The first thing bought for a new house is very often a cushion. It is small and lovely, and it makes an empty room feel as though it has started. Then the sofa has to go with the cushion, instead of the other way round, and the room ends up being decided by its smallest object.
A sensible furniture buying guide comes down to order. Buy the pieces you use every day first, measured against the room and against the way into it, and leave the decorative layer until you have lived in the house for a few weeks. Most of the regret we hear about furniture comes from doing those two things the wrong way round.
The pieces that decide everything else
Beds and sofas set the scale of the rooms they stand in, and they are the hardest things to change once they are in; a dining table does the same in the room where people eat. That is also where the money is best spent. With a bed it is the mattress more than the headboard, a point the piece on the couple’s bedroom makes at some length. With a sofa it is what is inside the cushions, which we went into in how to choose the perfect sofa, and a table is mostly a question of the chairs and the space behind them, as in choosing a dining table.
Whatever you choose, measure the stairs and the lift as well as the room.
Buying these well is most of what sustainable decoration means in practice. A sofa kept for fifteen years does more good than any amount of recycled cotton around it.
What can wait
Storage, surprisingly. Until you have lived in a house you don’t know what needs keeping where, and a wardrobe bought in the first week tends to be the wrong width for the wall you later wish it were on. A few weeks of boxes is a small price, and the options are set out in bedroom storage ideas when you get there.
Rugs wait for the furniture, because the right size depends on where the sofa and the table end up; how to work it out is in how to choose a rug. Lamps deserve a second round once you have seen the rooms at night, for reasons explained in the importance of lighting. And the inherited pieces that come out of storage often look better in the new house than anybody expected, which is a good reason not to buy their replacements too soon (mixing old and new furniture has more on that).
Furnishing a whole house at once
Plenty of houses in the Algarve are furnished in one go, a new build handed over empty, say, or a second home bought from abroad and furnished in a couple of trips. The order above still holds; it just gets compressed, and it helps to have one person holding the whole plan.
That is what our turnkey service is for. You tell us the budget and what matters most, we put the rooms together, as a 3D project first if you would like to see them, and then deliver and assemble everything so the house is ready to live in. Rentals have priorities of their own, set out in furnishing a holiday rental, and the walls nothing standard fits are the territory of custom furniture.
Our collections are organised room by room, and both H&P Mobiliário e Decoração showrooms, in Albufeira and Armação de Pêra, are the place to see the big pieces side by side before choosing any of them. Come in with the floor plan. Leave the cushions for the second visit.
