Award-winning kitchen, bathroom, and interior design studio in Hawke's Bay.
Whether you're holding the plans for your new build, terrified of getting it wrong. Or you reached into the pantry for one thing and ten things fell out, and that was the final straw, the problem is the same.
Homes are being designed around how they look, or how cheap they are to build. And you pay for it every day, one small defeat at a time.
KITCHEN DESIGN —
BATHROOM DESIGN —
LIVING ROOM JOINERY DESIGN —
WARDROBE DESIGN —
LAUNDRY DESIGN —
KITCHEN DESIGN — BATHROOM DESIGN — LIVING ROOM JOINERY DESIGN — WARDROBE DESIGN — LAUNDRY DESIGN —
Traditional interior design is letting you down.
The Reality
Stop blaming yourself for the daily chaos. You're not unorganised, you're not "Type B," and you're not letting anyone down. When a house lacks good design, keeping it tidy is an unwinnable battle that you’re losing daily, and you end up living in a space that feels cluttered, out of control, and nothing like you.
The Industry Gap
Traditional design splits your money in two and leaves you in the middle. Decorators do pretty finishes. Cabinet makers build boxes to fill a wall. Nobody puts how it looks and how it works in the same room, so you can spend five or six figures on a renovation or new build and still end up with a home that lets you down every single day.
The Fresh by Design Interior Way
I don't decorate rooms. I engineer them. My joinery-led process takes you from chaotic layout to buildable reality: a floor plan that works, selections that fit your life and your budget, and technical drawings your builder can price and build from without guessing. I carry the mental load. You keep the investment protected.
Meet Nichole
I've spent eleven years designing kitchens, bathrooms, and built-ins, including years inside a joinery company learning pricing, how everything goes together, and the steps it takes to get from concept to completion.
I've won four awards and worked on international projects, but the thing I'm proudest of is what I’ve learned along the way: beautiful and functional aren't a trade-off. They're an order. Function gets decided at the floor plan. Everything beautiful gets built on top of it.
So I built my signature design process around it, it's called FLO:
Finalise the floor plan.
Lock in the services.
Overlay the finishes.Nothing gets chosen before the thing it depends on, so you're never guessing what happens next.
My goal is simple: clarity, confidence, and calm. From our first conversation through every day you spend in your home.
The difference is undeniable.
Joinery-Led Design in Practice
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Beyond the Curve
A double award-winning transformation of a dark, cramped layout. We rebuilt the floor plan first, and it gave the room a job to do: a functional, statement space that finally matches the investment in the home.
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Gatsby's Kitchen
An award-winning kitchen built for effortless entertaining. Reshaping the existing footprint turned a disjointed room into a guest-ready space, without adding a single square metre.
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Drenched in Terracotta
A dark, south-facing room turned into a family retreat. We fixed the awkward layout first, then let the terracotta finishes sit on top of a floor plan that works.
Design is 10% of your spend, but it protects the other 90%.
The biggest misconception is that skipping design saves money. It doesn’t. You pay for design either way.
Upfront, in a plan your builder can price and follow. Or by the hour, while tradies make it up on site and you find the mistakes after you've already paid for them.
Design done first means the big decisions get made early, quotes come back accurate, and nobody's guessing with your money.
Here’s how we lead the process.
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First call — 20 minutes
This call is to answer your questions and see if we’re the right match without any pressure.
This is a phone or video conversation. You’ll get an approximate price for the work involved, and clear next steps, so you can move forward in the right direction.
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Deep‑dive session.
If we’re a good fit and you accept the proposal, we book a longer deep‑dive session.
We go space by space, talk about what’s working and what you want to change, and I start looking at your plans to diagnose the real problems. This is where I get a feel for your personality, how you want the space to look and feel, and what we’re really trying to achieve.
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Concept floor plans.
Next, I create 1–3 different floor plan options for each space.
These concepts are about optimising the space you have (especially with new‑build homes getting smaller), creating proper storage, and setting up a design that will let the aesthetics shine.
For every layout, you’ll get a 3D visual so you can actually see what it will look like, and together we decide which direction to take — sometimes it’s one option, sometimes a mix of two.
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Feasibility check.
We then send the concept plans to the relevant subtrades — plumbers, electricians, tilers, and more — to make sure what we’re proposing is possible in practice. Bigger items like joinery and benchtops are priced as well, so we can check that we’re staying within the budget we’ve set.
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Technical documentation.
Once we’re happy with the direction, I prepare final plans and technical documentation.
Every subtrade gets exactly what they need: lighting plans, cabinetry design, mechanical requirements, dimensioned drawings — the full picture so there’s no confusion on site.
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Materials and colour selections.
We then choose alongside you, a Pinterest board, and a clear design direction, the final materials, fittings, and finishes that suit the budget, the space, and your goals.
Think colour palettes, mood boards, pulling samples, and putting it all together.
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Handover and Ongoing Support.
Everything is handed over to your builder or joiner, with ongoing support from me so you’re not left to bridge the gap between the plans and the finished home on your own.
Let's clear the overwhelm before we start.
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This is why we never expect you to picture your kitchen from a 2D plan and a tiny tile sample.
You'll see exact, photo-real 3D renders of your space before you commit to a single finish. We lock the layout first, then layer the design on top, so the risk of a very expensive "I thought it would look different" is almost completely gone.
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When you get quotes without a locked design, builders have to guess your finishes. Which means every quote is for a different kitchen.
Work with us first and you hand your trades a complete, builder-ready specification document. No guessing on site, so the quotes you get back are accurate, comparable, and final.
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No. Right now you're probably spending your evenings scrolling Pinterest, feeling overwhelmed by 400 different opinions.
We take the mental load off you. We map the zones, solve the storage problems, and hand you clear decisions in the right order. You get the fun parts of the process without having to project-manage the chaos.
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Your design fee isn't an extra cost. It's the insurance that protects the rest of your budget.
The most expensive mistakes happen when decisions get made out of order, or when trades have to improvise on site. We engineer the space so it actually works, and hand over the technical documentation that keeps your build on time and out of the redo pile.
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A standard builder's allowance usually covers the bare minimum. Basic cupboards that don't account for how you actually cook or live.
When a joiner does "free" design, the cost is just hidden in the build, and their job is manufacturing, not solving your morning routine. We engineer joinery-first systems that actually lower your mental load, and hand your builder a locked specification so that allowance doesn't suddenly double.
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Ideally, before the slab is poured. If you wait until the builder asks you to pick your kitchen colours, it's already too late to fix a broken layout.
We start by going through your architectural plans to catch the hidden friction points, so the walls, windows, and plumbing end up in the exact right place from day one.
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Absolutely not. We need to see the reality of your daily life. The appliances taking up all the bench space, the corner cupboards that don't work, the school bags dumped on the island.
You don't have a tidying problem, you have a layout problem. This is a completely judgment-free space, and our goal is to design the systems that fix it.
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You don't have to choose between a pretty space and a practical one.
We don't design fragile show homes. We design camera-ready spaces that are kid-proof and guest-ready. Dedicated zones for the school-run scramble, durable finishes that won't date. Your home looks incredible and survives your family's daily routines.
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Yes. We take the decision fatigue entirely off your plate. You don't need to know the technical answers, the right order to pick things, or how to explain your style to a tradesperson.
We guide you through plain-English options, make expert recommendations based on your habits, and give you the confidence to just say yes.
I understand how overwhelmed you feel.
I've navigated this process myself, and I've guided hundreds of clients through it too. You want every dollar of your renovation to pay off, and getting clarity early is the most important thing you can do to make that happen.
If you're tired of the chaos but not sure where to begin, let's have a chat. Book a free, 20-minute discovery call, and we'll map out exactly what your next step should be.