Design and Pricing
At Cannon Hill, we put a lot of emphasis on client-led design. That means that you are in the driver’s seat throughout. We’re always here to offer advice and opinions, but the piece is going into your home, not ours, so it has to look and feel right to you, not us. There are certain things we’ll never compromise on: everything we make will always be rock solid, built right, and made to last. If there’s a design element we’re not comfortable with for functional reasons, we’ll work with you to develop a solution that satisfies everyone. That’s the beauty of truly custom work – there’s always a path forward. Sometimes we just have to create it ourselves.
The design process usually involves a visit to our Seaport showroom, where you can see and feel samples of all our most common wood species, dozens of color manipulation options, and many different types of bases. We also offer samples through the mail, so that you can see what different wood types, colors, and finishes look and feel like in your own home. We’ve taken great care to create a robust system for the design phase that ensures every i gets dotted and every t crossed; our process involves frequent, thorough communication, whether we’re just getting final confirmation on something or we’re exploring a brand new idea that may not even make it into the final product. It’s all important, and we take it all seriously.
Sometimes, a project calls for a site visit to your home. This may just mean that we come take measurements, and it may mean that we bring a template to mock up the piece so that you can get a sense of exactly what the table will feel like in the room, and how it will affect the flow. In other cases, as for countertops, we’ll make precise templates so that we have the exact size and shape of the piece entirely figured out, and we’ll simply trace that outline onto our material.
Once we have this information – size, materials, overall design – about your project, it’s time to give you a formal quote and an order agreement. By this point, we’ll have already discussed pricing in detail, so the final quote is never a surprise. The order agreement doesn’t mean that the design process has stopped, or that you can’t make any more changes to the piece; rather, it simply indicates that we’ve got a good roadmap and it’s time to officially get your project into our queue. There are often still items TBD at this point, and we’ll let you know if the possibilities include price changes. Prices are based on a simple formula that takes our historical information on how long various tasks take to carry out, so each project is priced based on how long it will take to build. In the end, our prices are as custom as the furniture itself.
