Storage & Logistics for Interior Designers

Managed Storage for Interior Designers

Most of the pressure on a design project sits between specification and installation. Pieces arrive from different suppliers on different dates, often long before the site is ready for them. We hold them in the meantime, keeping your project’s furniture, fixtures and equipment together from the first supplier delivery through to the final install. If the term is new to you, our guide explains what FF&E covers and how it moves from supplier to installation.

Storage for interior designers tends to work in one of two ways. Some practices come to us for a single project and consolidate one scheme from a dozen sources ahead of an installation date. Others use us as an ongoing hub for a whole studio’s workload, with several live projects held side by side and catalogued separately.

Either way, you are allocated a coordinator who becomes familiar with your practice, your suppliers and the way you prefer things done. The same person stays with the project from the first delivery into storage through to the final piece placed on site.

Photographed, Catalogued and Visible: How Your Collection Is Managed

Every item that arrives is carefully inspected, photographed and inventoried before being uploaded to our digital inventory portal. The result is a live digital inventory of your collection, recorded against your project and accessible from anywhere in the world, showing what has landed and the condition it arrived in.

Inventory management is a phrase used widely across the storage industry, so it is worth being specific about what it means here. As we described the process to the BIID, every item that enters our facilities is photographed, catalogued and recorded. Nothing is ever packed away without a record of what it is, which project it belongs to and its condition on arrival.

You can monitor deliveries as they land, review the imagery for any item and check where each piece has got to as the project runs. When pieces are needed on site, your coordinator arranges their release.

The record matters most when something arrives damaged. A marked piece is identified at our door and recorded with imagery, which gives you time to raise it with the supplier long before installation day.

Secure Storage Facilities

Our facilities are monitored 24 hours a day, with CCTV, security and fire systems in place. There is space for oversized pieces as well as standard furniture, on a long or short-term basis, and your coordinator will advise on what suits your project.

Insurance is a fair question to ask any storage partner. Your coordinator will confirm how goods are covered in storage and in transit before anything arrives, and will set out what is and is not included.

Our secure storage service page covers the wider offer.

Protection, Packing and In-House Crating

Packing decorative pieces properly is a craft, and the right approach changes with the surface. Our materials are selected with each piece in mind: oil-based wrapping paper to reduce the risk of sweating, quilted wrapping paper for shiny and polished surfaces.

High-value and fragile items are usually best protected by a tailor-made crate. We build them in our own workshop, to virtually any shape or size, with a range of interior padding options.

A gilt-edged mirror is a good example. Rather than resting it on any side, we hang it from a batten fixed inside its own crate, so nothing presses on the fragile edges, and it travels in much the position it would hang in on a wall.

There is more on our in-house crating and case making.

Delivery and FF&E Installation

Holding a collection is only worthwhile if it is placed, complete and undamaged, on the day it is needed. We deliver and install across the UK, Europe and worldwide, from a single piece through to a full FF&E installation.

Deliveries are sequenced room by room, and we survey access in advance rather than working it out on the day. Where an item cannot go up a staircase, we look at other routes in, including hoisting through a window with an external elevator.

Chandeliers go to a dedicated specialist who dismantles each one, wraps every crystal individually, then rebuilds and reinstates it on site.

Where a scheme includes artwork, mirrors or bespoke pieces that need hanging rather than placing, our art installation service covers that work.

If you have a project in specification, get in touch and your coordinator will talk it through.

European Road and Worldwide Consignments

We cover all European countries by road and run regular part-load routes, serving Paris and the South of France in particular. Part loads suit single pieces and smaller consignments, sharing vehicle space with compatible goods on the same route. Our vehicles are built with protection in transit in mind.

Further afield, we match the method to the consignment. Groupage works for smaller volumes, a full container load for a whole scheme moving at once, and air freight where a consignment is urgent or compact.

A design project’s stock is commercial goods, not household effects, so it follows the full commercial customs route. That means export and import declarations, EORI numbers, commercial invoices and, where zero tariff treatment applies, valid proof of origin. Your coordinator manages this alongside our customs agent and will advise on timing.

Where antique or decorative pieces contain materials from protected species, we handle the documentation as part of the same process. What is required depends on the material, when the item was worked and the countries involved. The position is set out in the government’s guidance on CITES permits, issued by the Animal and Plant Health Agency.

Yacht Interior Design and Fine Art Logistics

Yacht interiors run to the yard’s calendar rather than the designer’s. Refits are typically scheduled around the vessel’s own haul-out and survey cycle and the Mediterranean off-season, so the installation window is fixed well before the FF&E is ready to move. We plan backwards from that window, and survey aboard first to confirm access routes, measurements and weight.

Customs treatment for goods going aboard is case-specific. It depends on the vessel’s flag, whether it is registered privately or commercially, and where it is berthed at delivery, so there is no single answer. Your coordinator will work through the position for your vessel before anything moves.

Fine art aboard has its own considerations. Salt air, humidity and light are the standing risks, and fixings need to account for movement in rough water. We handle art for yacht projects as we do on land, with climate-appropriate fine art storage ahead of installation and specialist fine art and fragile moving in transit.

More on how we support fit-outs afloat is on our yacht services page.