FF&E Procurement: How We Buy, Store and Install Everything in Your Home

FF&E stands for furniture, fixtures and equipment. In plain terms, it’s everything in your home that isn’t the building itself: the sofa, the beds, the lighting, the curtains, the rugs, the art, the door handles. Procurement is the buying of it.

It sounds like the easy part. Choose the sofa, order the sofa. On one four-bedroom flat we renovated, it was over 800 items from dozens of suppliers, delivered across five months,, each with its own lead time, delivery rules and ways of going wrong. It’s also where budget quietly leaks if nobody is watching. So it’s worth knowing how procurement works before you sign up with any studio, including us.

What FF&E procurement covers

On our projects, it usually includes:

• Furniture, beds and upholstery, including made-to-order pieces
• Curtains, blinds and soft furnishings
• Decorative lighting, plus the lamps and drivers the electrician needs
• Bathroom fittings, flooring and ironmongery that your builder will fit
• Rugs, art and accessories

The bathroom fittings and flooring surprise people. A lot of what your builder needs comes through us, because we specified it in the design and it has to arrive at the right moment in the build. A tap that turns up three weeks late can hold up a whole bathroom.

How we do it, step by step

1. You sign off the whole scheme

We don’t order anything until you’ve approved the complete design. It’s far easier to say yes to a whole room than to a stream of individual pieces, and it means we can order in one go rather than drip-feeding orders over months. If something sells out between presentation and sign-off, we find alternatives and show them to you alongside the approved scheme. We’ve written about what happens when a chair disappears off the face of the earth.

2. We order everything, timed to the build

Lead times run from a few days to several months, and made-to-order pieces take the longest. We place orders so items arrive when the house is ready for them, not while the plaster is still drying.

3. Everything goes to a warehouse first

Most deliveries go to a storage warehouse rather than your home. Each item is unpacked and checked for damage when it arrives, so problems get sorted before installation day rather than on it. A building site is no place for a bespoke calfskin pouf. And if you’re living in the house during the works, your hallway isn’t full of cardboard.

4. Specialist installers bring it in

When the house is ready, our installation team delivers and fits everything: furniture assembled and placed, lights hung, art up. You come back to a finished home, not a pile of boxes.

5. You keep the paperwork for life

Because we buy everything for you, we hold every receipt. If something fails inside its warranty in five years’ time, we can find the paperwork.

What procurement costs

Two things set the price.

The first is trade discounts. Many suppliers give interior designers a trade discount, typically between 15% and 40%, and we pass that discount on to you.

The second is our buying fee. We charge 25% on top of the price of each item we buy. That covers ordering, chasing, checking, storage handling, delivery and installation.

Because discounts vary from supplier to supplier, the total often comes out close to the retail price, and sometimes lower. In other words, you pay roughly what you’d have paid anyway, without spending your evenings chasing deliveries.

Once you’ve signed off the design, we invoice the FF&E in full, so we can place every order at once. Our design fee is separate and is paid when the contract is signed. There’s more on how the numbers fit together in What Does a Luxury Interior Designer Cost in London?

Is procurement the same as project management?

No, and it’s worth being clear about the difference. Project management means someone on site every day, running the builders. We don’t do that. Your contractor runs the site, and you’re welcome to use your own builder.

What we do is make sure the builder has everything they need from the design: the drawings, the specifications, and the items themselves, arriving in the right order. From your side it can feel similar, because you’re not chasing anyone. But responsibility for the site sits with the contractor.

Can’t I just buy it all myself?

You can, and some clients do buy a few pieces themselves. But think about what it means across a whole house. Hundreds of orders. Checking every delivery for damage. Chasing a supplier when a sofa arrives in the wrong fabric. Storing it all until the house is ready. Finding a replacement when a chair goes out of production.

The question isn’t really whether you could do it. It’s whether that’s how you want to spend the next six months.

Buying for a home abroad

We’ve shipped full schemes overseas, including a home in Riyadh. International procurement adds freight, customs and longer lead times, so it needs planning earlier. Our post on shipping internationally for a luxury home in Saudi Arabia covers what’s involved.

One thing to ask any studio

If you’re comparing interior designers, ask each one how they handle procurement, who checks the deliveries, and what their buying fee is. You should get a straight answer to all three.