The furniture decorators use....(sometimes)

I was at my Brother-in-law's house in Winnipeg Canada a few weeks ago and he has a spectacular home (he has done very well in his business). His house was a full custom with remarkable millwork and cabinets, custom doors and windows, top of the line appliances and a backyard segment that probably cost as much by itself as most homes here in Northern Virginia. I was very impressed with everything but the furniture. He's a busy man, and I could see he used a decorator throughout the house and most likely just signed off on the recommendations the decorator made. As the party at his house had 170 people there I had plenty of time to check out his upholstery, and I had to chuckle to myself because both the leather and the fabric pieces were very mediocre, of lesser quality than the lowest line I have in my store. He's a top shelf guy and I's sure he's just not well-versed in what makes a good piece of upholstery and let his decorator choose it all. Why did the decorator put decidedly mid-range product in a high end custom home is anyone's guess - but it didn't match up with the quality of the home - like wearing Nike Sweat Pants with an Armani jacket. So this makes me curious - did the decorator have an assigned budget to work within and these chairs/sofas had to fit into that overall budget or did the decorator not have access to high end lines? Winnipeg Canada is not exactly the epicenter of fine products. I didn't want to tell him that "You should have called me" .... but he should have!

Point being - if you hire a decorator don't give them carte blanche, be sure to tell them the quality you expect in the home and certainly that it should match the rest of the home build. Get involved more than simply picking out colors and saying 'yes' or 'no' in the selections and remember the decorator works for YOU - and if done right the furniture will compliment the interiors of the home. If done wrong, your sister's husband who is in the furniture biz is going to pick up on it <G>

(First post-- hi there!)

I'm going to take a wild guess that the home, plus landscaping, cost more than they thought it would. Also the taxes. So they had to compromise with the furniture. It's also possible they don't know much about furniture, and the decorator just overcharged them. And of course lot of guys don't like to admit their ignorance and ask for help. I guess it's like asking for directions... ;)

The "high end" decorator we used where I lived previously seemed to have some "go to" furniture lines they used, which seemed to be smaller outfits that sold primarily through decorators, not retail so much or at all. No doubt they got a commission from them, of some sort.

If their build quality was questionable, I, and most other end use consumers, wouldn't know. Their website describes the same "8 way hand-tied', etc, buzzwords we are supposed to look for, but beyond that I wasn't, and am not now, really able to tell.
Thankfully all that furniture remains in good shape now, ten years and one move later, so maybe we got lucky.

But we got a decorator in the first place because we didn't have the time, knowledge, skill and aesthetic sensitivity to put the room and furnishings together ourselves and hope for the best possible results. And in that context, aesthetics generally undoubtedly comes first to a decorator. Because, while we cannot all distinguish furniture construction quality, we can all recognize and judge aesthetic results. So it's very easy to be fooled on the quality end. We just hoped we hired the right decorator.

It would have been better to take a step beyond that, and use the cautions in the last paragraph of #1 above. My guess is we would have been offered the same exact furniture if we did. [Like I said, they have all the buzzwords, and probably "pitched" their high quality to the decorator. And there was likely a commission involved]. And maybe that's ok. I don't really know. But it certainly can't hurt to explicitly point out the standards you are looking for. Whether or not that's what you ultimately get.

I spoke with a few decorators here as well, though I didn't use them for furniture. My sense is some of them at least don't really know that much about furniture construction quality, or do not value it highly. Though that was shortly after the crash when times were pretty tough. One of them wanted to send us to Pottery Barn. Another bought pieces on-line, at websites like Etsy and One Kings Lane. I didn't notice much detail about construction quality available from what I saw there.