We love working with our clients, and guess what… our clients love working with us too! We hear from current and past clients weekly how much we are saving their sanity, budgets and stress levels. Interior Designers may make beautiful spaces but there’s so much more to the job and you need one!
1. SHIPPING & RECEIVING GIANT PURCHASES
What do you do when the 102” sofa arrives damaged? How do you possibly ship it back? When sourcing for yourself through retail outlets, items arrive piece by piece at your home. When pieces arrive damaged or incorrect, you get to sit on the phone waiting for the customer sales rep to take your call and then figure out how to arrange freight back to the warehouse. It’s a headache. We’ve heard so many horror stories of life before our clients hired us.
As much as we wished this didn’t happen with trade purchases too, a piece sometimes arrives broken or significantly different than the order. Because of our amazing team at the warehouse, we know the condition and quality of every piece that arrives immediately. We aren’t surprised by deficiencies months later when we are installing a room, we know as soon as an item arrives. When something is flawed, we work with our wonderful trade representatives that handle it with ease.
2. FURNITURE AS AN INVESTMENT
Retail furniture stores want your business — and they want your business again in 5 years. The price point that retail pieces are listed at is appealing. The “look for less” makes you feel like you can have the best of both worlds. The quality shows itself sooner than desired. Every component in a furniture item adds to the life the item. When lower quality materials are used, a shorter lifespan can be expected. The truth is that some to-the-trade lines are cost comparative to the stores and no matter the price point, they are higher quality.
Furniture lines that are solely accessible by designers and showrooms are crafted, not just mass produced. They are reliable pieces because they know their reputation with designers is their lifeline. Instead of hoping a your furniture lasts 3 to 7 years, they’re hoping you have an heirloom piece that can be passed down to the next generation. We believe that spending more to get decades of use is the best ROI.
3. SUSTAINABILITY AND SOCIAL CONSCIOUS
Not only do people waste the same $2500 on a low quality sofa every 5 years, they also waste the pieces. When items are prone to breakage, irreversible wear, trends that pass too quickly, the unwanted and spent furniture ends up in the landfill. Particle board furniture and other poor quality elements are the equivalent of fast fashion with the disposal rate.
Decorating with new furniture from Target every month might be a quick endorphin boost, realizing that those items weren’t created in a sustainable way and will end up in the trash is a quick way to bring down the urge to impulse buy. Instead, we’ll help you source gorgeous items that reflect you, not just the current culture. We care about keeping toxins out of homes, keeping furniture pieces solid wood and making sure that upholstery will stand the test of time.
4. SPACIAL PLANNING FOR THE WAY YOU LIVE
It’s funny how often we hear, “I would never have thought of this, I love the layout!” The way furniture is arranged, the kitchen is laid out, the private spaces flow from the main living areas are all essential to creating the life a client has expressed they want to live. When working with a client’s builder and architect, we comb through the drawings, finding areas to make the structure of the home connected to lifestyle. We also work through possible furniture configurations to ensure that not only will furniture fit but that there will be an ease when moving around it.
One area that clients mention often is that they never considered that we’d make changes to ceiling and door height! We know the power of a cozy room and the power of a vaulted ceiling and know when to utilize each. We dive deep to know the aspirations of our clients and consider their unique needs and wants in every spatial decision.
5. DESIGN DECISIONS ARE OUR DAY-TO-DAY
When building a home for the first time, a client is face to face with thousands of decisions and questions from their builder that they never thought of before. Square or round shoe molding? Mullions or no? Inset or traditional overlay? 2cm or 3cm countertop? Which crown profile? These are items a Pinterest board can’t answer for you but a designer definitely can! We do this every day and create personal, cohesive homes for our clients with these tiny, seemingly insignificant choices. Design really is in the details!
If you don’t want to have to research the ins and outs of builder/designer language, a designer will enter into the exact style you’re hoping to achieve and can articulate the details and decisions so you don’t do it by trial and error. The amount of time and stress saved is immeasurable.
6. SCALING UP
Not to overstate the poor investment in cheaply made pieces (can that be overstated?) but another reason to enlist a designer to source trade-only items is because of the appropriate scale design resources can offer that mainstream stores cannot. A store that markets to apartment and home dwellers alike is full of items that suit smaller spaces. Putting an 80-inch sofa in a 15-foot room won’t feel balanced. A 24” chandelier over a 72” table will be dwarfed. “Dupes” of designer items are also created in smaller proportions to save the company costs while selling the consumer the idea that it’s exactly the same.
Pretty things are everywhere but a designer knows to look past just the aesthetics and determine if an item is fitting for the space based on measurements and scale. Scale is one of our most useful tools to create sophisticated spaces that feel collected and significant.
7. ENDLESS RESOURCES MAKE FOR ELEGANT DESIGNS
Think a living room just needs a sofa, chair and a few tables? Think again. We consider every element from top to bottom, side to side, to create the most stunning and personalized spaces for our clients. Mixing materials, textures, colors, forms and metallics is a breeze with all of thousands of design resources at our fingertips. Great relationships with our trim carpenter, a huge selection of wallpaper samples, insight on the latest designs from our furniture reps, etc. all help us achieve a great design.
In our design process, we love wowing our clients on presentation day with the gorgeous upholstery options, metallic finishes, wallpaper swatches, hardware samples and all the special details that turn into a stunning finished project.
8. ADVOCATE AND ALLY
Going it alone on a new build or renovation is not an easy task. The full-time work load of a designer immediately falls to the owner. This includes having a finger on the pulse of what is happening at the job site so that every detail of the design is implemented. It’s a full-time job which is why hiring a designer takes the stress and burden of time away from the homeowner.
If a disparity arises between the plan and what the trades have executed, our team is there to advocate for the solution. We are your allies and biggest advocates with the builders, with flooring manufacturers, with lighting vendors, with furniture companies. We are your biggest advocates to make sure the dream home you want is the dream home you walk into!
9. KEEPING THE TIMELINE
Designers keep a job moving. We provide detailed construction plans to the work site so there’s no delay for the team of trades. We make choices and order items ahead of time so things are ready to be installed as soon as the general contractor needs them. We babysit any backorders or onsite hiccups to make sure they’re resolved in a timely way.
We want you to feel excited and relaxed during this time, not stressing about the timeline and being asked a moment's notice to provide decisions for your job because the trades need it ASAP. We’ve done this so many times that we love to be several steps ahead of our trades’ needs and requests. Go out to lunch, get together with friends, we’ve got this!
10. WE BRING THE JOY
Throughout our relationship, we purposefully look for ways to make the building or renovation process easier on our clients. In all the ways listed above and more personal touches, we are working towards the final reveal when our clients open the doors of their home, gasp and cry. Our goal is to understand their unique style, lifestyle, routine, likes and aspirations and wrap it up into a layered, styled home that is move in ready.
When going it alone, a homeowner will get the go ahead from the builder or contractor that it’s ready for them. It’ll be exciting of course, but then comes the task of moving in furniture, decorating and working out the layouts for each space with furniture that possibly doesn’t fit or go. The reveal we provide is emotional for everyone — we love seeing all of our hard work come together into the finished project and most of all, we love seeing the look of awe on our clients’ faces and the realization that everything has been done to the nines for them.