An off-plan buyer purchases from images, plans and a show-home – long before there is a room to stand in. Which means a development can lose its sale in the drawings, months before anyone notices. These are the five failures we are most often called in to prevent – or repair. All of them come from real projects on this market.
The plan shows a bedroom with a 1.70 m bed against the wall. Then the built-in wardrobes go in, and the niche that remains measures 1.68 m. The bed is now a custom order, and the mattress a non-standard 1.63 or 1.65 m, made by a handful of manufacturers at a price nobody planned. A routine bedroom has become a procurement problem – multiplied by every unit that shares the layout.
Storage fails the same way: it is the least glamorous line in a brief and the first thing a serious buyer checks.
How it is prevented: a layout review against real furniture dimensions – door swings, walkways, wardrobe depths, the bed that actually exists at the price point – before the plans are frozen.
Proportions that feel wrong at eye level, sightlines from the entrance straight into a bathroom door, a “generous” living room that is all circulation – these flaws are invisible on paper and obvious in three dimensions. When a layout is approved from the 2D drawing alone, they survive into construction, and produce residences that are awkward to live in and awkward to sell.
How it is prevented: every typology is built as a full 3D model and walked before approval – the cheapest possible stage to change a wall.
The most expensive mistake on this list usually starts innocently: a dimensionless plan is handed to a visualiser who was never trained in interiors. The visualiser fills the frame with whatever 3D models are at hand – usually the catalogue of one or two famous houses – without checking real dimensions, real prices or the room’s ergonomics.
Three bills arrive later. First, the identity bill: the renders look like every competitor’s, because they are drawn from the same catalogues – the development has nothing of its own to sell. Second, the budget bill: when the project reaches delivery, the developer discovers what the pictured furniture actually costs. In one real case, furnishing a 600 m² villa to the render came to €693.000, and a 200 m² apartment to €320.000 – neither figure existed anywhere in the project budget. Third, the trust bill: the delivered home differs from the render the buyer paid against, and the claims begin.
How it is prevented: renders made by visualisers who are trained interior designers – every piece in the frame procurable, at its real size, with its real price attached to the specification.
The architect carries a different responsibility – structure, envelope, permissions – and interiors are, understandably, a secondary concern. So furniture enters the drawings as approximate rectangles: a space “about the size of a sofa”, a gap “roughly a dining table”. In the built home the real pieces have real dimensions, and they do not fit as planned – or fit only after compromises the buyer can see.
How it is prevented: an interior partner working alongside the architect from the start – each discipline carrying its own drawings, neither guessing at the other’s.
The entrance hall, the lift lobbies, the parking level, the pool and spa, the gym, the cinema, the wine cellar – in too many projects these are left to a contractor’s default finishes. The effect is corrosive: a buyer who loved the show apartment walks back through a lobby that contradicts everything it promised. In an apartment complex, the shared spaces sell as hard as the units.
How it is prevented: one interior identity from the street to the bedroom – common areas and amenities designed as part of the same line as the residences.
Each of these failures is cheap to prevent on paper and expensive to repair in concrete. Removing them, systematically, is what a developer-side interior practice is for.
More than a decade of residential work, from the studio in Palma de Mallorca.
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