If you are looking for European designer furniture, then new online retailer Contemporary Home International has established itself as the selling a wide range of top brands for a fraction of the usual UK prices, despite only just celebrating their first birthday.
If you consider yourself a furniture connoisseur, then this could be your dream site, featuring high-end products from more than 50 design-led brands, with a particular focus on Italian names such as B&B Italia, Ceccotti, Poliform, and Flexform. The site also includes furniture from iconic designers including H&D favourite Philippe Starck, Antonio Citterio and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is also available.
Francesca Bianchi and Gabriel Homer are the brains behind the business. “A good price example of what we can obtain from our suppliers is the Cattelan Alaska chair,” says Gabriel. “This item would normally retail at £2,275, but we can offer it for £1,580, (saving 30%). Another example is the Philippe Starck Caadre mirror which retails at £2,345 but we are selling it for £1,435, a saving of nearly 40%.”
Gabriel and Francesca have spent the last 10 years working in the world of furniture and design, and as a result, have built up strong relationships with the movers and shakers in the industry, particularly with the suppliers in Italy .
It helps that Francesca is Italian and furniture is her passion, so she has had years of dealing directly with Italy .
Gabriel also has a wealth of experience with European furniture websites and comes from a family of furniture designers, so working in this business seemed like the perfect path for them to follow.
“We can offer the absolute best in European designer furniture, particularly Italian, because we know the people involved so well and deal directly with them,” Gabriel says.
“We can find the exact piece a customer wants, even if it’s not on our site, and get it shipped straight to their house. Attention to detail is vital, so we ensure the furniture our clients request is manufactured down the exact finish they want, all for an enormous cost saving on UK or US prices. Typically we can offer an item for 30% lower than usual UK prices, but this can be as much as 40% or 50% lower.
“Our unique relationships with the key suppliers and our passion for the furniture we sell help us to achieve this level of service.”
And with the credit crunch forcing everyone, even the wealthy, to re-evaluate how they spend their money, the prospect of securing such a saving on genuine designer pieces can make the difference between unaffordable and affordable.
“One of our very first US customers has saved an estimated £100,000 on a spend of around £200,000. They kitted out their beachside apartment in Miami with some really stylish pieces from our site.”
Having supplied its British customers with the best that Europe has to offer in terms of modern high-end furniture for nearly a year, Contemporary Home International has now expanded its operation to the US, setting up a new office to cater for the growing number of orders from furniture lovers across the pond.
