If you’re interested in a custom feature for your home—whether it’s a front door, hardware, countertops, or furniture—the higher price point and complexity of ordering can be daunting. But there’s plenty of good reasons why going custom or bespoke is worth it. Here’s five of them—some of which come straight from our own clients and customers.
1: Just One Custom Piece Radically Shifts The Energy
Just one custom element injects the whole space with a different, more elevated energy. If you’ve already invested in a custom piece for your home—like a sofa, furniture, or even artwork—you can sense the difference it makes. Pieces that are full of personality have an outsized effect on any interior space or exterior facade. It goes from feeling like this home could be anybody’s, to this home is mine. So if you can’t do everything custom, just one or two special pieces is enough to put your own unique twist on any house.
2: Personalized Home Goods Work Better For Unique Spaces
If your home is historic or otherwise unusual, why should your doors and fixtures be bland or contemporary-looking?
If you live in a historic, custom, or unique home, then contemporary mass-market home goods can stick out like a sore thumb. But the inverse is true, as well; if you embrace custom solutions, they create a sense of design cohesion and purposefulness.
A large proportion of our customers live in historic or custom homes, and they tell us that mass-produced home goods end up looking extremely out of place. They need doors, hardware, and home accents that match the traditional construction methods of the spaces where they live.
Our customer Lorraine K was renovating her house that was built in 1920. Her design challenge? Needing to install a door in a space without floor clearance for a swinging door. A pocket door wouldn't work, so she used a sliding barn door and our Swiss Rod sliding door hardware, available in custom track lengths in solid brass. The design of the hardware had to fit the historic surroundings, which is why she came to us, since mass-market hardware would look obviously out of place. She says, “A ‘barn door’ would not match this house. This [hardware] is so well made, the craftsmanship is amazing. It looks like we exposed the hardware of a pocket door!”
You can see the Swiss Rod hardware Lorraine mentions below--but this photo is actually from a 17th century French hunting lodge.
3: Custom Doors Enhance Property Value
If you eventually sell your home, custom features improve the property value as evidence of your investment. Custom front doors in particular enhance curb appeal and revitalize the entire facade. Updating your front entryway with a custom door is one of the most meaningful improvements you can make when it comes to property value. Our client Tim A. needed a new entry door for his historic home, and the opening had an extremely unique pointed arch shape. The only way to get a new door that fit precisely in the opening was to go custom. And Tim told us about his new door:
“I have a great feeling of satisfaction every time I walk through my front door now. I consider it to be one of the most impactful investments made to our home in its 98 year history.”
4: Personalization Allows You To Enjoy The Present
The place where you live should look like you live there. That’s the true distinction between a house and a home. We know that there's a lot of pressure on homeowners lately to think about keeping their house easier to sell down the line. People can feel like the safest bet is to keep things middle-of-the-road or aggressively typical.
But isn’t that also just a little...soul-crushing? To always be thinking about where you live in terms of who could live there next? If you know you’ll be somewhere for a little while, it’s okay to think about living in the present and investing in where you are now. It is, after all, your home.
5: Custom Home Goods Are Superior Quality
Custom made goods are almost always better made than their off-the-rack counterparts. This is because they have to be. Economies of scale aren’t possible for custom and bespoke wood products the same way that they are for mass market counterparts. When each product is built one by one, attention to detail is finer, materials are higher quality, and construction methods are based in tradition rather than what’s cheapest or fastest.
Customized, personalized wood doors represent a return to how we’ve done things for hundreds of years. Before the advent of industrialization, craftsmen and artisans were commissioned to make furniture, doors, or hardware for specific buildings. This resulted in pieces built to serve a specific home, a specific family. These objects could then be passed down through the generations.
RealCraft is committed to doing things the old-fashioned way. When you commission us to build a custom door, we use traditional joinery and solid wood so that it really is an heirloom quality piece. Our customer Nadia-Zmiana, who ordered a custom Chevron panel door, says, “RealCraft does not only supply functional products, but mastered pieces of art that will undoubtedly last through generations.”
Interested in a custom door? Fill out our new and improved Custom Door Form below to get a free quote from one of our expert design consultants.
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