Samantha Watkins McRae

Sam is an absolute wonder, she listens to your needs and wishes and cunningly combines the two. She is excellent at intuiting your taste and helping elevate it at the same time. She helped design my dream bathroom in a tricky space. Taking consideration of the fact I will soon have two teenagers sharing the facilities. Understanding I want a retreat from our hectic life but also somewhere practical to maintain. I would recommend Sam in a heartbeat!

Sam re-designed our bathroom and two bedrooms. This is the second time we have worked with her. This project included beautiful bespoke joinery in both rooms, sourcing of all materials and soft furnishings and liaising with the suppliers. Sam is such a lovely person to work with, she has a fantastic attention to detail, I would highly recommend her.

Sam joined our project to advise and design a downstairs renovation after a big flood. From the start her warm, approachable manner and her incredible ability to listen and understand our family and our needs, made such a difference. The builders she recommended were incredible and followed her precise designs to the mm. Our project transformed from what would have been a functional and smart kitchen to a special, stylish family space. It is not easy to create a space that reflects every person in our family but Sam achieved it with her innate understanding and incredible vision! I have since recommended her to many friends.

I have collaborated with Samantha on a number of projects - most recently on the refurbishment of an apartment in a mansion block in Kensington. She is fantastic to work with - providing a creative, professional and detail-focussed approach. The end result is a beautiful, comfortable and practical home for a young family.

We recently had the pleasure of working with Samantha on a high-end residential project in London, and the experience was excellent from start to finish. Samantha was highly collaborative throughout the project, communicating clearly and working closely with our team to ensure the design intent was fully understood and successfully delivered on site. His creativity and attention to detail were evident at every stage, and his design ideas were both inspiring and practical, adding real value to the overall outcome. It was a genuine pleasure working together, and we would not hesitate to recommend Samantha for high-end residential projects. We look forward to collaborating again in the future.

Working with Samantha was honestly the best decision we made for redoing our home’s interior. She really took the time to understand what we wanted, and she worked closely with us and all the suppliers and contractors to make sure we got the best result for our budget. She was super professional and kept us in the loop the whole way through. We’d 100% work with her again. Thanks so much, Sam!

I hired Samantha Watkins McRae Interiors for a large-scale home renovation. Unfortunately, my experience was deeply disappointing. Her approach to the project was both unusual and inefficient. Despite paying most of her fees on schedule and trusting she was meeting her contract, she failed to deliver to standard. Much of her design work was unusable due to measurement inaccuracies and odd design choices—issues repeatedly flagged by third parties—and had to be completely redone. More concerningly, she misrepresented her communications with suppliers, creating tensions that made it impossible to continue working with her. The final breakdown occurred when she claimed a supplier had verbally abused her after she told him he wouldn’t be getting work from me—despite the fact that I had made no such decision. I contacted the supplier directly and confirmed that this allegation was false. It was a reckless, unprofessional move that could have harmed his reputation. After her early exit from the project—due to the circumstances she created—I discovered how much work had been left incomplete. She never offered to return any funds, which felt dishonest. To cover herself, she hastily produced a document that didn’t reflect the brief and looked amateur—not the work of a professional interior designer. I’m happy to share that document with anyone who wants to see what £12,000 bought me. She also failed to provide the DWG files I had paid for. Had she taken accountability or attempted to fix the situation, I wouldn’t be writing this. But £12,000 bought me nothing usable—and delayed my project significantly. I had to pay someone else to redo the work entirely. In hindsight, she might be suitable for furnishing a room (though even then, I’d double-check her measurements), but in my view, she is not equipped to handle large-scale renovation projects. The lack of accountability, combined with the professional harm caused, compels me to warn others: proceed with extreme caution.

Sam did an amazing job interpreting our hopes and vague ideas into amazing, beautiful, rooms that are a pleasure to live in. She has an incredible eye for the colours, fabrics, lighting and objects that will work together perfectly. She is a great listener, so it always felt like she was improving and building on something that was our vision, albeit with far more skill and taste than we could have imagined. She has great connections among the trade suppliers and was always available to sort out any aspect of the build and decoration process. She was an absolute pleasure to work with and I could not recommend her highly enough!

Samantha has been at the heart of many renovation projects with us over the last few years. During that time, she has completely transformed a tired and dated property in Hampshire into a colourful jewel of a holiday home from top to bottom, created an exquisite en-suite bathroom that is an everyday pleasure to use and most recently, helped to turn our kitchen and family room into a functional yet immensely beautiful space. Sam is always imaginative, couragous with texture, pattern and colour and has really helped us to step outside our comfort zone by nurturing a more adventurous appreciation for the aesthetics of our home. She has found some incredible pieces of furniture that we would never have encountered on our own and introduced us to many amazing artisans and designers. Sam is endlessly positive and creative, as well as being wonderful to work with. I would recommend her to anyone who is looking to make changes in their home.

Samantha designed the decor for my flat, sourced incredible materials and pieces and introduced me to professional builders. There are a lots of great things about working with Samantha. She spent time with me to understand my taste and how to incorporate my furniture and artwork into the design and I am very pleased that the outcome reflects me and my taste. During the time the builders were at my place Samantha was proactively engaged with deliveries, fixing issues that arose such as the replacing a faulty light etc. Finally I really like all the statement unique pieces such as lights and beautiful materials that she has sourced for me through her partners and contacts many of which are small businesses. I highly recommend.

Sam has vast knowledge and a great ability to tailor projects to her clients needs. Having worked with her on a few projects now, she comes well and worthily recommended.

We would like to highly recommend Sam for her amazing work. Sam and her team are so professional and really look into details. We are very pleased with the results. Our off-plan apartment has been transformed to a nice and comfortable home.