A quarter of the way through, and so far the 21st century has been good to designers. Through a steady diet of HGTV, Instagram and Pinterest, Americans have become increasingly obsessed with having a beautiful home, and are looking for help to get one. The industry itself has also opened up considerably—what was once a cloistered, secretive world is now a place where designers share tips, jokes and horror stories out in the open. Funny then, that at the very core of the profession remains a question that can still cause confusion, anxiety and the occasional heated argument: Is the job title interior designer or interior decorator?
There are many answers. Sometimes, the way the question is asked says more than the answer itself.
A quick Google search yields several articles that offer a fairly clean explanation: that interior designers and interior decorators are really separate and distinct kinds of professionals. To paraphrase, designers work on space planning and architectural details, often collaborating with the contractor on technical and safety issues. Decorators, on the other hand, focus on choosing furniture, fabrics and finishes. One is focused on how a space works. The other is all about how it feels.
There’s something tidy about these kinds of explanations. In the real world, things start to get messy.
On the demand side—among clients—splitting these two needs apart is not always so straightforward. For the most part, clients come to the process simply knowing they want a beautiful, functional home—not the exact steps required to get there. The scope of a project itself can easily morph from one kind of job into another. What starts as a “simple decorating job” often turns into a whole-home remodel. In other cases, it’s the reverse, and a client who thinks they need an overhaul really just needs their hand held while they pick out a chair.
On the supply side—among professionals—the distinction is blurry too. The same way that many clients need a little bit of both, most people in this line of work can do a little bit of both. “I think the vast majority of professional practitioners are in the middle,” says Massachusetts-based Linda Merrill, who often bills herself as a decorator. “Everybody cares about having something look great and function appropriately for the task of the room.”
Then there’s the market dynamic at play. Implicit in a lot of these definitions is the idea that designers can execute on more or less every aspect of a project, whereas decorators can only do half of it. Absent any kind of legal requirement around choosing a title (more on that later), it’s only natural that people would gravitate toward “designer.” Why do anything to limit your appeal to a potential client?
That same dynamic can create a kind of herding effect. As more and more people choose to call themselves “interior designer” over “interior decorator,” it cements the term in the public’s mind, and there’s even less incentive to go the other way. Merrill, for example, mainly uses designer for marketing purposes. “You want to have both words out there,” she says. If someone’s Googling ‘interior designer’ in my neighborhood, I want to come up.”
The more that professionals call themselves interior designers, so too does the broader industry. (Most brands advertise their trade program as being for “designers” as opposed to “decorators” these days.) The effect builds and becomes self-reinforcing over time. As much as it might provide a kind of clarity to split designer and decorator into two categories, the marketplace creates its own logic.
Or forget all that. Because it's possible to think about the "decorator" versus "designer" debate in purely generational terms. There’s history here. For a long time, decorator was the term of art. The giants of the 20th century, from Elsie de Wolfe to Mario Buatta, largely billed themselves as decorators, and Edith Wharton’s classic tome is The Decoration of Houses, not The Design of Houses.
Decorator was descriptive, but not limiting. Many giants of the profession absolutely did weigh in on architectural issues, and knew their way around a floor plan. For them, being a decorator was not less than—it was just what you called it.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when and why that began to change. There is no official study of the term, and the shifting cultural impact of a phrase can be a slippery thing to pin down. But there’s evidence of a slide toward designer earlier than one might think. As early as 1951, the New York School of Interior Decoration changed its name to the New York School of Interior Design. According to a report in Interiors at the time, the school felt the change “better [reflected] the character of courses and the dignity of the profession.”
Still, anecdotally, most tend to agree that it wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that the shift really began in earnest—when the industry at large, from shelter magazines to professionals themselves, started slowly to tilt away from decorator. The reason for this shift is also difficult to pin down, but the conventional wisdom is that the change coincided with a collective desire to present the industry as more professionalized, forward-looking and holistic. Decorator had the faint ring of an old-fashioned society character with a teacup poodle in tow; designer conveyed a cosmopolitan modernity—or so the thinking went.
Whatever the timeline and the underlying causes of the change, it has undeniably created some semblance of a generational divide. For many baby boomers, the default term is still decorator—no amount of HGTV will change that. For the most part, designers tend to take it in stride. “In the area that I live in, there are a lot of people from an older generation, and they always say ‘decorator,’” says Abigail Marcelo Horace, the principal of Connecticut-based firm Casa Marcelo. “I do try to inform them of all the things I do—space planning, functionality—but it is what it is. I don’t mind.”
Perhaps the most loaded way to think about the difference in title is through the eyes of the law. Unlike doctors, pilots and funeral directors, you don’t need to pass a test or satisfy an educational requirement to call yourself a designer. You can adopt the title 30 years into an illustrious career—or on day one.
However, there has been a concerted effort by professional associations like the American Society of Interior Designers and the International Interior Design Association to pass state laws that put some kind of structure onto the way designers self-identify. These “titling legislations,” as they’re called, usually allow designers to register and bill themselves as a “Certified Interior Designer” if they meet certain educational requirements and pass the Council for Interior Design Qualification’s NCIDQ exam.
In recent years, ASID, IIDA and CIDQ have formed a group called the Consortium for Interior Design, which has been on a tear of passing these bills. In 2024 alone, they added Nebraska, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania to the roster, following a run of successes in Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and North Carolina.
None of these laws limits the use of the term interior designer. However, they serve as a proxy for the broader debate over nomenclature: Should the terms reflect specific education or experience? Should “designers” be required to have a degree or pass a test? These questions have been the subject of heated arguments and strongly worded blog posts.
On one side of the debate, there’s the argument that education and a certain level of experience and knowledge give the word designer a valuable sense of professionalism and legitimacy. On the other side, some claim that clients don’t actually care, and that these requirements—which can be expensive and time-consuming—are pure gatekeeping.
Khoi Vo, the president of ASID, says that the organization’s goal with titling legislation is more about lifting its own members up than keeping anyone out of the industry. “That’s kind of the beauty of our profession: There are many different routes to get into it and make a living out of it,” he says. “Although we are an inclusive society, we want to make sure, if you have put in the effort to get to a certain level through education that you have the right to use the specific titles and appellations that we issue to our members according to their qualifications. Because we want to celebrate those achievements for our members, and that is a sign of distinction for them.”
Whatever laws are ultimately passed, there’s no denying that the question of who gets to call themselves a designer can sometimes reflect the anxieties of an industry with a relatively low barrier to entry. Decorator is sometimes used as a light put-down for a perceived dilettante—someone who strolls into the profession with little experience and puts on airs. (Showrooms, and even fellow design professionals, maligning the “Debbie Decorators” of the industry is nothing new.)
That stigma is often acutely felt on the jobsite, where designers often face condescension and doubt from architects and contractors no matter how they self-identify. “[Architects] blanket-call everyone a decorator in a very derogatory and not-flattering way,” says Los Angeles–based designer Lori Dennis. “Where I think other people would use the term decorator in a very favorable and appreciative way, a lot of architects [use the term as a] pejorative instead of recognizing the skills that [we] have. Everybody’s part of a wheel in order to make a project roll, and everybody has their specialties.”
Just as a slow-moving generational change swung the pendulum from “decorator” to “designer,” there’s evidence of another shift in the works. It would be wrong to say that there is a big wave of young professionals describing themselves exclusively as decorators—that’s not the case. But it’s fair to say that the term feels less loaded. Sometimes its old-school flavor even gives it a kind of vintage cache.
“I really use the terms interchangeably. When people ask me, I say that technically I am an interior designer because of my degree, but I also call myself a decorator,” says Rudy Saunders, design director of century-old New York firm Dorothy Draper & Company, who appreciates the sense of grandeur that decorator can conjure. “We all look up to these design icons who created legendary spaces and described themselves as decorators. We also see so many people living in beige boxes with no flourish or flare and strive for the detailing and special touches of yesteryear.”
Kendra Cusic, of the Brooklyn-based firm Cusic & Warner Design, labels herself as a decorator partially because she didn’t go to school for design. But she resists the idea that there’s anything negative about it. “I think that being a decorator, we add a lot to the space, right? We create the mood. You can do a lot with soft goods and furnishings, and we still are able to tell a story.”
“I would say [the term interior decorator] is more popular now, and I would credit that to TikTok and people building their own path,” adds New Jersey–based decorator Celena Browning. “They’re like, ‘Hey, [if] the older generation wants to discredit me and say I don’t have a degree in interior design, fine. I’m saying I’m an interior decorator. I feel like the gap is closing now.”
But maybe more so than a swing toward “decorator,” the general consensus seems to be it simply doesn’t matter that much anymore. In speaking to a dozen designers at various levels of experience, Business of Home largely found that most were happy to be called either—as long as the clients were kind, the project turned out well, and the checks cleared.
“I don’t really care what someone wants to call me,” says Dennis. “I just execute a job well.”
Additional reporting by Aidan Taylor
