Malini's Project Record

A designer's own record of every room she has finished, so she can find the exact green she used three years ago and show a stranger why she chose it.

Who this is for

Malini Rao designs homes out of the second bedroom of her flat in Aundh, Pune. She works with one assistant who takes measurements and chases carpenters. Eight or nine homes a year. On a Tuesday morning a woman from Baner rings her, having sat in a friend's living room, and asks what that grey-green on the wall was. Malini remembers the room. She does not remember the shade name, and the painter has changed his number.

How the job is done today

The photos sit in her phone gallery, some in her assistant's phone, a few in a client's WhatsApp group that she left last year. Bills are in a cloth folder, in no order. She posts the best rooms on Instagram, which looks fine and cannot be searched, so when a client asks for something like the Kothrud kitchen she scrolls for ten minutes past her own holiday pictures. The reasons are the worst loss. Why she put the taller shutter on the left, why she talked the family out of glass, which vendor delivered late. That lives only in her head, and it goes.

The screens, in order

1. Rooms — A stranger's first look, one room after another with a plain name, the town, the year and a single photo that opens fast on a weak connection.
2. One room — The full record of a finished room, the photos, the colours with their real shade names, and Malini's own paragraphs about why each thing was chosen.
3. Find — Lets anyone dig through the archive by colour, material, room type, town or rough budget instead of scrolling for ten minutes.
4. Add a room — Where Malini adds a project from her phone at the site, before she forgets, uploading photos and typing the reasoning in her own words.
5. My sheet — Her private half of the record, holding supplier names, phone numbers, rates paid and what went wrong, visible to nobody else.
6. Send to a client — Puts four or five chosen rooms behind one link she can paste into WhatsApp when someone new asks to see her work.

What it keeps track of

• Room — what she calls it, which town, which year, room type, the photos, the colours and shade names, the materials used, why she chose them, roughly what the family spent
• Choice — the thing itself, where it sits in the room, which supplier gave it, what it cost, what she would do differently
• Supplier — name, trade, phone, which rooms he worked on, whether he came on time, whether she would call him again
• Shared link — which rooms are in it, who it was made for, when it was sent

The one decision that matters

Every room record carries two kinds of truth, and the choice is whether they live in one place or two. One option is one page per room, everything on it, supplier names and rates included, open to anyone. Simpler to build, and some designers do work this way. The other is a split record, public above and private below, same page for Malini, only the top half for strangers. Go with the split. The vendor who gives her a good rate gives it to her, not to the internet, and a client from Wakad reading what the Kothrud family paid will start the conversation from a bad place. She loses nothing by hiding it, and she loses real money by not.

What to leave out of the first version

Leave out client accounts and messaging. Nobody needs to log in to look at a finished room, and enquiries already arrive on WhatsApp and on her phone, so building an inbox only gives her a second place to forget to check. Leave out video too, and before and after sliders. Both are heavy on the kind of phone her clients actually hold, and the archive is worth nothing if the photos never finish loading.

How you would know it worked

A woman Malini has never met rings her, says she read the page about the Kothrud kitchen, and asks for that same grey-green by name. And when the painter is needed, Malini finds his number in the record in under a minute instead of asking three people.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I am an interior designer in Pune and I want a website that holds a record of every room I have finished, so please let me add a room from my phone with photos, the paint shade names, the materials, roughly what the family spent and a few paragraphs on why I chose each thing, and keep a second part on the same page for supplier names, phone numbers and rates that only I can see. Anyone should be able to open the site and search my work by colour, material, room type or town, and I should be able to pick four or five rooms and get one link to send on WhatsApp. Most of my clients use older phones and often look at this standing outside in sun, so keep the text large and dark on plain white, and make the photos load quickly rather than look perfect.