Hard Finishes and Soft Furnishings: How to Make Cohesive Selections
Building and decorating a dream home is, well, a dream! But, ensuring that everything inside your dream home flows is one of the hardest parts of the process—especially when it comes to adding personalized details that bring character to your home. When you’re in the middle of selecting tiles, appliances, furniture, and fabrics, it can be challenging to conceptualize what the finished product will look like.
That’s where we come in!
As the sister company of Shoreline Construction, at Furnish, we’re lucky enough to walk with our clients and their homebuilders from first sketch to move-in day. Below, we’ll go through the steps we take to perfectly blend hard finishes and soft furnishings and turn your home into the space you’ve always imagined.
The client experience:
Acting as both your Shoreline designer and your Furnish designer enables us to understand your style and carefully curate every corner of your home. The time we invest in getting to know your taste and preferences during construction ultimately guides the direction we take when it’s time to bring life to your interiors.
For example, in this stunning 2021 install project, we knew the rich hardwood floors would provide our primary pop of color in the kitchen. To complement this selection, our design team added a geometric runner that brought out the wood’s lovely warm tones. By incorporating neutral curtains, we drew the eye to the room’s distinctive windows and brought balance to the space. The result? A classic coastal aesthetic that’s completely custom-suited to our client.
The vision:
Since we are with you from the drawing of architectural plans to the placement of the final accent piece, we know exactly where everything is located inside the home - from electrical outlets to built-in bookcases. This gives our team a comprehensive understanding of how every inch of the building will impact where furniture should be placed.
At the beginning of the process, you’re welcome to share your inspiration photos and Pinterest boards with us…but rest assured that you do not need to know a single thing about interior design in order for us to bring your vision to life. In fact, if you can simply tell us what you do not like in a space, we can work with that information just as easily!
As your trust in our team grows throughout the construction process, we’ll look for opportunities to push you a bit outside of your comfort zone—however, we will never impose our own style onto you. Our ultimate goal is to design a cohesive space that’s suited to your preferences and lifestyle. Through our vendor relationships and knowledge of the design world, you may ultimately find that each room of your home feels more “you” than you ever thought possible!
The process:
Bringing your vision to life is a process…and it’s one we absolutely adore!
Typically, flooring is the first decision you will need to make in terms of hard finishes. Up next? Appliances. This is because, from a construction perspective, it’s important to know which appliances will be required (one wine refrigerator or two?) and where they will be inserted (in the main area of the kitchen or tucked into a butler’s pantry?) before finalizing your cabinetry. From there, we will create a custom cabinet plan that fits the appliances you’ve chosen. Next up: plumbing, lighting, countertops, and tile.
Once all of your hard finishes have been finalized, we get to have some fun by bringing in the soft furnishings and accent pieces that will tie each room together! The best news? Our inside knowledge of the special features that will be built into your new home gives us the ability to create designs that are cohesive from baseboards to bedding.
The result:
In true HGTV fashion, our home reveals are always magical. We send all of our purchases to a receiving warehouse, so every item is brought to your home over the course of one to two days…not one to two months! This trouble-free method lets you spend time doing what you enjoy instead of dealing with the delivery schedules of 70+ dealers from around the world. We also meticulously label each room with specific layout instructions so that each piece ends up in the perfect position. It’s a proven process that is run efficiently and beautifully by our lead designers and everyone else involved!