costs more than the annual salary of the person whose job is to write those reports.

5. The discount nobody asked for

Professional buying runs on dealer terms: the designer discount at most factories is 10 to 15 per cent, and direct contracts plus volume can reach 25. On a 40-million-rouble procurement budget, that is a difference of 4 to 10 million for exactly the same contents. The client who buys independently “through a friend at the showroom” pays retail and sincerely believes they saved on the service fee.

Expensive myths

“I’ll buy it myself once the house is ready.” The house being ready means the lead-time clock has only just started. That is another four to six months of living in an unfurnished house, or of crews walking back into freshly finished rooms.

“Procurement is shopping.” Shopping is the first fifteen per cent of the work. The rest is contracts, deposits, production control, tracking trucks, customs, warehousing, receiving, claims, and installation in the right order. Dull logistics on which the beauty entirely depends.

“We don’t need a reserve, everything is calculated.” A reserve of 10 to 15 per cent of the procurement budget is not a sign of poor planning but of good planning. It is not spent on whims; it is spent on replacing what arrived broken and on express shipping what arrived late.

“More expensive means more reliable.” No. Our hardest stories came not from obscure workshops but from major names whose queue for a popular model stretched to six months precisely because of demand.

Our approach: procurement begins at the drawing stage

In the studio we close the specification before the finishing crew sets foot on site. The reason is simple: the technical interior design package and the specification are one document split across different sheets. The socket goes where the console will stand. The niche is built for one specific refrigerator with one specific depth. The cut-out in the worktop matches a sink that has already been paid for, not one we will “find something similar” to later.

From there the logic is straightforward. Every item falls into one of three groups by criticality: “holds the room” (large furniture, lighting over the table, joinery), “affects the finishes” (sanitaryware, built-in appliances, concealed systems) and “arrives fast” (textiles, decorative objects, accessories). The first group is ordered first, with a double specification. The third comes last, often once we can see how the light actually falls in the finished room.

The load is gathered at a consolidation warehouse, receiving runs on a photo protocol with formal reports, and installation follows a calendar in which the rug cannot arrive before the construction dust has left. Making sure what arrives matches what was drawn is the job of design supervision — otherwise, six months later, instead of the intended interior you get a collection of vaguely similar objects.

Materials and equipment are a chapter of their own: stone, joinery, lighting and technical systems come from manufacturers we work with directly. Those categories are gathered in our equipment and materials section, and it is not a showcase for its own sake — it is the list of suppliers who have never once failed us on time or quality. At this level, a supplier’s reputation is measured not by the catalogue but by their behaviour when something goes wrong.

Two cases from practice

A residence near Zvenigorod, 1,200 square metres. The client insisted on buying the kitchen himself, “through people he knew”. It arrived seven weeks behind schedule, with fronts in a different shade — the batch had been repainted at the factory without notice. There was no one to argue with: the agreement had been verbal and the deposit paid to a private account. Redoing it cost 3.8 million roubles and pushed the move-in to spring. Everything else in the house, bought through studio contracts, arrived on time.

The second case runs the other way. A house outside Moscow, 900 square metres, ten items from Italy. A month before shipment the main upholstery supplier halted production for a company restructuring. The double specification did its job: a pre-approved alternative set from another factory went into production the same day. The client learned about the incident afterwards, from a report. The price difference was around two hundred thousand roubles — against two months of a stalled interior, that is very different arithmetic.

How to build a budget that holds

The working formula we use in the first conversation with a client: the price of the items on the specification, plus 15 to 20 per cent for logistics and customs, plus 5 to 8 per cent for white-glove delivery and installation, plus a 10 to 15 per cent reserve for replacements and express shipping. In other words, a third is honestly added to the catalogue price. That third is exactly the thirty per cent that supposedly “goes missing” — in reality it was never lost, it was simply never budgeted.

Three things need to happen before the first payment to any supplier. Approve the specification in full rather than room by room: until the whole picture is visible, you cannot divide the budget between “holds the room” and “we’ll add it later”. Check the lead time on every critical item and write it into the construction calendar, not into the designer’s separate file. And appoint one person accountable for the money and the schedule of the procurement process, with the authority to approve a substitution without a month of sign-offs.

Without those three things, saving on the service usually costs several times more than the service — not because anyone is doing bad work, but because two hundred moving parts do not assemble themselves into an interior.

One last thing

The home straight is deceptive. It feels as though the hard part is behind you: the land, the foundation, the roof, the engineering — everything that costs millions and takes years. All that is left is “buying furniture”. Yet this is precisely where a house either becomes a home or stays a beautiful shell in which someone lives among objects bought in a hurry.

If you are at that stage right now — specification in hand and a growing sense that the budget has started living a life of its own — write to us. Sometimes one conversation is enough to see exactly where those three months and that missing third of the estimate are hiding in your schedule.