About Studio Akiva
Two hundred and fifty renovations, then a studio.
Studio Akiva was founded on fifteen years of building sites. From 2002, and for fifteen years, James Karpin ran property renovations across London, more than two hundred and fifty of them, standing in stripped-back rooms while contractors explained why the thing on the drawing could not be built. It is an unglamorous education and it is the most useful one available. It is also why our drawings are the sort a trade can work from, rather than the sort that look impressive and come apart on site.
He founded the studio in 2013 and named it after his daughter, Akiva. The word means protection and shelter. That is a large thing to write above a door, and it has been the standard we have measured ourselves against ever since: a home should be the one place that holds up when everything else is difficult.
The studio itself came from a straightforward observation from those years. Considered design was reaching people who could afford a designer at fifteen per cent of a project budget, and almost nobody else. The rooms that most needed thinking about were getting none.
I spent fifteen years watching people spend serious money on rooms that did not work. Almost never because they had bad taste. Because nobody sat down with them for an hour before the first invoice went out.
That hour is most of what we sell.
Three things, and what they cost us.
Values are easy to list and harder to hold when they are inconvenient. These are ours, along with what each one actually means in practice.
Protection
A home should hold up under real life. We would rather specify the sofa that survives a family than the one that photographs well, and we will say so even when the beautiful option is sitting right there on the mood board.
Creativity
Every scheme is drawn for the room it is going in. We have no house style to impose and no template to fill, which is slower and is the entire point. Your home should look like you live there, not like we do.
Affordability
Fixed prices, published on the website, per room. It caps what we can earn from a project and it means you can find out what something costs without booking a call to be told.
Why we do not charge a percentage.
Interior design has traditionally been priced in one of two ways. A percentage of what you spend, or an hourly rate with no ceiling on the hours. Both are perfectly legitimate and both have the same awkward feature: the more you spend, the more your designer earns.
Nobody sets out to exploit that. But it sits underneath every recommendation, and it is why so many people come to us having been quietly steered towards the more expensive sofa without ever being able to point to the moment it happened.
A fixed fee per room removes the question entirely. We are paid the same whether your furnishing budget is three thousand pounds or thirty, so when we tell you the cheaper option is the right one, there is nothing behind it but the room. It also means you can buy a single room, see how you find working with us, and stop there with no obligation and nothing outstanding.
Fixed pricing only works if the scope is fixed too, which is why our packages list precisely what you receive and precisely what you do not. It makes us look inflexible next to a studio that will quote for anything. We would rather be clear at the start than renegotiate at the end.
Five stages, two of them calls.
Discovery call
A free, informal conversation to work out whether we are the right studio for your project. Nothing is designed on it and there is nothing to pay.
Kick-off call
Once you have booked, your designer takes the brief properly: how you use the room, what you are keeping, what you cannot stand and where the budget sits. Measurements and photographs follow.
Design
Around three weeks per room for a standard room. Mood board, then the layout, then every item selected, sourced and costed against your budget.
Presentation call
Your designer talks you through the scheme and explains the reasoning behind it. One revision is included, and your design pack is issued afterwards.
Afterwards, if you want it
You can take the pack and order everything yourself, or hand the ordering, tracking and delivery to us. Support during the works is available separately.
The full process, including what happens between each stage and what we need from you, is set out on our how it works page.
What we have to show for it.
We are one of the top-rated interior design studios on Houzz in the UK, with twelve consecutive Best of Houzz awards behind us. That matters less than the reviews underneath them, which are written by homeowners who had to live with the result.
Because the work is delivered remotely, where you are matters far less than it used to. We design homes across the UK and for English-speaking homeowners elsewhere in Europe, many of whom are navigating a renovation in a country whose building trade they do not yet know. James also hosts a property renovation podcast that has found listeners in more than thirty countries, which is where a fair few of our clients first came across us.
The studio works with a small group of trained interior designers and interior architects, each of whom takes a project from the first client call through to the final presentation rather than passing it along a chain. You can meet the team here.
If you are weighing up whether a designer is worth it for your project, fifteen minutes on a call will tell you more than any amount of reading. We will give you an honest answer, including when that answer is no.
Book a free discovery call
