Florida cracks down on Hirsch Bedner & Associates!?!?!??

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I recently learned the Florida Board of Architecture and Interior Design contracts with the law firm of Smith, Thompson, Shaw & Manausa, P.A., to provide investigative and prosecutorial services to the Board.

The law firm provides these services for both licensed and unlicensed interior designers (and architects). So who have they “caught” practicing interior design lately? None other than Hirsch Bedner & Associates the internationally famous hotel design firm.

Yep, the Florida Board has caught themselves a pretty big fish…..Florida’s practice act is nasty…business owners and large corporations apparently are now being forced to hire only licensed Florida interior designers to design their hotels (or those designers will be breaking the law.) Someone needs to challenge this stupid law. This is America … anyone should be able to hire any interior designer they want to.

Hirsch Bedner & Associates

Howard Pharr

Case No. 2007-068978

Probable cause was found that Hirsch Bedner & Associates of Atlanta, Georgia, is not licensed to practice interior design in Florida and contracted to provide interior design services on a commercial project. Further, Hirsch Bedner & Associates is offering these services without a certificate of authorization. An Administrative Complaint seeking fines will be filed and a Notice and Order to Cease and Desist will be issued.

Scroll down this page to find the Hirsch Bedner entry

More disciplinary cases here

ASID’s Licensing Spin is Dizzying

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There’s an article written by Rita Carson Guest, FASID called “A Goal of Licensure, not Limitation” in Interiors and Sources Magazine. It is a masterpiece of smoothly written nonsense masked to take in and win over unwitting practitioners.

For example – - -read it slowly . . .

“We are asking that those practitioners who can provide evidence that they meet the necessary requirements ­similar requirements demanded of other professionals ­be permitted to provide certain services, which they are trained and qualified to perform.”

I say: WHAT SERVICES are interior designers currently denied from providing? The answer is NONE. As long as they are actually providing interior design services and not architecture, engineering or building contracting, interior designers are free as birds to provide interior design services, no license needed.

Rita also wrote:

“To those who say to us, “Why do you need a law for interior designers?” we say, interior design is already regulated de facto. The law is there to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public, and we support that. But those laws are preventing interior designers from fully practicing their profession. We simply want states to grant interior design professionals who meet the necessary qualifications to be permitted to offer their services. We want to loosen the restriction on interior design professionals, not add a new one.”

I say: WHAT LAWS say that interior designers cannot fully practice? WHAT RESTRICTIONS need loosening? Again, the answer is NONE. Unless Rita is referring to those restrictive interior designer laws that ASID has already supported that currently shuts out other designers !

Rita, you do not need a heavy handed state license scheme to make interior designers accountable and responsible. California interior designer law already proves this. If your argument was a canoe, it would be at the bottom of the lake, it’s so full of holes.

as always, COMMENTS WELCOME!