Even in period property the home is often populated with contemporary furniture, often it’s a welcome addition to a modern lifestyle in areas of high activity and function like kitchens. The furniture if well positioned and appointed helps us use our homes and allows us to get the most out of our time spent in them, this isn’t untrue of any other piece of furniture in the other rooms in our homes. Modern furniture like a modern kitchen can make a space, and like badly fitted kitchens can ruin it, the kitchen scenario is less common because most kitchen designs are modular and linear allowing units to be added or subtracted as required, the classic error being the ill advised island or peninsular addition, more storage of course but compromising the space and the users movements through it.
The difference with bespoke is that the design isn’t driven from a modular product, it begins with the space and how one wants to use it. This is the key difference in using a company like Couture Furniture who only produce bespoke furniture. Each piece is a contemporary furniture design in direct response to it’s function and location, our home office furniture examples are excellent illustrations of this, the variety of designs isn’t just a showcase of style, they are all different because the space and user had different requirements on each occasion, and equally importantly the room almost always has had a variety of previous uses, often migrating to a study through haphazard stages of furniture. In some cases the user has a clear understanding of the way the room has been used and what the functional requirements are to be, we just need to package this into a piece of contemporary furniture that suits both function and taste, a different brief maybe that the user hasn’t established a room or way of working but has an idea of what would be ideal but is wary of plonking a piece of modern production furniture into the room and hoping it performs as a study and looks appealing.
The look and feel is easily overlooked, the study needs to be conducive to actually using it, it’s not a piece of ornamental furniture. Part of a successful look is a considered integration into the room, sympathetic design to the existing boundaries is something we know how to do very well, another part of the look is how clean it looks. This can be a satisfying soft close drawer action, or a full set of sliding and folding doors to close off the whole piece when not in use, or just well organised storage so that it never seems overflowing with paperwork, cables and paraphernalia!