High Point Market, Fall 2022
/Our team recently returned from a few days at High Point Market in North Carolina. It’s an amazing and creative (and a bit exhausting!) chance to meet current and new vendors, watch for trends, get inspired, and come home ready to tackle your client’s projects. There’s endless tours, speakers, treats and snacks, free bags for the loot, and inspiration everywhere you look.
“Market brought excitement about what’s to come which I am looking forward to sharing with our clients!”
We certainly had a few clients and projects in mind as we walked through showrooms and booths of fabrics, finishings, wallpapers, furniture, lighting, etc. Market definitely gets your creative juices flowing! We tried to take note of things we loved like all the different pattern and textures, colors, burlwood, and as well some upholstery do’s and don’ts.
We are excited to share with you our trip to Market and look forward to continuing to design creative and livable spaces for you and your families!
COLOR AND PATTERN
First off, touring showroom after showroom, the most obvious design features that we couldn’t get enough of were COLOR and PATTERN! We aren’t saying that color is a new trend or ever went away, but there are some years that neutral, earth-tones tend to rule the color palettes. We were so excited to see color everywhere! In velvets galore, colored upholstery, contrast trim (love!), paint details on furniture, candy-colored lamps, pillows and more! Mix, don’t match, they say. See our video on Instagram for our favorites!
BURLWOOD
We also admired all of the beautiful burlwood furniture showcased. Sometimes a side table, a dresser, a dining table…burlwood has a beautiful unique quality to it, that invokes character and is highly sought after. Burlwood furniture is a great addition to any space…it doesn’t really fall into a specific “style” or design type. It makes a great accent piece that is a bit of a neutral but definitely brings depth to a space.
Did you know that the burl is actually a grain characteristic in wood? A burl is a large, knobby-looking growth on the base and trunk of the tree. Once burls are cleaned and cut at the processing facility, they are made into slabs for table tops, mantles or other furniture.
It’s hard not to be attracted to the beautiful shiny finish of burlwood. Below are some of our favorite pieces we came across at Market.
Aren’t they lovely?!
UPHOLSTERY DO’S AND DON’TS
We saw a couple pieces that made us scratch our heads a bit (and hey, that’s ok! We don’t have to all like the same things). Based on our past and current projects, we felt like we could offer a little advice to anyone considering custom upholstery for their space.
These two chairs were upholstered with the very trendy boucle fabric on one part of the furniture. While we are all for a comfy, warm snuggle in a boucle chair, we felt like the plain color of the boucle took away from the beautiful plaid and blue cheetah prints. In addition, the boucle fabric on the back on the chair in the first picture does sort of defeat the point of using boucle - it must be touched and snuggled with!
Below are some chairs that had multiple fabrics upholstered together that we loved! How fun are theses? The back of a chair is a great way to add contrast, color and pattern to a room. It can really make a chair stand out and bring something new to a space. Would you try it?
It was so great to be back at High Point after a few years. Though it was a fun, creative, bonding experience together, it was still after all, a business trip. We walked, we looked, we touched! We were there to accomplish goals, connect with vendors and reps we’ve only known online, and to most importantly, look out for our clients and future projects.
We leave you with one of our fierce leaders, Margaret Lee, who may have very well sat in every chair we saw at Market, you know, to really make sure they were suitable for our clients.
“It’s always exciting to be surrounded by people who really love design. It re-energizes you. It’s fun to see all of the latest designs and trends and to get a sense of which way design is headed. While Charleston does have some really great resources and vendors, it is not always possible to see the products we are specing for our clients in person before ordering. Visiting with our vendors and going to the showrooms in person brings another level of knowledge to our designs.”
If anything catches your eye or would like to learn more about the design services we offer, please reach out to us. We’d love to work with you!