High Point Highlight #1: It’s Complicated
Some of the superb pieces we love to use handcrafted by Alfonso Marino
I just returned from the Spring Furnishings Market in High Point, NC, as always feeling inspired and enthusiastic to specify some of the wonderful pieces that I’ve just spent the week getting to know. However, the trend we’ve been witnessing lately tempers my certainty that I’ll get to see them installed on one of our projects.
The world of furnishings is complicated and vast. Understanding how to compose pieces that will provide maximum beauty and livability is an acumen a designer accumulates over years and untold experience. My goal is to have my clients adore their home! In a world of “DIY Design,” clients who insist they have to sit on the sofa in person at a furniture store or buy everything online themselves undermine the potential for the space we are creating. More and more, I find myself having to turn down opportunities to work on projects with incredible potential because they’re attached to clients with this particular foible—one which inevitably becomes a barrier to the creation of the optimal design.
Ray Booth and Tammy Randall Wood at High Point Spring Market among his stunning new pieces for Hickory Chair.
The Tansu Storage Chest. Part of the wildly handsome and functional new line by Ray Booth for Hickory Chair.
To achieve the home our clients crave, I encourage them to approach the subject of furnishing in ways that might be new to them. Here are two keys:
1) Appropriate a meaningful budget for furnishings.
Our most confident spending is always going to be our most frequent spending, and for most of us, furnishing a whole house at once is a once- or twice-in-a-lifetime experience. Yet furniture has the biggest influence over how we use our homes and how our homes make us feel. Important stuff! Give its funding the reverence it deserves, and your lifestyle will be elevated in ways that pay you dividends every day.
2) Trust your designer!
Great design pushes you past your comfort zone into spaces that captivate and hold your attention—spaces that you’ll love for many years. A good designer knows how to balance aesthetic reach with everyday service and function. Get the true value from your designer by letting them do what you hired them to do and what their well of experience can avail you!
Art and history intersect in the Spanish Barguen-o by Alfonso Marina
Do you have a question about what an appropriate furniture budget should look like? Let me know in the comments below!