Photos by Tessa Neustadt / Homepolish via The New York TimesA Los Angeles homeowner used Homepolish, an online service, to connect with an interior designer who recommended the modern furniture seen in the second image.

It was an act of desperation that led us to write the email. My wife and I felt overwhelmed and hopeless. Two years into our marriage, we began discussing the possibility of seeking professional help. The problem was our home.

We had finally acquired some furniture, including a dining table and chairs, a credenza, a properly proportioned couch and a side table. Considering I had lived as a single man with little more than an overlarge sofa and a TV on the floor, it was a big improvement. But our rental apartment still wasn’t coming together.

Framed art sat on the floor because we didn’t know where to hang it. The furniture floated independently with no cohesion. We went to stores and shopped online, but the thought of buying anything caused paralysis: We feared we’d make a costly mistake.

In the bathroom, I had already painted the walls glossy black years earlier, a decorating disaster. The space also lacked storage and needed a new recessed medicine cabinet. Neither of us are Bob Vila types. These were jobs for a decorator and potentially a contractor. But we had no clue how to find reputable professionals.

Then my wife Cara came home one day and told me about a service she had heard about. It offered a free consultation with an interior designer who comes to your home, discusses your goals and creates a plan. If you hire the designer, you pay by the hour.

I had stubbornly held on to the idea that if we studied enough shelter magazines, we could pull together our space ourselves. But it’s at your lowest point that you’re sometimes willing to try something new.

OK, let’s contact Homepolish, I finally said.

Homepolish was founded in 2012 by 24-year-old Stanford University graduate Noa Santos and his partner, Will Nathan. Santos, a business and architecture major, moved to New York for a job at a high-end residential design firm. Within weeks, he said, he knew two things: He loved design, and his chosen profession was “terribly obsolete.”

Santos, now 27, thought the traditional commission structure gave designers an incentive to inflate budgets, breeding distrust among clients and creating unnecessary drama. And he disliked the way talented staff members often worked for years for a big-name designer without a chance to establish their own reputations or firms.

Santos also noticed that when friends and people he met discovered what he did, they were desperate for advice.

“It was this lightbulb in my head,” he said. “Why is everyone so eager for me to help them? They didn’t have access to this anywhere else.”

Soon after, Santos quit his job and started Homepolish with Nathan to give designers access to clients and provide clients with accessible design expertise.

Initially, Santos was the only designer. But before long the roster had grown to 60, and now there are more than 500 designers affiliated with the company. Some have recently graduated from design school; others have years of experience and are moonlighting or testing the waters to go out on their own.

The process is akin to online dating. Prospective clients log on to the website, enter basic information (location, budget, goals, preferred style) and are matched by one of the company’s “queen bees” with a designer suited to their project. A free consultation follows, either in person at home or via Skype.

If clients don’t think they jibe with the Homepolish designer, they notify the queen bee and — as simply as swiping on Tinder — are rematched. (The queen bee also acts as a go-between if any problems arise during the design process.)

Once a match is made, clients can buy either a single-day session (three hours) for $349 or a set number of hours, which are bought in chunks of five, starting with a 10-hour minimum, at an hourly rate of $130.

“I don’t presume $130 an hour is affordable for everyone,” Santos said. “We say it’s accessible. Our clients typically make as a household $100,000, and they typically have $10,000 to spend on a project.”

Homepolish has opened up personal design to this large segment of professionals who, though successful by most measures, were nevertheless previously unable to afford most decorators. Chris Wallgren and his partner, Brijen Shah, fit the category.

Wallgren, 38, is a consultant for public transportation agencies; Shah, 39, is a doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. The couple bought a two-bedroom co-op on the Upper East Side three years ago, and after a few tentative furniture purchases, grew frustrated trying to decorate the place themselves.

“I’m at a stage in my life where I don’t want this to look like college,” Wallgren said.

But when the couple interviewed designers and architects, they were stunned, Wallgren said. “The decorator comes to your apartment and says, ‘OK, this is going to cost a hundred grand,’” he said. “You need a $30,000 couch.”

Instead, on a friend’s recommendation, they tried Homepolish. During the initial consultation, the designer they were matched with rearranged some furniture. It was an immediate improvement and set the couple at ease about spending money. The designer projected a $25,000 budget and 50 hours of work.

“That’s what he estimated, and that’s what he stuck to,” Wallgren said, adding that it was a collaborative, largely stress-free process that resulted in a home that feels “complete.”

Haley Weidenbaum, a 28-year-old designer in Los Angeles who has become something of a star within the Homepolish stable, said the loose approach was what made the process feel collaborative and unintimidating.

“Usually at a firm, it’s more than one person on a project,” Weidenbaum said. “This feels more personal and less business-y. The client just feels like, ‘Oh, this person is helping me with my home.’”

Weidenbaum is juggling around 20 projects at the moment, and while many of them are for young professionals and first-time homeowners (“I’ve done a lot of nurseries,” she said), she also works with some very wealthy clients.

“Twenty years ago, if you lived in Bel Air, you’d hire the top designer and they’d do everything custom,” she said. “In the last 10 years, magazines and blogs have shown you don’t need to pay three times as much to make your home look good.”

For Santos, the Homepolish co-founder, the informal feel is key.

“People find the task so daunting,” he said. “It’s such a big spend. What people want is a design partner.”

That, and a living room where the art is off the floor and on the walls.