Including Custom and Semi Custom Furniture in Interior Design

01 Jul Including Custom and Semi Custom Furniture in Interior Design

Custom furniture is a fabulous way to display your personal design style and have a lot of fun with different materials, colors and patterns. Nowadays, many furniture companies will let you choose the cushion style, arm style, wood species, skirt and trim of their upholstery pieces. You can even ship them your own fabric if you find a pattern they don’t have. To a lesser extent, custom finishes exist for casegoods like dining room tables, wooden chairs, end tables and coffee tables. Taking the custom furniture route allows you to create a unique piece no one else has.

However, not everything has to be custom. In fact, it is often more cost effective to combine premade with hand-picked. Balancing the two takes experience and a bit of a crafty mind. The trick is in making what is premade appear custom with just a few touches here and there, resulting in a look that is high-end and distinct. My expertise is in this balancing act, finding the right combination of fully and partly custom for each of my clients. Within that range, there are many ways I can bring my client’s personality to their space.

When you’re looking to save money on a custom design, don’t go big. Focusing on smart choices for the details of a design can change your whole look. For example, rather than customizing an entire sofa, choosing to customize smaller, less expensive furniture, like an ottoman and throw pillows, can quickly add a unique touch to your room in several places. Throw pillows especially are great for tighter budgets. You are spending on a small scale, so you can choose a really fantastic fabric that will make your couch look gorgeous with just a splash of it.

In the Indianapolis condo above, the lovely red-fabric throw pillows on a fairly neutral sofa created an overall high-end look, but since we chose to customize the smaller component of the set (the pillows), we were able to spend less on that element.

Some furniture lines have a multitude of fabric samples to choose from, as well as wood frame finishes, arm and back styles. Though these options aren’t necessarily your own find or original design, you can still make a premade piece somewhat custom.

For example, in the same condo, we went to a furniture line that had the style bar stool we liked, but brought in our own blue vinyl, the exact shade of blue we needed for my client’s very-specific color scheme. We ordered the vinyl from a fabric manufacturer and had it shipped to the furniture line.

In this farmhouse-style kitchen, we again customized the bar stools to fit the needs of my client. On their seats is a durable vinyl for easy cleaning and longevity. To add interesting texture, we covered the back with embroidered fabric and nail heads. The vinyl was less expensive and more practical for the seat—the embroidered fabric would not last long there. However, we didn’t have to choose one over the other; we found a way to use both.

Another trick to use your budget wisely is to reupholster furniture you already have. A piece that’s been in your family for a while may be a bit outdated, and doesn’t fit your style anymore. Some tweaking can jazz it back up. I work with my local upholsterer to choose materials and remove or add skirts and decorative trims to make my client’s old furniture fit their new interior design.

A local upholsterer can also build pieces to your specifications. The above room is entirely filled with custom furniture. My upholsterer built the ottoman, the window benches (which had to be a certain length to fit the windows), and the couch sectional. We custom made the sectional to sit my client’s sizable family, and so they can enjoy both the fireplace and the TV, which is on a different wall than the fireplace.

With custom furniture, or even slightly customized, your space can have a look that is entirely unique to you, furnished with pieces others don’t have. There is more than one way to customize, and if you need help finding that perfect solution, send us an email or give us a call at (317) 507-9358.