Putting your projects forward for an award is always a brave thing to do. It pits your skills against your fellow designers and lets a judging panel decide who has hit the mark more than another.

Because of this, we take the entry and judging process really seriously and we believe it’s unique to this industry and is designed to make sure that those who win have truly earned their trophy.

WHO CAN ENTER?

The design categories are open to any designers of kitchen and/or bathroom residential projects based in the UK and Ireland.

HOW DO YOU ENTER?

Designers submit their entries via a really simple online process that allows you to save, add, edit and change your entry up to the point you decide to send it to us.

HOW IS IT JUDGED?

Judges begin by going through all the submitted entries and scoring them against these fixed criteria:

• Aesthetics
• Meeting and exceeding the brief
• Problem solving
• Product and material choice
• Unique ideas and initiative
• Value for money

Each criteria carries equal weight and all the scores are added together with the top four in each category making up the shortlist.

Then comes stage two – the presentations. All the shortlisted designers are invited to a dedicated judging day where they are each given 15 minutes to present their project in person to the judging panel.

It’s their chance to give all the detail and tell the full story of the design, but likewise it’s the judge’s chance to quiz them on all aspects of the project before deciding who the winners are.

WHAT IS ‘PROJECT COST’?

The one question that always arises in the design judging is how we define ‘project cost’. No two design projects are the same so the definition we use is ‘the final cost paid to you by the client’. That cost may or may not include all aspects of the completed kitchen or bathroom but they do include the aspects that the designer had control over. So, for example, you may get two kitchens with a project cost of £29,000 but one includes building work, installation and appliances and the other did not.

On the entry form, the designer must declare the project cost AND what is or isn’t included in that figure. It’s then up to the judges to take those factors into account when making their decisions. This is a design competition, it’s not an audit, so we must take all the figures presented to us at face value, however there is no advantage to be had by manipulating the costs to push it into one category over another.