The partner houses
Milan, Paris, Copenhagen, Antwerp, London, Kyoto, Venice, Vicenza, Florence and Brooklyn. Several are the interiors divisions of fashion and couture ateliers — the same cloth and the same colour discipline, applied to rooms instead of collections.
Why they exist
Not for want of taste. For want of coordination. The kitchen is designed by one firm, built by a second and furnished eight months later from a showroom that has never seen the room — so the result is beautiful things that do not quite belong to each other, bought under time pressure.
The partner houses close that gap. We hold trade accounts across cabinetry, upholstery, surfaces, lighting and hardware, so a single room can take its kitchen from Milan, its wall panels from a Paris atelier, its lighting from Venice and its hardware from Florence — specified together, on one schedule, and installed by the people who drew the room.
A great deal of the most interesting furniture of the past decade has come out of fashion houses. The ateliers already understood cloth, colour and proportion; turning that on rooms was a short step, and it produces pieces that a contract furniture supplier simply does not make.
The roster
We are not a dealer for any one of them, which is the point — we specify across all twelve for a single room rather than fitting a room to one manufacturer's system.
Kitchen systems · Milan, Italy
The house we specify most often for a contemporary kitchen. Lacquer and rift-veneer programmes, a tight tolerance on every carcass, and integrated appliance panels that actually align across a nine-foot run.
Couture interiors · Paris, France
The interiors division of a Paris couture house. Upholstered wall panels, folding screens and cloth by the metre, in the same dye lots the atelier uses for its collections. Long lead times, and worth every week of them.
Fashion-house furniture · Paris, France
Limited furniture editions from a fashion house's design studio — released seasonally, numbered, and then gone. We hold allocation, which is the only reliable way to get a piece from a collection that sells out in a fortnight.
Upholstery and leather · Milan, Italy
A Milanese tailoring house that began making furniture for its own showrooms and never stopped. Hand-stitched leather and wool flannel upholstery, tailored the way a jacket is — which you can see at the seams.
Cabinetry and storage · Copenhagen, Denmark
Danish oak systems for wardrobes, dressing rooms and quiet storage walls. Restrained, beautifully engineered, and the runners still glide in year eight.
Steel and glass systems · Antwerp, Belgium
Blackened steel and glass partition systems, slim internal windows and structural shelving. For where a loft or an office needs to be divided without being darkened.
Joinery and millwork · London, United Kingdom
Hand-painted English joinery for period rooms — shaker and in-frame cabinetry, panelled rooms and libraries. The house we turn to when a brownstone needs something that looks as though it was always there.
Fine joinery · Kyoto, Japan
Joinery in the Japanese tradition, in ash, hinoki and smoked oak. Sliding screens, tea-room detailing and drawer boxes with no visible fixings anywhere. Slow, expensive and unmatched.
American millwork · Brooklyn, New York
Our nearest partner and often our fastest. Solid American hardwood millwork built a subway ride away, which matters enormously when a piece has to be remade in week eleven.
Surfaces and stone · Vicenza, Italy
Terrazzo, engineered stone and honed marble, cut and finished to our templates. They will hold a single block for a project so that an island, a backsplash and a bathroom all come from the same seam.
Lighting · Venice, Italy
Hand-blown glass lighting from the lagoon — pendants, sconces and the fluted opal shades we hang over most of our islands. Every piece is slightly different, which is the point.
Hardware and brass · Florence, Italy
Unlacquered brass and bronze hardware, cast and hand-finished. It arrives bright and ages into the room over about eighteen months. Nothing else we have found patinates the same way.
How the money works
We are an independent design-build firm. We are not owned by any of these houses and none of them owns any part of us. Where we hold a trade account the trade price is passed through to you and our margin is stated openly on the schedule — you always see both numbers.
What the house charges us is what appears on your schedule as the goods price. It is usually meaningfully below retail, and on several houses it is the only way to buy at all.
Stated openly against each item rather than folded invisibly into a single retail figure. A dealer quoting one number is making the same margin without showing it to you.
Nobody here is paid more for specifying one house over another. It is the only way the recommendation can mean anything, and it is why we will occasionally tell you the cheaper option is the better one.
Plenty of clients build with us and furnish themselves. We will still give you a furniture plan at real dimensions so that what you buy actually fits the room we built.
The unglamorous half
Furniture has lead times that are frequently longer than the construction it is going into. A made-to-order table is ten to sixteen weeks; atelier upholstery can be longer. Ordered when a site is nearly finished, it arrives well after you have moved in.
Buying well
Including the parts that reduce what they spend with us.
Seating, tables, hardware and lighting are used daily and reward quality enormously. Decorative pieces reward it far less, and that is where a budget can sensibly be trimmed.
A correctly proportioned piece from an unremarkable maker looks better in a room than a celebrated piece at the wrong size. We draw everything at real dimensions for exactly this reason.
A room furnished entirely from one house looks like a showroom. The best rooms we build combine three or four houses, something vintage, and something the client already owned.
We will tell you honestly which of your existing furniture is worth keeping. Reusing three good pieces is frequently the difference between a furniture budget that fits and one that does not.
The most expensive mistake in this category is a beautiful piece bought before the layout was fixed. It never quite fits, it cannot be returned, and the room ends up designed around it.
Please read this one
Woodside Remodeling is a fictional company built to demonstrate what a website like this can be, and the twelve design and furniture houses above were invented for it along with everything else. No real manufacturer, fashion house, design brand or certification body is named anywhere on this website, and nothing here describes a partnership that exists.
Come and see them
Stone, veneer, tile, cloth and leather from every partner house, on Skillman Avenue in Woodside. Come and hold them, borrow what you like, and take it home before you decide anything.