Small Businesses Are People Too...

A friend of ours who runs a small drapery wrote us an email to vent about a particularly nasty client of his. The woman was referred to him by a friend.  She insisted on meeting early in the morning, so to get to her house at 10am in LA traffic, my friend has to leave his office at 8am.  He spent a couple of hours the night before picking out fabrics for her.  Once he got there, she proceeded to tell him that she only wants to have someone measure the windows for her so that she can buy the window treatment over the Internet.  Mind you, she wants to have the measurement done for free! 

Another friend of ours owns a restaurant in San Francisco.  We don't know if you know, but this is a particularly trying time for the restaurant business.  Our friend is struggling to survive.  At any rate, there was this group of four young guys.  They ordered a noodle dish and the dish had a tiny thread (that was used to tie the dry noodle together).  My friend apologized and made a new one.  When the check came, they demanded that the whole meal, including 2-3 bottles of wine, be comped!  My friend explained that that is not possible, but she would comp them for the appetizers.  They proceeded to stomp off and left the waitress no tip.  Then wrote a Yelp review about it.

One recent customer of ours ordered $4000 worth of merchandise, then proceeded to cancel/return/refuse 80% of them, leaving us with restocking fee, shipping fee and opened merchandise that we now have to salvage. 

Which leads us to the question, is common decency dead?  Do people feel that merchants exists to be abused and used?  Is common courtesy only goes one way-from the merchant to customers but not the other way around?

If a customer experiences bad service, and we have many times ourselves, there are many outlets they can vent to.

Yet if a merchant gets used/abused like this, all we can do is vent privately.    Yet the same customers will go elsewhere and repeat this deplorable attitute to other businesses.  Most small businesses that we know, especially retail/restaurants are working fingers to the bone to survive day to day.  Having this type of customers just kill us.

We wish sometime that people understand that businesses are people too.

PS We do have a lot of many good and amazing customers that we just love.   To them, we say thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Art Murals for Large Spaces

We think the large murals that you see in Starbuck or Barnes and Nobles are really cool.  We always wish we can get something like that at home.  It will work great if you have a large loft with tall, tall ceilings, don't you think?  So much cooler than wallpapers.

We found a source today for it that we thought you might want to check out.  They do mostly commercial installations but you can buy them for residential as well.

Here are some samplings:

To see more portfolios and get product information, visit the vendor's web site here.

Loft Room Divider

We're in the process of downsizing from a 4000 sq ft home to a 1200-sq ft loft.  Do you know,  loft living sounds more romantic than it actually is? We find that we really miss the traditional division of space. We miss having rooms.  We miss the privacy!

We've been looking into options of dividing the space.  Drapery is one, but do you have any idea how expensive a piece of fabric with four stitching is?  It's quite a mystery actually, how much drapery can cost.  The other option is to go with a company like the Sliding Door, but they are really pricey too.

We found this company, Loft Wall, today and we thought it might be a good option.  They make portable dividers that you can customize the sizing and the panels.  They are not cheap but they are not too expensive either.  You can visit the web site to download the price list.  Keep in mind that the published prices are retail, and no one pays retail!

Here are some samples:

To see more product specifications and pricing info, visit the Loft Wall web site.

Modern Planters

When we go to a really cool restaurant in Miami or Los Angeles we are always envious of the huge, modern planters that they have.  It's really hard to find them.  Most of the pottery places that we have in our local area sell the traditional planters.  If you have a modern home you are kinda out luck.

Anyway, we just found a great source today for huge, commercial modern planters that we thought we'd share with you.  They are so cool!  We have no idea how much they cost, sorry. But if you are interested drop us a line and we'll get pricing info for you.

Here are some samples:

These are made by Green Form. To see more see their web site.

Color Story: Red

A pop of red home accessories to brighten up your day...

Red coral statues from Made Goods, Red Silk Flowers from New Growth Design, Shikaro Red Fabric from Fschumacher, Red Garden Stool from Urban Trend, Red Carpet from Chandra, Red Pillow from Caroline Cole, Red Chair from Jessica Charles, Red Artwork from Art Frame Source, Red Mirror from Made Goods.

All can be found under our home decor section.

Black and White Artwork

We usually have a really hard time finding artwork.  Mainly because we know nothing about art and when you know nothing about something you tend to be really insecure.  We suppose art is like wine, you can pretend to be a connoiseur or you can just decide you like what you like and that's that.  

It's easier that way, no?

So here are some artworks that we just picked up for our own personal loft lately.  It's a modern loft with very dark floors and white paint, so we thought we keep it simple by sticking to black and white theme.  We really like them in person. They are made professionally for commercial projects so they look really nice and expensive, even though they are quite reasonable.

For more information on pricing and sizes, you can check out our artwork section.  They are on the first few pages of the category.

Barbara Barry Home Accessories for Global Views

 We haven't seen much from Barbara Barry for a while.  She was huge a few years back, with furniture for Baker, fabrics for Kravet and so on.  Her stuff was always so expensive though, so it was a nice surprise to see her home accessories collection for Global Views.  They are actually reasonable!

The accessories has her signatured subdued colors & clean-lined styles.  Here are some examples:

These items run between $100-$250 each. They will be posted in our home decor section shortly.