A designer who agreed to supervise paid for the defects

A company that built luxury homes hired an interior designer to design the decoration of a residential complex under renovation in Limassol, and to supervise its execution. When the protective coverings came off near the end of the project, serious defects were found. The company terminated the agreement, had the work put right by others and sued her. On 14 September 2026 the Court of Appeal upheld an award of 174,570 euro against her.

Her defence was that the defects were the fault of the contractors, the workmen and the materials, and that site supervision was someone else's job. The contract said otherwise.

What happened

By a written agreement dated 1 June 2009, the respondent company engaged the appellant for the design, supervision and control of all the decorative works in the renovation of the Santa Barbara Residence complex in Limassol. At the final stages of the project, when the protective coverings were removed, serious defects came to light. The company said they were caused by her defective supervision, terminated the agreement and gave the remedial works to third parties.

It called two experts. A quantity surveyor costed the repairs from the invoices and receipts, using the actual cost of the work once done. An architect and civil engineer prepared a snagging list and confirmed that the defects fell within the responsibility of the supervising designer. The designer accepted that there were defects, but said she had kept the company informed, denied any duty of daily or construction supervision, and blamed the contractors, subcontractors and workmen and the poor quality of the materials. There was no expert evidence to the contrary.

The Limassol District Court found her personally liable under the agreement, rejecting as an afterthought her position that only her company had been involved. It accepted the company's expert evidence, which was in substance uncontradicted, and awarded damages on the actual cost of the repairs. She appealed on six grounds and withdrew two of them.

The clauses were clear

The agreement was in English. Clause 1 said the designer undertook the design and decoration activities "as well as the supervision and control of execution of the works". Clause 3 said she undertook "to supervise and control the execution of the relevant constructions, reconstructions, repairs and other activities and their conformity with design", and would visit the site while the works were carried out until completion. Clause 8 said she would visit the site twice a week for a half day to supervise the project.

The Court of Appeal restated that a contract is read for the meaning its text conveys to the ordinary reasonable person, and that the rules of interpretation are used only when a term is unclear. These terms were not. The court adopted the trial judge's question: if there was no duty to supervise, what was the point of requiring her to visit the site twice a week? It added that she had in the end accepted at the hearing that she had a contractual duty to supervise the implementation of her designs.

Where a contract says the designer will supervise the works and their conformity with the design, defects that supervision should have caught are the designer's breach.

A later argument relied on clause 2.4, under which drawings were to be discussed with those executing the works so that they could be carried out without the designer's intervention. The court held that clause had to be read with clause 3, not in isolation, and that the damages awarded related to her defective supervision of the works implementing her designs.

Blaming the contractors did not work

The court upheld the trial judge's rejection of her case that the employer had chosen incompetent contractors and, despite her warnings, terminated rather than fixing the problem. The engineer's evidence was that contractors can perform properly if the supervisor guides them, checks that the work is faithfully executed and, if cooperation fails, asks for their removal. She had not told the company in time that the contractors could not do the work. She admitted that she raised defects only after May 2012, when they had already been found.

The court also accepted as sound the trial judge's view that it made no sense for so many defects to surface only at the end of the project, while the works remained covered, when she was bound to supervise at least twice a week. If almost all the subcontractors were as poorly trained as she said, that was a reason for her, as the person contractually responsible for supervising them, to tell the employer at once.

How the damages were measured

The designer argued that damages should have been assessed at the date of breach, which she put at 7 June 2012, and that the quantity surveyor's report of 2 July 2013 came a year after termination. The court held that the time for assessing loss is, as a rule, the time of breach, unless the needs of justice require otherwise.

It then relied on the usual measure for defective building work, the cost of reinstatement, and on the authority that where the claimant acted reasonably in carrying out the necessary repairs, that cost is measured at the time the defects were discovered. The surveyor had inspected in April 2012 and the snagging list was dated 30 April 2012. His report came 14 months after his first visit because the repairs had to be finished before their true cost could be known, and the method was not challenged in cross-examination. The court found no delay by the company in putting the work right, and upheld the award of the actual cost of the repairs.

The court noted, without applying it, that where reinstatement would cost out of proportion to the benefit, damages are measured instead by the difference in value. On mitigation, it applied section 73(3) of the Contract Law, Cap. 149: the claimant must take reasonable steps to limit its loss, whether it did so is a question of fact, and the burden of proving that it did not lies on the other side.

She also argued that the sale of the development for 22 million euro proved the company had suffered no loss. The court would not consider it, because it had not been pleaded and no evidence had been given on it. The appeal was dismissed with 4,000 euro in costs, plus VAT if any.

What this means in practice

For designers, architects and consultants, the wording of the appointment decides the scope of the risk. A clause that promises to "supervise and control the execution" of works, backed by a schedule of site visits, will be read as a real supervision duty. If the intention is to supervise design intent only, and not workmanship, that has to be written into the contract before signing. Our contract review work looks at exactly this kind of scope clause.

For developers and employers, this judgment shows what a successful defects claim looks like: an expert snagging list, repairs costed invoice by invoice by a quantity surveyor, prompt remedial work, and a record kept separately for each item. An award based on the actual cost of repair held up on appeal, although it was calculated more than a year after the contract ended.

For a supervisor who sees problems on site, silence is the danger. The court treated her failure to warn the employer in time as undermining her case that the contractors were to blame. A written report to the employer as soon as a defect or an unsuitable contractor is identified is both good practice and evidence.

The trap is the argument raised too late. A point that was not pleaded and not proved at trial, however persuasive it looks, is unlikely to be heard on appeal. Our construction disputes team acts for employers and consultants in claims of this kind.

Questions we are asked

Sources

• Irina Antropova Charalampous v. Bakeview Properties Ltd, Civil Appeal 393/2019, Court of Appeal of Cyprus, 14 September 2026
• Contract Law, Cap. 149, consolidated text, CyLaw

This article is provided for general information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.

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