When you expect the highest quality of home furnishings and the interior design to coordinate them into a beautiful home, come meet Rich Burford and the other designers at Flegel’s Design in Menlo Park.
Many clients come into Flegel’s curated showroom of elegant furniture and accessories for a specific item, say a desk or sofa, and in the process of selecting and customizing their piece, realize they want their home to be just as beautiful and coordinated, said Rich.
“A lot of my clients have started with items and I’ve done their whole houses,” he said.
With 35 years of experience in furniture and interior design, Rich says, the key to any project is to first create a unified scheme first. The color palette can come from a key item like a rug or painting from an art collection.
“If you do a whole house, you want the concept to relate and every room to flow into the next,” he said.
In one case he had a couple who came in to buy desks from Rho Mobili, an Italian furniture maker known for using gorgeous artisan craft techniques that date from the 1700s. Rich said he ended up redesigning the couple’s entire house, a Woodside home in the Country English style, to honor its 18th-century English style while using a more contemporary color palette and modern amenities, including a completely customized TV cabinet built in the style of their furniture but including a hydraulic mechanism that could slide the television into the cabinet and out of sight. In the dining room, a table was retained but too- low chairs replaced with hand-carved Chippendale ones.
“We kept a rug and developed a color palette from the rug,” he said. Some elements that tied the rooms together were window coverings in French fabrics and motifs of vines, butterflies and birds painted in a trompe l’oeil style throughout the home.
Clients who expect this level of customization and choice know that Flegel’s is a natural destination for them because Flegel’s has access to a huge variety of premium furniture brands as well as finishes, fabrics and other design elements.
And Rich is interested in every level of possibility in the design process. For a client with a French Normandy- style home in Saratoga, they had the walls of the entire home finished in luxurious Venetian plaster. He said they started with a soft color palette based on three rugs they bought and created the home the client sought, which was “very peaceful and tasteful, but not at all flashy.”
“I enjoy beautiful things and want my clients to find them,” he said. “I think everybody can come to Flegel’s to find that beautiful, beautiful house they’ve always wanted.”
To find out more about how Rich can help you, call him at (650) 326-9661, email [email protected] or stop by Flegel’s Design’s downtown Menlo Park showroom Tuesday through Saturday.