KGD v. Kathryn Weill, Defendant. (2026)

This action arises from disputes relating to the renovation of a Manhattan apartment. On motion sequence 002, defendant, Kathryn Weill, has moved for partial summary judgment dismissing plaintiff, KGD Interior, Inc.'s, breach-of-contract claim to the extent it seeks payment for unlicensed home-improvement services. (See KGD Interiors, Inc. v Weill, 2024 NY Slip Op 51732[U], *1-2 [Sup Ct, NY County 2024].) In a prior order on the motion, this court held that plaintiff may seek a design fee for decorative services, but that NYC Administrative Code §§ 20-386 and 20-387 bars plaintiff from charging a fee for home-improvement services—for which plaintiff lacks a license. (See id. at *2.) This court held that a sizeable portion of the work plaintiff performed constituted home-improvement services and therefore could not make up part of plaintiff's design fee. (Id. at *3.)

In so holding, the court asked the parties to provide supplemental briefing about how much of plaintiff's breach-of-contract claim remains—i.e., what portion of the fee that plaintiff seeks is compensable because it is not derived from home-improvement services. Each party submitted supplemental papers now considered here.

1. Plaintiff argues that notwithstanding the holding and analysis in the court's prior ruling on this motion, plaintiff is entitled to the full amount of its claimed fee. Plaintiff asserts that the underlying contract describes the fee as one for design services, without separate line items for "design" work and "home-improvement" work; and that this court should therefore treat the entire fee as having been permissibly assessed for (compensable) design-related services—whether or not plaintiff also performed home-improvement work. (See NYSCEF No. 81 at 2.) This argument is unpersuasive.

As a procedural matter, this court's prior order established as law of the case that plaintiff is not entitled to its full fee, because some of that fee was earned through performance of (non-compensable) home-improvement services. In rendering that ruling, this court necessarily also held that one can distinguish between design services and home-improvement services, and permit recovery of fees only for the former category of work. Indeed, the purpose of this court's directing supplemental briefing was to give the parties an opportunity to weigh in on how this court should draw a distinction between the two categories of work. Plaintiff's supplemental brief does not acknowledge or engage with this aspect of the court's prior ruling.

Plaintiff's position in its supplemental brief is also unavailing considered on its own terms. Plaintiff is contending that all of its fees were (permissibly) assessed for design services—and thus, in effect, that any home-improvement work that it carried out was done for free. But as this court previously held, the text of the contract makes clear that some of the tasks that plaintiff expressly agreed to perform, in exchange for the contractual fee, constituted home-improvement services. (See KGD Interiors, 2024 NY Slip Op 51732[U], at *2 [holding that KGD's contractual undertaking to "act[ ] as Weill's agent in coordinating and monitoring the renovations being carried out by other contractors constitutes home-improvement work within the meaning of Admin. Code §§ 20-386 and 20-387"] [internal quotation marks omitted].) Nothing in the language of the contract suggests that these services were being done for free, whereas other services would be performed only for a fee.

To the contrary, as this court previously noted (see id. at 3), plaintiff's fee was set as a percentage of the total value of the work being done by all the contractors on the project—including those who would undisputedly be performing home-improvement services. (See NYSCEF No. 55 at 2.) That method of determining the contractual fee suggests, in turn, that some of the value that plaintiff would be providing to defendant lay in facilitating the completion of home-improvement work, not merely in performing design-related services.

Additionally, allowing plaintiff now to recharacterize its fee as assessed only for design work would undermine the purpose of Administrative Code §§ 20-386 and 20-387. Doing so would allow a non-licensed contractor to circumvent the licensing requirement and recoup a fee based on all services provided—both design and home-improvement—by claiming later that it had charged a fee for design services alone.

This court thus declines to accept plaintiff's position in its supplemental brief that plaintiff is entitled to its full fee.

2. Defendant's supplemental brief takes the polar opposite position from plaintiff, claiming, in essence, that plaintiff is entitled to almost nothing. Defendant asserts that the record establishes as a matter of law that plaintiff's proper design fee—on an apartment renovation costing more than $1 million—is no more than $1,243.86. (NYSCEF No. 83 at 20.) In reaching this conclusion, defendant relies on invoices from the various companies from which she received materials, furnishings, and services in the course of the renovation project. Defendant seeks to distinguish between those invoices goods and services that are related to plaintiff's design work, and those that are (assertedly) purely for home improvement; and concludes that only $1,243.86 worth of the invoices fall into the former category. (See NYSCEF No. 83 at 2-3.) This court is not persuaded, though, that defendant's contentions about which goods and services fall into the home-improvement category, rather than the design category, would have to be credited by any reasonable jury. That is particularly true given that defendant supports her contentions largely with general references to the language of Administrative Code § 20-386, without considering the provision or installation of particular goods in light of the role they played in the overall project.

Additionally, defendant argues with respect to several categories of goods that plaintiff is barred as a matter of law from earning any design fee for those goods because they are "home improvement goods" within the meaning of General Business Law (GBL) § 770 (4), for which plaintiff may not claim compensation without a home-improvement license. (See e.g. NYSCEF No. 83 at 5-6.) But defendant has not shown that the procurement and installation of "home improvement goods" as defined by GBL § 770 (4) constitutes "home improvement work" for purposes of Administrative Code §§ 20-386 and 20-387. Absent that showing, defendant has not established as a matter of law that plaintiff is foreclosed by these ordinances from obtaining its claimed fee for the provision of these goods.

In short, plaintiff is not entitled to its full fee, as it claims. Nor, however, has defendant successfully clarified, as a matter of law, what increment of that fee pertains only to home-improvement-related work. This court is persuaded instead that drawing the necessary distinctions between home-improvement and design services will entail repeated contextual, fact-intensive judgment calls. Doing so is the proper province of a jury, not this court. The court therefore determines that the question of the amount of plaintiff's damages in unpaid design fees (and sums advanced to contractors by plaintiff on behalf of defendant) must be left for the jury to determine following the trial of this action.

Accordingly, it is

ORDERED that defendant's motion for partial summary judgment is granted in part and denied in part, and plaintiff's first cause of action is dismissed to the extent that it seeks damages in the form of unpaid fees charged for home-improvement-related goods and services (as distinct from design-related goods and services); and it is further

ORDERED that the amount that remains in damages on the first cause of action, comprising fees charged for compensable design-related goods and services, shall be determined by the jury at trial.

DATE 3/10/2026

Gerald Lebovits, J.