I've been following the arguments about charging for kitchen design and as I am an independent kitchen designer I can say that I don't sell kitchens, I only design them and I don't design them without being paid.

When I first started as a freelancer, there was only one other independent kitchen designer but now, more than four years later, I know of five or six. I think that in years to come independent kitchen design will become the norm, certainly at the bottom end of the market.

Oddly enough, it's not at the top end of the market that design skills are most needed. It takes a lot of skill to come up with a good design using limited unit sizes, yet in-house designers at the bottom end of the market are often the least experienced and least imaginative.

Tim Foley recently voiced the usual fitter's complaint about having to redesign kitchens to make them fit. He concluded that qualifications would be needed before kitchen designers start to charge. 

Chris Simmons reckons that "a good kitchen designer should be able to produce a scale drawing and a perspective in a couple of hours." I disagree. A competent kitchen

planner will do that. A good, imaginative, kitchen designer will take longer and come up with something a bit different.

Many in-house designers at the low end of the market could not justify charging a design fee. So are customers being short-changed by the KBB industry? 

If you don't charge for your designs, then you're putting yourself in the same bracket as every incompetent sales designer, who's just doing skimpy CAD plans and trying to flog enough kitchens to earn a decent living. I'm not convinced about qualifications either. You can

train designers so that their kitchens will fit, but you can't train them to be imaginative. 

Kitchen design guru Johnny Grey has berated kitchen designers for designs that look "depressingly similar". I think he was talking about the top end of the market. Many

low-end kitchen designers don't even achieve a basic level.

Tim Foley was also recently talking about the internet. Around half of my designs are done entirely online and by email. Clients can look at an online portfolio and decide which independent designer to use and then find a local supplier, of the recommended type of

kitchen, once they have the design. That keeps the cost of independent design down for the low-end kitchens.

In future, kitchen designers need to expand their knowledge. It isn't enough to know only about the unit ranges of one supplier and arrange the units and appliances to fit the room. If you're independent, you need to be able to design a modern Ikea kitchen one day and a

traditional, bespoke piece of furniture the next.

As for training, perhaps the new courses for kitchen designers are too closely associated with

manufacturers? Manufacturers would do well to make more information available, otherwise they'll find that in the future, the public won't use their cosily tied designers and their kitchens won't be specified at all.