How We Research and Verify What We Publish

Why a written methodology exists

Interior design is an unusually unregulated information category. Fee ranges, timelines, and material claims circulate online without attribution, get repeated until they feel settled, and then guide expensive decisions in a homeowner's actual house. We publish this methodology so a reader can judge our work by its process rather than its confidence.

The rule underneath everything below is simple: a reader should always be able to tell whether they are reading a verifiable fact, a figure drawn from our own completed work, or an opinion held by this studio. Those three categories are written differently on purpose, and they are never blended inside a single sentence.

The source hierarchy

When a page states something as fact, the supporting source is selected from a fixed order of preference. We use the strongest available tier and cite it directly rather than citing an article that summarises it.

• Primary law and regulation — North Carolina General Statutes, municipal building and permitting codes, and the rules of the North Carolina Board of Architecture and Registered Interior Designers.
• Government statistical agencies — the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, and county property and permitting records.
• Professional bodies and standards organisations — ASID, NKBA, and published testing or performance standards for materials.
• Manufacturer technical documentation for a specific product's stated specification, cited only for that product and never generalised across a category.
• Our own project record, clearly labelled as studio experience rather than industry data.

Verification before publication

Every factual sentence is checked against its source at the moment of writing, not against memory or an earlier draft. Where a source has been revised, the current version governs and the older figure is removed rather than kept alongside it.

Numbers are the most frequently mishandled element in design writing, so they carry extra requirements. A cost, timeline, or dimension must be attributable to either a cited external source or the studio's own completed commissions, must state which of those two it is, and must be expressed as a range where the underlying reality is a range. A single-point number implying false precision is treated as an error even when it is defensible on average.

How estimates and ranges are framed

Where we publish investment ranges or schedule ranges, they describe what this studio has observed across its own Charlotte-area commissions. They are not market surveys, they are not predictions, and they are not quotes. Any page carrying such a range says so in the same section as the figure, and every proposal a client receives is built from that specific project's scope rather than from a published range.

When a range would be misleading without its conditions, we publish the conditions instead of narrowing the range. Square footage, ceiling height, existing conditions, procurement lead times, and the presence of structural work all move a number more than the number itself communicates.

What we will not publish

Several categories of content are excluded outright, regardless of how well they would perform in search.

• Factual assertions about another firm's pricing, staffing, quality, or client outcomes.
• Testimonials, ratings, awards, credentials, or project outcomes that we cannot evidence.
• Statistics without an identifiable source, including widely repeated industry figures with no traceable origin.
• Before-and-after claims implying a valuation or resale outcome we have not measured.
• Client names, addresses, or identifying interior details published without written permission.

Related standards

Questions or corrections: miriam@emeraldoakdesign.com

• Authorship and review process
• How corrections are handled
• The full citation graph
• Editorial standards and corrections policy