Kate Malandris Interiors

My husband and I hired Kate to do three rooms in our house. She did a fantastic job and stayed within our budget. I seem to always pick things that are expensive. She did a great job picking out different options that wouldn’t break the bank but still look expensive and designer.
I also hired her to help me pick out stones in my backyard. I have a little guy so shopping and asking questions is often very stressful. She came with me got all the pricing on all the stones we liked and was able to give it to our landscape contractor. This made the process so smooth and less stressful!
I love that she thinks outside the box and doesn’t deliver a cheesy model home. Her style is fresh and something you would see in LA or SF. She puts her heart and soul into every project. People come in to our house and always ask where we bought things. I love, love her work and would refer her to everyone.

I live alone with a three bedroom and 2.5 bath house and I recently had become cluttered with a lot of stuff I kept since college and I still thought was useful.
I was vociferously encouraged to hire an interior designer because I had friends coming to use the two spare bedrooms for a vacation. My eye for design is what some would politely describe as blind.
I found Kate on LinkedIn and I figured she would be perfect for me because she focuses on personal design. I scheduled a free consultation and was a little overwhelmed at first at all of the attention to detail she was pursuing with a lot of measurements and photos but I knew I was in good hands. I gave her full control of the entire project due to my lack of knowledge and the immediate trust I gained from her passion and expertise.
Despite the smaller budget and short time schedule she still seemed to make me a primary focus and continually kept me up to date with the project. She even helped me personally by choosing just the right photos and location to memorialize my family.
The only thing more impressive than it was working with Kate was the end results and I have an everyday reminder of her talent.

We hired Kate to decorate a 4500 square foot house. We gave her a clean slate with no old furniture to work into the mix. A decorators dream in my opinion. We hired her in August. By December the shutters and built ins were not completed. She was not even 40% of the way finished and had run through the budget and had charged us over three times her original quote. Her ability to size things cost us tons of money in shipping returns and shopping for new items.
Such as:
–Nightstands blocking closets
-$ 700 custom built hanging rods built too short by two feet and barely covering the windows and not able to be opened completely.
–Professional hung lights that she ordered too short for the ceilings and were un returnable (the person she hired to hang them even told us they were not sized properly).
–She was in charge of getting quotes for shutters and she referred us to a family friend who then hired subcontractors who then hired an actual shutter company and it cost us an extra $ 6k in mark ups that were unnecessary and took four months to complete. We will be in small claims court to get that money back shortly. She is advertised on his website, so I’m sure she was cut in on the deal. I specifically asked her to get multiple quotes and if this guy actually did shutters. –Purchased sofa tables that were four feet shorter than the sofa.
–Purchased custom sofa’s that didn’t quite fit into the room correctly after the built in was completed. Our new designer had to change the entire design of the room so we didn’t have to lose the money on the custom sofa’s that were not returnable.
All of those things above could have been forgiven as rookie errors if she was humble and kind and helpful.
She was not. She made what should have been a fun project very stressful and disorganized. She would try to force us to keep things that we didn’t like and our friends agreed didn’t fit the space well. And at the end she was unprofessional and didn’t handle the end of the relationship well at all. She quit while she was supposed to be handling returns for us free of charge. She made the returns very difficult by not providing enough information for us to complete them easily on our own.
I’m currently pregnant with two small children and work full time. She was hired to make our lives and this transition to this new home wonderful, fun and easy for us. She instead hired all of the wrong contractors, cost us a ton of money that was unnecessary, and left us with a complete disaster and mismatched and disorganized furniture.
Luckily we hired a true professional to sort through her mess and that person is wrapping up with the most beautiful home we could have asked for in spite of the mess Kate left us with and in one fifth of the time Kate spent on this project.
Kate truly doesn’t understand space concepts and cannot handle a large project. I hope this saves another family from going through what we went through.