We’re very grateful to have Sia Yu Cheng (Sia) as our interior designer for our first home. Thanks to his hard work, we managed to finish most of our renovation in just 2 months, before most of our neighbours even started their renovation works! This result is truly testament to how efficient he can be.
Even though we started looking for an ID quite late, and only confirmed the project with Sia after we got our keys, we knew from our first meet up with him that he would be a great fit for our project. Frankly, we did not have a high budget for renovation, and told him upfront that we would not do much carpentry. Despite these challenges, Sia definitely put a lot of effort into making sure we could achieve our dream look and functionality within the limited budget.
We were also quite clueless about laminates, schedules, and the necessities we would need to confirm before he could start work. Sia’s patience and expertise shone through here; he could answer every question we had about the different qualities of each material, cost-effectiveness, durability, and ease of upkeep. He also introduced us to his suppliers for bathroom suppliers, lighting, and doors, so that we knew exactly what we were getting for our house.
His experience and adaptability were also obvious when we reviewed our apartment with him and realised several differences from the blueprint. For one, there were many more beams than expected, which would affect aircon placement. More importantly, the washing machine tap was placed in a completely unexpected location, and the kitchen had a wall that we were instructed not to cover – even though we had already planned a cabinet there. While some designers would have panicked, Sia immediately started brainstorming about how he could adapt the design to (1) not block the cabinet; and (2) preserve what we wanted, which was storage space. After 20 minutes of collective brainstorming in the dark, he managed to come up with a fix. I was genuinely super impressed with him in that moment!
Sia never complained about how fickle minded we were, even though we definitely upped the difficulty for Sia along the way – for example, we decided to incorporate a huge bathtub into a tiny 3 room flat bathroom. Nevertheless, he remained super professional, helped to coordinate our million and one item deliveries, and even actively followed up with us after the handover to check if there were any outstanding defects to rectify (there weren’t).
All in all, I’m truly thankful for Sia’s hard work, and I hope more will recognise how fantastic of an interior designer he is!! I will certainly be recommending him to peers who are seeking a patient and hardworking ID who actually cares about what his clients wants 🙂 Thank you so much Sia!!