How a Dedicated Kitchen and Bath Designer Will Change Your Renovation Game

3 min read

No matter how great your great room or livable your living room, and even if your primary bedroom is palatial and your back deck is decadent, chances are the places you and your family spend the most time are your kitchen and bathrooms. That means you want them to be especially on point—and the best way to ensure that is to hire a designer who is laser-focused on those particular spaces. We talked to two such specialists, both designers associated with the National Kitchen & Bath Association (NKBA), to learn more about why they can be vital to a successful project.

1. They've already made the mistakes you want to avoid.

This Atlanta kitchen (also shown at top) designed by Jerel Lake was awarded the NKBA’s Best Small Kitchen Professional Design Award.

Kitchens and bathrooms are among the most complex spaces in any home to design and construct. "There's plumbing, electrical, mechanical, things behind the walls that you don't think about," says Atlanta kitchen designer Jerel Lake of LakeHaus Designs, who was also a House Beautiful 2024 Next Wave designer. "Doors not opening, appliances running into each other, clearances…professional designers can walk into a space and immediately think, Here's what could go wrong."

In other words, by hiring a seasoned and specialized designer, you're paying to avoid the cost—the potentially much greater cost—of fixing problems you might otherwise encounter later on. "One of the biggest mistakes I see when I go for a consultation—one of the biggest issues I end up correcting—is not being up to code," says NKBA-certified bathroom designer Kelly Collier-Clark, who is among the 2025 class of House Beautiful Next Wave designers. "And when you go to sell it and it has to go through an inspection, you can run into problems." Both Collier-Clark and Lake credit the NKBA with publishing an industry-standard set of planning recommendations and illustrations for designing and installing code-compliant kitchens and baths. "They've got a really robust set of guidelines on how a space should be laid out, where appliances should go, and how the flow of a kitchen should operate," Lake says.

2. They're immersed in the latest trends and tech.

"To me, powder rooms and small bathrooms are spaces where you can easily create a huge impact," says designer Kelly Collier-Clark. "There

While trade-only resources are available to every professional designer, it takes exploration, education, and discernment to know which of those resources are distinctive—as well as reputable. That's key, Lake says, to "being able to create something unique that is not repeatable or something you'd see on a day-to-day basis. Over the years, we build relationships with vendors and discover new ones through associations or going to exhibitions. We have exposure to a lot of different vendors that you won't find just with web research."

A must-attend for kitchen and bath specialists (and for most interior designers, for that matter) is the Kitchen & Bath Industry Show (KBIS), presented by NKBA and largely acknowledged as the most prestigious trade show for the design of these spaces. Lake and Collier-Clark are there every year, and it pays off for their clients, they say. "Aesthetics you won't be able to find elsewhere are at our fingertips," Collier-Clark says. "We get exclusivity and know-how. That's how I create something you won't see in stores."