FREE DESIGN SERVICES! Retailers are tempting everyone to skip the professionals and go it alone, but how do they measure up? Writer Elizabeth G. Dunn test-drove the design services of three retailers to see what one hour of style aid and chaperoned shopping could provide.
Inside Restoration Hardware’s Manhattan store, young employees clad in black are scuttling between elephantine coffee tables and armoires the size of studio apartments, iPads clasped to their torsos. I am here to meet one of them, a designer named Lauren, who materializes noiselessly from behind a vast sectional and directs me to take a seat. She offers water and listens patiently as I describe the sorry state of my guest bedroom, which has brought me here on this winter Monday morning.
My husband and I recently bought our first house, and I have found the process of furnishing it to be at once confusing, tedious, intoxicating, and most of all, slow. I am a millennial. I have absolutely no design experience but the certitude that deep down, my taste is very good. I want a polished, pretty home. I have no idea how to get there.
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