Modern furniture in Charleston? Yes!

Last week I just finished up a commercial project whereby the client needed short term rental furniture. The problem was this: It was a hotel that was VERY modern in style and he needed tables, chairs and barstools. Most of the time, I like to mix things up as I tend to be more eclectic in my design style. This particular project screamed...modern only!

To start with, the rug in the lobby area was geometric and quite colorful. Very colorful. Very primary. The sofa was ultra modern and bright. We needed 2 lounge chairs, end tables and a coffee table to go with that. My first thought was the short term furniture rental stores! Surely they would have a way to put together the amount of furniture I needed by pulling from several of their store locations....NOT! They simply did not have anything that would work.

The biggest problem turned out to be the 6 tables, with 4 chairs each that matched and 8 modern, tall barstools. Charleston is predominately traditional in design with an eclectic feel, so short term furniture rental places don't even carry the contemporary styles that are on their website AND they definately don't have multiple matching tables and chairs of anything that would remotely work. After much searching, here is how I met the need:

Event rental places! They actually had modern furniture...really modern. Of course, the price was high, and they normally only put furniture in short term events...but they were able to work with us, though to only charge us 2 event fees for a whole month of furniture rental.

For the 2 lounge chairs, we used armless microfiber chairs and put some modern pillows on them for a pop of color and drama. The end tables had to be painted a color to match the style as they only had white or dark wood. For a coffee table, we selected 4 cubes and made them into a square.

The 6 tables were very "mod" and looked like they were straight from the 60's. They actually were fine, but the matching mod swivel chairs were just too much. Simple clean-lined silver painted chairs with cushions did the trick. Modern swivel barstools in white leather really worked at the eating counter.

This was a very challenging project as I did all of this in just under 8 hours! It was a lot of work, but worth it for the challenge and the fun of it. Hopefully their furniture that is on order will be here in about a month.

I am not sure if any of you stagers out there have run into this problem, but I hope this will help save you some time if you run into a similar problem.