I don’t wear an Apple Watch, so I have absolutely no data to back this up, but I feel confident saying we walked at least 15,000 steps a day at High Point Market last weekend.
We hit more than 55 showrooms in three days. We sat in approximately one million chairs and sofas, felt fabrics, inspected seams, asked a million questions and took a ridiculous number of pictures. But that was the point—to overload our brains with information so that when a client walks in looking for custom furniture or interior design help here on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, we can reach into our (beautiful) brains and say, “We know EXACTLY what you need.”
The main focus of this trip was upholstery.
Our little showroom here on Maryland’s Eastern Shore cannot hold every sofa, chair and sectional we love, so trips to High Point Market to sit-test furniture and upholstery are a really important part of our CTI business model.
How deep is it? Do you sink into it or sit on top of it? How does the cushion feel? Does the arm hit in the right place? How does the tailoring look? Does it feel substantial? And perhaps most importantly, would we actually want it in our own homes?
A photograph and a spec sheet can only tell you so much.
And speaking of all this work coming in…
This pains me a little to say because one of the hardest parts of owning this business has been learning to say no, but we are currently booked through late February/early March. So exciting, but it’s also something we take really seriously.
From the beginning, I have known that Common Thread Interiors will always be a boutique interior design firm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. To us, boutique means we only commit to the amount of work our small-but-mighty team can execute really, really, REALLY well.
Boutique also means answering emails like humans. Knowing what is happening in your house. Remembering the chair you loved, how you like to lay on your sofa when you watch tv, the fabric your husband hated, that your dog sleeps on your bed and that you don’t ask anyone to remove their shoes at the door.
We want every client to come away from working with us feeling like they became part of the CTI family. We love design. We love working with our clients. But we are 10000% not a machine. Every home we design is different because every family who lives in it is different, and we never want to lose that.
Which brings us back to High Point.
I brought my friend Catherine with us this year—hi, Catherine!—and somewhere in the midst of our 55+ showrooms, she said something that really stuck with me: “You know, I think your clients would really appreciate knowing that you actually know the owners of the companies you buy your furniture from.”
And she’s right.
One of our favorite things about the furniture industry—especially upholstery—is how incredibly generational it is. We know these people. We LIKE these people. We talk furniture and families and business, and we meet their shrieking children running through showrooms in patent leather shoes and smocked dresses, playing peekaboo through the fabric swatches. And we groan about teenagers and talk about how Marriott Bonvoy points have been inflated. There is something about the whole thing that feels so wonderfully Chestertown. Because the conversation is easy. And the company is genuine.
We are the people behind the design, and these are the people behind the beautiful furniture we source—craftspeople, families and generations of knowledge about how to build something well. That matters to us just as much as how beautiful the finished piece is.
The People Behind the Furniture
After 55+ showrooms and more chairs than we could possibly count, here are a few of the makers we came home especially excited about.
Chaddock
If you’ve worked with us for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard us talk about Chaddock. They won us over when they invited us to Chaddock “College,” where we spent three days at their factory in Morganton, North Carolina, learning firsthand how their upholstered and wood furniture is made. More than 200 craftspeople work there—many of them third- and fourth-generation furniture makers—and seeing that level of craftsmanship up close made us believers for life.
And their ability to customize is BANANAS.
Dimensions, finishes, fabrics, cushions—we can start with a beautiful piece and make it work specifically for your room rather than trying to make your room work around the furniture. This is what we mean when we talk about investing in quality, custom furniture: pieces made by actual people, one at a time, with the intention that you’ll live with them for a very long time.
Mt Company
MT Company is another CTI favorite and hits a really wonderful sweet spot: beautiful, comfortable, customizable upholstery at a price point that makes sense for a lot of our projects. Their furniture is handcrafted in High Point, one piece at a time, using traditional eight-way hand-tied foundations.
But here is what really matters: people want to sit in it. And stay there.
We can make a room beautiful all day long, but if nobody wants to curl up on the sofa at the end of the day, we haven’t done our job.
Wesley Hall- Coming to the CTI Showroom This Winter!
We’ve looked at Wesley Hall before, but this trip gave us the opportunity to really dig in—sit in the frames, study the tailoring, go through fabrics and finishes and figure out whether it filled a hole in our current upholstery offerings.
And boy did it pass the CTI sit test.
Carolina Custom Leather
I could go on but CJ and Sara tell me that my blogs are getting a bit too wordy. So if you want to know MORE, you have to come in and get it straight from me! The word count is at capacity.
But all of this is why we go.
High Point isn’t just a buying trip for us. We see ourselves as lifelong learners of the craft of designing rooms and furniture. That’s why we open every drawer, touch every fabric, and sit in so many chairs and sofas that our legs hurt. We ask questions about construction, meet the people who make the pieces, and hunt for the new line we didn’t even know our showroom was missing.
That part means something to us.
And when you’re trusting us to help create your home, that’s exactly the point.
