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Custom & Customized Furnishings: The Art of Creating Something That’s Entirely Your Own
One of the things I love most about designing a home is that there’s rarely only one way to arrive at the right solution.
Sometimes we find a beautiful piece that already exists and it’s exactly what the space needs.
Sometimes we find an option that’s almost right, but we’re able to customize it to make it fit our needs and vision.
And sometimes, what I can see so clearly in my mind simply doesn’t exist yet, so we create it.
Both custom and customized furnishings play important roles in our work here at RHD, and while those terms are often used interchangeably, they actually describe two very different things. At the same time, they both give us the freedom to move beyond what’s readily available as we work to create a home that feels deeply personal, beautifully considered, and entirely your own.
Truly Custom Furnishings
When we talk about custom furnishings, we mean pieces that are designed from the ground up specifically for the client and their home.
We begin with an idea, and often a challenge or parameter we’re working within. Then we develop the design and specifications, and work with a skilled craftsperson or fabricator to bring the piece to life.
It might be a sofa designed to precisely suit the proportions of a room or to meet the comfort needs of both a taller person and their petite partner.
It could be a storage piece for a living room, designed around the architecture, the space available, and what needs to go inside of it.
We’ve custom designed more than a few kitchen banquettes to make the most of a tight corner or a long wall while also creating a comfortably inviting spot for the family to gather.
Or the starting point might be a bit of unexpected inspiration.
I recently came across a piece of sculptural metalwork and loved its movement and artistry so much that I want to capture that in the form of a table base. I can see it paired with a wood top holding court in the right foyer. This is where custom design gets especially exciting for me. We aren’t merely searching for a piece that checks all the right boxes. We’re asking a much more intriguing question:
What’s possible for this piece?
Very often, we go the custom route because we have an idea of what we need but we can’t find it in the marketplace. Other times, we find something we love but its scale or dimensions simply aren’t right for the space. If something is important to the design and the right version doesn’t exist, creating it ourselves can be the best answer. And if, on certain occasions, we get to create a piece merely for the sake of creating something completely unique, I’m all in!
Customized Furnishings
With customized furniture, rather than starting a piece from scratch, we start with an existing design from one of the exceptional manufacturers or vendors we work with, making selections from the customization options they offer.
And those options can be extensive.
We might customize a sofa by first selecting the silhouette, then choosing the arm style, seat depth, back height, cushion configuration, cushion fill, feet, wood or metal finish, and trim details.
Do we want a bench cushion or individual seat cushions? A track arm, slope arm, or tuxedo-style arm? Bun feet, block feet, tapered legs, or plinth base? Down-filled cushions or a combination fill that creates a different ‘sit’ and requires different levels of maintenance? Piping or no piping?
And, of course, there’s the upholstery.
All of the manufacturers we work with offer beautiful textile collections of their own, but many of them also allow us to specify COM (“customer’s own material”). That means we can source a completely different fabric or leather and send it to the manufacturer for them to use to upholster the piece with.
With all of those potential customizations, the end result can be something completely singular even though it wasn’t designed from scratch.
Why We Go Beyond What’s Readily Available
For me, custom and customized furnishings aren’t about adding bespoke details simply because we can.
They’re about opening up possibilities for my clients’ spaces.
Every home has its own architecture, proportions, views, quirks, and sense of place. And every client comes to us with a different way of living in their home, different sensibilities, and a different personal aesthetic.
The furnishings we select for them have to respond to all of that.
For example, a room might call for a sofa with a depth that makes lounging irresistible, but a standard version would completely overwhelm the space.
Or the clients may own specific audio visual equipment that needs storing in the living room… but they don’t want the piece it’s stored in to look like a media cabinet.
Or a banquette needs to do double duty as a dining nook and a work-from-home office space so it needs space for stowing away office supplies as much as it needs a supremely comfortable cushion.
Or maybe we simply want something you aren’t going to see anywhere else. That sense of individuality matters to my clients, and it matters to me.
If we limited ourselves to what’s readily available (i.e. mass produced options from retailers), not only would the pieces not be unique, but we’d also be compromising right, left, and center on size, scale, color, style, and quality. And that’s definitely not what our clients hire us to do for them.
That’s why custom and customization make so much sense for us, and for our clients.
Our Vendors & Craftspeople Are the Key
We’re fortunate to have developed relationships with many exceptional vendors and craftspeople over the years. It’s these talented folks who enable us to exercise our creative freedom to its fullest potential on our clients’ behalf.
Image via A Rudin Image via A Rudin Image via A Rudin
Many of them embrace a designer-friendly approach with extensive customization programs. By giving us a beautiful foundation to work from plus lots of options to choose from, we’re able to take their existing silhouettes and turn them into something highly individualized through a series of thoughtful decisions.
That gives us an enormous range of possibilities before we ever need to design something entirely from scratch.
But when customization can only take us so far and we need proportions that aren’t available, a material combination that doesn’t exist, or the design I’m envisioning simply isn’t something any manufacturer offers, we draw it.
Then we turn to our fabricators, upholsterers, cabinetmakers, and other talented craftspeople who can help us create it.
Either way, there’s something incredibly satisfying about these processes. Ideas that begin as responses to our clients and their spaces become the tangible objects that make their homes uniquely their own.
Having a Choice is the Real Luxury
It’s about uncompromising comfort, quality, and ease. It’s about living with materials that feel wonderful and age beautifully. It’s craftsmanship you can see and feel. And it’s having the freedom to make the choice that’s right for you rather than settling for the choice that’s most readily available.
And that’s ultimately why custom and customized furnishings matter.
We aren’t limited to asking, “What exists?”
We can ask instead, “What truly belongs here? What will make this space feel balanced? What best honors the architecture? What will be most comfortable and functional for the way you actually live? What will you still love years from now? And what makes this feel unmistakably like your home?”
Whether the answer awaits us in a furniture collection that can be customized or it needs us to dream it up, being able to give our clients the luxury of choice is our great privilege.
Let’s Create Something That’s Entirely Yours
The most compelling homes aren’t created by simply choosing beautiful things. They come from knowing when the perfect piece already exists, when it needs to be reimagined, and when the only answer is to create something entirely new.
That’s where experience, creative vision, and relationships with exceptional makers and manufacturers make all the difference.
If you’re planning a new build or renovation in Sonoma County, Marin County, San Francisco, Napa Valley, or elsewhere in Wine Country, we’d love to show you what’s possible.
Let’s create a home that could only be yours.
Connect with Robin Heard Design
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