Hiring an interior designer is one of the most significant decisions you will make in the process of creating a home. It is also one of the most misunderstood. Most people who have never worked with a designer before arrive at the process with a combination of excitement and anxiety, excited about what the result might be, anxious about the cost, the process, what they are actually paying for and whether they are making the right choice.

One of the most common questions homeowners ask before hiring an interior designer is how much it is going to cost. It is also one of the hardest questions to answer honestly, because the range across Europe is genuinely vast, and because the way designers charge varies as much as the fees themselves.

Budapest has always been a city of extraordinary architecture. The problem, historically, has been that the world did not quite know it yet. That is changing fast. Over the past decade, a generation of Hungarian architects, interior designers, furniture makers and creative professionals has emerged with a visual intelligence and a design ambition that is drawing international attention, investment and, increasingly, clients from across Europe and beyond.

Every year the design industry produces a list of trends. Most of them are not trends at all. They are slightly rearranged versions of whatever was trending eighteen months ago, filtered through whatever was shown at Salone del Mobile and translated into content that will drive Pinterest saves for the next six months before being replaced by the next version of essentially the same thing.

Materials are where interior design becomes tangible. You can understand a design concept intellectually and remain unmoved by it. You cannot stand in a room lined with hand-applied Venetian plaster, with a floor of honed travertine underfoot and morning light passing through linen curtains, and remain unmoved. Materials are what make the difference between a space that looks designed and a space that feels alive.

There are design studios that define themselves by their style. And there are design studios that define themselves by their values. Bogdanova Architects, the Geneva and Kyiv-based practice founded by Olga Bogdanova, is firmly in the second category. The term the practice uses to describe its position is Sustainable Luxury, and while both of those words are used so frequently in the design world that they have almost lost their meaning, Bogdanova Architects uses them to describe something genuinely specific.

The title architect is one of the most legally protected professional designations in most European countries. To call yourself an architect you must complete a degree programme of a minimum of five years, followed in most countries by a period of supervised practical experience and a professional examination. The protection exists because the work of architects directly affects the safety, functionality and permanence of buildings, and because the consequences of getting it wrong are expensive at best and dangerous at worst.

Every April, when Salone del Mobile takes over the fairgrounds at Rho and the Fuori Salone transforms the city's neighbourhoods into a week-long design festival, Milan becomes the most concentrated gathering of design talent, design ambition and design commerce on earth. But Milan as a design city is not just a one-week event. It is a permanent condition.

Finding the right contractor is one of the most important and most stressful parts of any renovation project. The horror stories are well known. Projects that run months over schedule. Budgets that expand by fifty percent without warning. Work that has to be done twice because it was not done correctly the first time. Contractors who disappear after the first payment.