Previous Projects

Less is more

Have you ever been in a home and felt you were back in the Victorian era? Where there’s so much furniture you can hardly walk around (without tripping over something)?

When furnishing a space, there’s a fine balance to be struck between having everything you’d like and making the space too cluttered/gaudy. If we all had massive 10,000 square foot homes, this wouldn’t be a concern. More often, however, you need to work with space. Less really is more for several reasons.

Furniture needs to serve the way you live, and not the other way around. Having been in many homes, I can tell you that the majority of people have more furniture than is required. Besides kitchen cupboards and table with a few chairs, how much of your furniture do you ACTUALLY use on a daily basis?

You know how they say you use 20% of your clothes 80% of the time? The same is true of furniture. Granted, it is nice to have flexibility for special events. But is it really a good strategy to set everything up for those events (which usually end up requiring some creativity anyway)?

Simply from an appearance perspective, having less has several benefits:

1)      Looks cleaner (and requires less cleaning!)

2)      Is inviting (no claustrophobia)

3)      Less congestion (as you don’t have a lot of different things grabbing your eye)

4)      Fewer colours to deal with! Colours are a tricky thing, and often improperly coordinated. The fewer you have, the less chance of everything becoming convoluted and inconsistent. Anything more than 3 colours + natural tone wood is too much!

5)      The furniture that IS there is more enhanced!

I once set up a table in a massive living room that had only two things – a grand piano, and the HDTFF table +chairs. The table and piano looked amazing because there weren’t other thing competing for attention.

So what do you do with the massive armoire that has been handed down and has sentimental value? Chances are you don’t use it very often, so your best bet is to put it in a part of the home you don’t use very often. That way, you don’t have it interfering with your day-to-day.

Keep things simple and minimalistic. It may mean detaching yourself from that desk you used back in your college days, or buffet that your aunt gave you, but in the end you’ll thank yourself.  You don’t HAVE to keep that ‘whatever’ just because you have it; all that matters is your present and future needs.

So now for how my obvious marketing spin – HD Threshing Floor Furniture looks awesome in any design scheme. I’ve delivered to almost every scheme in the book and the feedback has always been very positive. From what I’ve observed, however, is that it thrives the most in the simplest designs – 4 painted walls, 1 or 2 pieces of art on the walls, table +seating, and that’s it. HD’s reclaimed wood furniture is designed to stand out [one of the reasons, as well, why we never stain anything].

Gerald Reinink, Owner and Designer