A 90-minute visit at your home — flat fee, scheduled directly with Katie. We walk the rooms together, talk through how you actually live in the space, and leave you with clear direction.
Most projects can move forward from there on an hourly basis. Larger renovations and whole-home programs are scoped and priced as a flat-fee project after the consultation.
A simple, transparent process — whether you're hanging art in one room or planning a six-room renovation.
A flat-fee visit. We walk the home, take measurements, and leave you with direction — even if you don't take a next step with us.
For ongoing work, we send a written plan: scope, approach, timeline, and how we'll bill — hourly for most projects, flat fee for larger ones.
Sourcing, vendor coordination, sample pulls, install oversight — as much or as little as you want us to handle. Your time, your call.
Ongoing design help, billed by the hour. Use it for as little or as long as you need — a single afternoon of art placement, or a year of slowly furnishing a new build.
Whole-home programs, renovations, and multi-room projects — scoped and priced as a single flat fee after the consultation. Predictable, no hourly creep.
Marais Home was founded by Katie DesMarais — a Lexington native who studied interior design at the University of Kentucky, then spent more than a decade designing in New York City and Austin across residential, hospitality, higher education, and luxury development. Returning to Lexington meant bringing that work home: thoughtful, detail-driven design for the families who actually live in these rooms.
Every consultation ends with a curated list — drawn from luxury furniture in Lexington, KY and five more edits we keep in the showroom and online.
Most projects pull across several of these. Each link below opens the corresponding edit — the same products and brands we specify on client work, available to browse online or visit in the showroom.
Sofas, dining tables, beds, and the rest of what holds a room together. Our Lexington furniture showroom centers on brands like Rowe, Gabby, Four Hands, Made Goods, and Wesley Allen — many of them new to the Kentucky market. Custom upholstery is available on most frames: your dimensions, your fabric, 6 to 8 weeks from approval.
Table lamps, floor lamps, chandeliers, sconces — specified the way a designer would layer them, ambient through accent. The full designer lighting edit pulls from Hudson Valley, Troy, Mitzi, Arteriors, and others most local lighting stores don't carry. We spec fixtures on nearly every project, big or small.
Art, mirrors, vessels, books, decorative objects. We treat decor as composition — varied heights, mixed materials, an anchor piece before the styling. It's where most rooms either come together or read as a furniture catalog. The styling pass at the end of a project usually leans heavily on this category.
Pillows, throws, bedding, rugs — the soft layer that does most of the temperature-setting in a room. Our textile edit favors natural fibers, hand-loomed weaves, and small-batch makers over the big-box mill stuff. We use these heavily in bedroom programs and as the seasonal refresh layer on living rooms.
Tabletop, drinkware, kitchen tools, and the daily-use pieces that age into a home. Our kitchen and dining edit leans on makers like Kinto, Hawkins New York, and Casa Cubista — pieces designed to last decades, not seasons. Especially relevant on kitchen and dining-room renovations where we're already specifying lighting and seating.
Candles, fragrance, body care, apothecary. The scent and self-care edit exists because a fully designed room still smells like nothing if you stop there. It's also the easiest entry point for clients who aren't ready for a full project — start with the candle, end up rethinking the powder room.
The three-step summary above is the shape of it. Here's what each phase looks like in practice — the work that happens between “we agreed to start” and “the room is done.”
A 90-minute visit at your home, scheduled directly with Katie. We walk every room in scope with a tape measure, talk through how you actually live in the space — where the morning light lands, where the kids drop their bags, what the room is supposed to do that it isn't doing. You'll leave with concrete direction on layout, lighting, and palette, plus an honest read on where to spend and where to wait. Flat fee, no obligation to continue. Most clients use what they hear to either start a project with us or go forward on their own.
After the consultation we decide together how the work should be billed. Smaller efforts — art placement, a furniture plan for one room, sourcing a single sofa — stay on an hourly basis. You buy time as you need it; we track hours against a written estimate. Whole-home programs and renovations get scoped as flat-fee projects with a defined deliverables list, a payment schedule, and a written start-to-finish timeline. The dividing line is usually around four rooms or any project that touches construction. We send a short written plan before any sourcing begins.
Most projects start with the bones — anchor pieces from our Lexington furniture showroom and our trade vendors. We pull from designer brands that are difficult to find at retail in the Lexington market, plus build custom upholstery on most frames — your dimensions, your fabric, 6 to 8 weeks from approval. You'll see fabric memos and frame samples in person before anything is ordered. Lead times, payment schedule, and delivery windows are written down up front so the project doesn't drift.
In parallel, we specify the layers most local stores don't carry. Layered designer lighting — ambient, task, accent — pulled from Hudson Valley, Troy, Mitzi, Arteriors, and other designer-only houses. Textiles selected for texture before color: pillows, throws, bedding, rugs that hold up to the way a family actually uses them. And the decor layer — art, mirrors, vessels — that takes a furnished room and makes it feel like yours.
When everything lands we're there. Our delivery partners place the furniture; we walk through with a punch list, hang the art, place the rugs, layer the bedding, set the decor. The styling pass is where the room actually starts to look like the rendering — fresh florals, a curated bookshelf, the right lamp at the right height. Most installs take a day or two depending on scale. Renovations are sequenced across multiple install days as construction wraps.
We don't disappear after install. If a finish reads differently in the room than it did on a memo, we swap it. If a sconce needs to move two inches left, we move it. Most clients keep us on retainer for the slow stuff afterward — a new piece of art when something speaks to them, a holiday tabletop refresh, the next room when it's time. Our kitchen and dining edit and the scent and self-care categories are usually where clients keep adding once the heavy lifting is done.
Every home is different, every scope is different, and we'd rather give you an honest number after walking the rooms than a generic price sheet that won't hold up. That said — here's how we think about it.
The 90-minute in-home consultation is a flat fee that varies based on how far we're driving and how many rooms are in scope. Lexington proper is the base rate; Versailles, Frankfort, Georgetown, and Louisville scale up. We don't publish the number on the website because it would either be wrong for half of clients or pad it to cover everyone. Email or call and we'll quote it inside a day.
After the consultation, most engagements continue on an hourly basis. We track time against a written estimate so there are no surprises — billable hours include sourcing, vendor coordination, sample pulls, in-showroom selections, and install oversight. You can buy as little as a few hours for art placement or run a multi-month furnishing program. We bill monthly with itemized hours.
Larger projects — whole-home programs, multi-room renovations, anything touching construction — are scoped and priced as a single design fee after the consultation. You get a written scope, a payment schedule, and a defined deliverables list. The fee covers all of our time through final install. Predictable, no hourly creep, no surprise invoices. Furniture, lighting, and finishes are billed separately at the vendor price.
We have trade accounts with dozens of furniture, lighting, fabric, and decor vendors. That pricing — often 15 to 30 percent under retail — is what we pay; we pass most of it through to the client. On larger projects, the trade savings on furniture alone can offset a meaningful portion of the design fee. We're happy to walk through the math during the consultation.
Our Chevy Chase showroom carries lighting, furniture, textiles, and the kind of small-batch makers most Lexington shops don't. Drop in for a finish question or a long browse — both work.
It's a flat fee, set at booking — most consultations run about 90 minutes. We walk every room in scope, take measurements, and leave you with concrete direction. You're not committing to anything beyond the visit.
For the in-home consultation, yes — we work in Lexington and the surrounding Bluegrass region (Versailles, Midway, Georgetown, Nicholasville, Richmond, and out to Louisville and Cincinnati on a case-by-case basis). For ongoing hourly work after the consultation, much of it can happen remotely.
You're billed for design time — meetings, sourcing, plans, vendor coordination, and time on site. Hours are tracked transparently and invoiced as the project moves. Most one-room refreshes settle in well under what a flat-fee package would have cost.
Generally when scope spans multiple rooms, includes a renovation, or runs long enough that hourly stops being predictable. After the consultation we'll tell you which model fits — and write a scoped proposal if it's flat fee.
Yes. We coordinate directly with builders, architects, and trades on whole-home and renovation projects — handling drawings, finish schedules, and the back-and-forth so you don't have to translate.
No. We source through our showroom and trade vendors when it makes sense — better pricing, better availability — but you're not locked in. We'll happily spec from anywhere that fits the project. Customer's own material (COM) is welcome on most upholstered pieces.
Hourly projects start within a week or two of the consultation. Larger flat-fee projects depend on scope — a typical multi-room program runs three to six months from kickoff to install, longer if construction is involved.
Absolutely. The in-home consultation is built for exactly this kind of small-but-load-bearing decision. Many clients use us for one focused thing — paint, lighting layout, art placement — and stop there.
882 E High St
Lexington, KY 40502
(859)800-2481
Monday (by appointment only)
Tues-Fri (11am-5pm)
Saturday (11am-4pm)
