WHY I LOVE HOME GOODS

I know, all you other designers out there are cringing...but honestly, I do love Home Goods, the home store extension of TJ Maxx, and I will tell you why.  Living in Utah presents some significant hurdles when practicing interior design.  One major hurdle is finding good sources for accessories.  Sure, I can purchase items online, but that is just not always convenient.  I often accessorize homes after I have completed renovations for my clients, which typically entails my going out, purchasing items, and then bring them all to the home and trying everything out to see what works best.  I then return anything that is not needed.  You see ordering a ton of things online is not exactly the easiest way to go about this. 

So I try to purchase at least the majority of items here in Salt Lake.  That means I am really limited to Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, (finally a Crate& Barrel which opened about 2 months ago), Ikea, and a few select unique boutiques that charge and arm and sometimes a leg for their cool accessories.  There are great consignment stores here, but one is not able to return anything in these stores, so I can easily end up with excess accessories.

And then there is Home Goods.  What I enjoy about Home Goods is that while yes, there is a lot of bad holiday decor and bad art and ugly furniture-

there is also quite a goldmine of reasonably priced, different and somewhat one-off (at least one-off in Utah) accessories- if you have the time to dig.  One certainly has to do an extreme search, but it can be very rewarding.  And of course the bonus is that I can return anything that does not work for my projects. 

And while many would claim that Pottery Barn and Crate&Barrel yield many more cute, stylish and sophisticated items, I must admit I prefer to keep accessories from these popular chains to a minimum whenever possible.  Not to say they don't have some great items, however, such an important part of my design philosophy is mixing and coordinating, never matchy-matchy.  And who wants their friends to walk into their newly decorated home, the home they have spent lots of time and money renovating, and have the friends say 'oh look, I saw that at Pottery Barn the other day!'  I want my clients friends to say 'wow, I have never seen any of these things, where did you get them?'  Of course in an ideal world (like New York, LA, Chicago, or San Francisco) this is never an issue as there are so many stores to mine.  But here, I must admit Home Goods has become one of my standard 'go-tos' for accessories.

Cringe if you will, but see how many Pottery Barn and Crate&Barrel items you can pick out of my design projects :)