Designer makes a name for herself

Raji Radhakrishnan did not study interior design in school. Instead, she is completely self-taught, beginning at age 10 with painting and drawing.

In her teen years, Radhakrishnan became a classical Indian dancer and performed on world tours, seeing South America and Asia. She also won many painting and drawing contests.

“All of these things influenced my love of design,” Radhakrishnan said. “It was only a matter of time before it all added up.”

Radhakrishnan came to the U.S. for good after her years dancing. She received an MBA in marketing and began working at PricewaterhouseCoopers. It was there she constantly was observing and reading every book on architecture and design that she could get her hands on.

In 2003, Radhakrishnan got exposure from renting work from D.C. designers. She then began a MFA program at George Washington University but had to drop out because she got pregnant.

“I guess it was karma and I was meant to do this” Radhakrishnan said.

Two years after dropping out of GW, she began operating her own business, Raji RM & Associates.

Radhakrishnan also recently began an online art gallery, although 50 percent of her business comes from her own clients. Radhakrishnan is also planning on launching a furniture line soon.

“My online gallery is French-based, and my clients are really excited about it,” she said.

The best way to arrange a consultation with Radhakrishnan is to visit her website at www.rajirm.com . Every client of Radhakrishnan’s is a referral, she said. “All of my clients and I are on great terms. Some are my very close friends and I’ve been invited to many of their holiday parties, birthdays and weddings,” she said.

Consultations are always done at the client’s home. “As I am walking around the home, I get a sense of its style and how I want to reuse or refunction the space,” Radhakrishnan said. “Projects in my home range from very simple to quite unique.”

Depending on the size and complexity of the project, a single-family home at 3,500 square feet takes about one to two years, although some projects are in their third year running, Radhakrishnan said. Condos are usually completed within four to six months.

Raji RM has not yet designed any famous Washingtonian’s homes. Instead, for a while, she designed mostly physicians’ homes due to word of mouth.

“I usually don’t design just a single room,” Radhakrishnan said. “I’ve designed apartments in square feet up to whole large homes. I put plans together as holistic ones.”

Costs for each project are different, and Raji RM charges a mark-up fee, but the actual cost involves certain projects.

“There’s a big difference between 500-square-foot apartments and 5,000-square-foot houses,” Radhakrishnan said. “I’ve had clients of all ages, including a young girl who was renting an apartment and also much more mature clients in their 40s and 50s. They’re all about continuing what they have and making it more up to date.”

Another client of Raji RM was a Chevy Chase couple who were living in their house for 30 years and had last remodeled it 10 years ago. “Everything was dated,” Radhakrishnan said. “I just updated the entire home and did the refurnishing I needed to do, but I didn’t touch the architecture because it was beautiful.”

“I do a range of styles,” Radhakrishnan said. “In Washington, most people tend to be very traditional in their taste, and I like to make homes a little more modern and livable for today.  You think about how with human beings, the pretty ones attract you, but it’s the interesting ones that make you want to stay.”

Radhakrishnan makes her designs very interesting, she said. According to her, fashion fads pass in a couple of years, so why waste money on trendy designs?

Every home owner in some way or the other decorates, in that sense decorating is a huge part of design," she said. "But the difference between decorating and designing is that we as designers think much more holistically and approach the work from the shell, the architecture and the flow of the spaces and down to the decorating part."

Radhakrishnan never advertises; the publicity she gets is from articles. She has been featured in Metropolitan Home, The Washington Post, Washington Times and Northern Virginia Magazine. Her own home is currently being shot in July for Metropolitan Home.

(Editors note: The print version of this story differed slightly.)