BIID Interior Design Awards: What next?

In April, we were delighted to announce the shortlist for this year’s BIID interior design awards. The shortlist features a wide variety of projects from private residences, to workplaces, to holiday homes, to cinemas. You can view all the exciting projects here.

Now that the shortlist has been announced, the next stage is the site assessments. This is the phase where experienced designers visit each project and create detailed feedback on the experience of actually being on site. Photographs are hugely important for the shortlisting process, but here, the assessors get to experience in 3D how a space flows and feels to occupy. It is one of the ways our awards stand out from the crowds.

Currently, we are mid-way through the site visits which are due to conclude in the next few weeks. After that, our expert panel of judges will decide the winners for each category based on the feedback. This is a really exciting moment in the awards process and is the final step before the winners are announced at a grand ceremony at Drapers Hall in October.

To give you a (spoiler free!) insight into the site assessment process, we spoke to some of our site assessors about their experiences and favourite memories of visiting projects over the years. 

Jennifer Hamilton

This year, Jennifer is site assessing for the first time. Previously, she has won Interior of the Year and the Anna Whitehead prize.

I think for me it's so important as an entrant to know your project is being judged on the full experience, not just a handful of pictures. If your projects shine from all angles and you have paid attention to every corner, circulation spaces, back of house spaces it is wonderful for judges to see and understand that. 

From the judge’s angle: Anyone can make a project look good in 6 stills taken from clever angles with a big tidy up - and this makes it so hard to compare. But a truly winning project should look good 'in use' and from all angles. This is what visiting a project allows a judge to really assess. 

The other added angle I have really enjoyed as an assessor is that we often get to meet the client and hear their story and enthusiasm for the project and design team, and how it has met or exceeded their brief. There can really be no higher accolade than that. 
 

Mathew Freeman

Last year I assessed a project tucked away in the Eskdale valley in Cumbria — up at 5:30, then a bus, the tube, and a train north through some beautiful countryside. Google Maps told me to change for one last train, and to my surprise it turned out to be a miniature steam railway. I had forty-five minutes in my own little carriage, cuppa in hand, winding through the valley to the project. I was like a big kid. And the project — a lovingly restored Victorian vicarage — went on to win its regional award, which made every mile of the journey feel worth it. It sums up what the site visits are about: every shortlisted project gets seen in person, wherever it is.

Fiona Watkins

During the past few years of carrying out site assessments for the BIID awards, I’ve come to appreciate just how valuable they are within the judging process.  Whilst photography and written submissions help to tell an important part of the story, nothing ever compares to experiencing a project in person.  A site visit allows you to understand the scale, atmosphere and attention to detail in a way that simply isn’t possible from images alone.  

As I am based outside London, I feel particularly strongly that projects should be visited across the UK as it’s important that every entrant receives the same level of consideration.  

The most memorable visits are often those where you experience a genuine wow moment, not necessarily because it’s extravagant, but because everything has been so thoughtfully and beautifully executed.  I am thinking particularly of one of the first projects I assessed, Upper Heights by Dunning and Everard, shortlisted for the first BIID awards in 2022.

For me, being a site assessor hasn’t fundamentally changed the way I approach my own design work, but it has given me a real appreciation for the creativity within our industry.  I genuinely enjoy meeting the designers so they can explain their projects, enabling me to understand how they’ve interpreted the brief, solved challenges and designed/created some wonderful solutions.  Every project offers something to learn and it’s both inspiring and a privilege to experience this level of design excellence first hand.

We wish all the shortlisted designer’s luck with their site visits.

Tickets for the awards ceremony are now on sale, book here.