Turnkey Interiors: What Happens Between Design and Handover

What turnkey should cover

Design and drawings, material selection and procurement, all site work through to finishes, coordination of every trade, and supervision until handover. You deal with one party rather than with a carpenter, an electrician, a painter and a stone supplier separately.

What varies between studios is whether loose furniture, soft furnishings, appliances and styling are included. Ask specifically.

The order the work runs in

• Demolition and any civil changes
• Plumbing and electrical routing, before walls are closed
• False ceiling framing and the lighting inside it
• Flooring and stone
• Carpentry and joinery installation
• Painting and wall finishes
• Fixtures, fittings and hardware
• Deep clean, snagging and handover

Why sequence matters to you

Each stage closes off the one before it. Once the false ceiling is boarded, moving a light means opening it again. Once the flooring is laid, changing the layout means lifting it.

This is why decisions get progressively more expensive as a project advances, and why the drawing stage deserves more of your attention than it usually gets.

What to check before you accept handover

• Every drawer and shutter opens, closes and aligns
• Every switch, socket and light works, and is labelled correctly
• No water pooling in washrooms or balconies; drainage falls correctly
• Paint finish is even under daylight and under artificial light
• Skirting, beading and edge banding are continuous with no gaps
• Silicone and grout lines are clean
• Spare tiles, laminate and paint from the original batch are handed over

Snagging is normal

No site finishes without a list. A studio that expects a snag list and works through it methodically is behaving normally; one that treats the list as an accusation is not.

Walk the space slowly, in daylight, with the list in hand. Small defects are easy to fix in the week after handover and awkward to fix six months later.