Inspiration in the Studio

After months of work and thousands of decisions, the Southern Living Showcase Home built by Whitney Blair Custom Homes in the Thistle community in Sunset Beach, North Carolina is opening for tours next week! We’re excited to share some highlights of our install and photo shoot!  Let’s just say, we worked some long days that began with beautiful coastal sunrises…

It took a team of professionals to move furniture, install window treatments, and add the finishing touches!

The house is finally ready for photography!  It was two full days of staging and lighting and flowers and more details.

If you have plans to be on the coast this spring, please take the time to visit!  The Showcase Home is located at 8826 Kirkcaldy Court in Sunset Beach and will be open for tours on weekends (Friday-Sunday) from April 17 through May 25. Your $10 donation at the door will benefit the Lower Cape Fear Hospice & Life Center and Operation Finally Home.

Special thanks to the entire team for pitching in and making it happen.

The time has come! The Southern Living Showcase Home being built by Whitney Blair Custom Homes in the Thistle community is in the final stages of construction and we’re preparing and packing for furniture installation on Monday! The behind-the-scenes preparation is in full throttle. This is just a glimpse of what’s happing this week…boxes and boxes of beautiful accessories.

Window treatments and hardware….the beautiful Kravet fabrics under all of that protective wrapping are going to look amazing.

And, of course, no house would be complete without the last minute fill-in necessities at Target (special thanks to the store manager who brought us Starbucks while we shopped)!

This is always the stage of the process that we start to wonder if the vision we’ve been working so hard to achieve is actually going to come together. We’re staying focused on the plan….time to make it happen!

Welcome 2015!  It’s going to be an exciting year and we’re ready for the challenge. This week we made a quick visit to check on the progress of the Southern Living Showcase Home in the Thistle community in Sunset Beach. There are so many details to consider and we spent the day on site to get them just right…although I’m not sure Eric likes whatever idea I’m sharing in this photo!  The stack of trim material became our make-shift work table for the day.

Janene (our super-talented window treatment fabricator) and Julia spent much of the day precisely measuring for window treatments. The super-talented Whitney Blair craftsmen were out in full force installing trim.

It was an exciting day, but we really need to do something about our poor planning with Mother Nature! We were once again battling some serious rain. Let’s hope that we’re paying our rainy day dues now. We are requesting beautiful weather when the Showcase Home opens to the public Easter weekend.

Wishing you a 2015 filled with happiness….even on the rainy days!

We’re making great progress on the design of the Southern Living Showcase Home! There are so many decisions that need to be made and so many details to consider. The creative energy is contagious! Here’s what we’ve been working on over the past few weeks.

We visited an amazing warehouse filled with unique wood species to consider for specialty treatments in the house. The craftsmanship is impressive.

Construction is progressing….exterior is looking great, windows are installed, and framing decisions are finalized.

We are spending a lot of time on the design development of the interior furnishings and finishes. We never say we are making changes to a design since it seems so negative. Instead, we say we are allowing a design to evolve. Well, it’s time to stop evolving….time for commitment.

It’s going to be exciting to see this house come to life. I welcome you to follow the progress on the Showhouse Facebook Page! It’s hard to believe that our next update will be in 2015. Gotta go…lots of designing to do!

It has been an incredibly busy few months in the studio.  One project we are particularly happy to finally share is going to come to life in the spring of 2015!  Here’s a sneak peak….

We are thrilled to be the exclusive designers of the Southern Living Showcase Home being built by Whitney Blair Custom Homes in the Thistle community at Sunset Beach, North Carolina. We’ve spent hours in construction meetings designing every last detail of the home….and it’s been exciting. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll share our progress.

On our most recent trip to the coast, Martha and I battled monsoon rains to visit the site (this job is really not very glamorous). Construction is progressing…brick is up on the exterior and rough-ins are almost complete.

We’ve spent many hours in the studio developing each interior space. Creative studio work days are the best and on this particular day, we ran out of workspace and the design spilled onto the floor.

We still have a lot of work to do, but the process is exciting. The home will be open for tours beginning Easter weekend, 2015 and will benefit Lower Cape Fear Hospice and Operation Finally Home.  Please join us on this Showhouse journey!