We announced a few weeks ago that this blog has been selected to be a part of the Test it, Blog it, Win it contest from local retailer Su Casa Furniture. We’re thrilled to be participating, and win or lose it’s been an incredibly positive experience for us.

After demonstrating just how bleak and bare our living room is, and discussing how difficult it can be to design a room from the ground up, we’re finally ready to reveal our selections.

Now, having a decent budget to work with and knowing how much there was to choose from, we thought it would be excruciatingly difficult to choose a new sofa. It wasn’t. It was incredibly easy. It all started when we walked into Pad and saw this chair on display…

“Does this chair come in a sofa?”

“Yes.”

“Is it a two cushion sofa?”

“Yes. Here’s a picture of the sofa version.”

“Oh good. I’ll buy it. And a matching ottoman please.”

And it was really as simple as that. Here’s what the sofa looks like:

(We should also say that we could be that confident because we had already seen this particular sofa on display at another high-end independent furniture store in Hampden. The only difference was that Pad beat their sticker price by $50. When you factor in the free delivery that Su Casa and Pad offer on all their items, They actually beat them by about $150. Not too shabby.)

We had dozens of fabrics to choose from, and after narrowing it down by texture, we settled on a shade of gray not too different from what’s pictured. We’re thinking it will work well with the paint color we’ve chosen, which is (and we’re not kidding) “Lavender Sparkle.”

But wait, there’s more! We’re only “testing” the couch as per the contest rules, but we’re not done shopping yet. The whole way we found out about the contest is because we were shopping on the Su Casa website in the first place. Contest or no contest, they still come out ahead of the competition on most items as far as price and quality, and with the extensive customization options we wanted to pick up a few other pieces while we were at it. (A 30% discount on additional pieces for contestants was also a nice incentive.)

Transitioning from Pad directly across the street to Su Casa was absolutely seamless. They just faxed over our order sheet and even let us carry our chosen fabric swatch from one store to the other so that we could match it up.

Now, what we wanted to do was to select chairs that are complimentary, but not matchy-matchy. So as much as we like sweep-arm chairs (and Su Casa has several), we went with something more traditional, but with a low profile on the arms which sort of sweep in reverse. We bought two of these… The Highland Chair:

The design we’re aiming for is modern, but not ultra-modern. We’re looking to hit a sweet spot between mid-century chic, traditional living room function, and here-and now sensibility. We’re incorporating a lot of subtle masculine touches, and Lavender Sparkle aside, the whole thing is somewhat menswear inspired so we went with this herringbone tweed fabric.

So, if you’ve got a tweed blazer, gray tie, and linen handkerchief (curtains) What are you missing? What’s your foundation? A white dress shirt. In this little design analogy, the dress shirt is this rug:

As nice as all their furniture is, Su Casa is a world-beater when it comes to rugs. There are only a few samples hanging in the shop, but they offer four full catalogs with literally thousands of rugs. This one is from Surya and was made by hand in India. Not only that but it’s handmade from 100% wool, which was important to us, and was available to ship in just a few weeks.

Shopping from any of Su Casa’s rug catalogs, or the links in their rugs section can be daunting, because none of them include price tags. Not to worry though: the 5′ x 8′ rug we chose was on sale for $355, which would be cheap even for a machine made polyester rug. For a handmade wool rug, it’s ridiculously inexpensive. All of the rugs we saw, even wool/silk blends were very competitively priced.

So now… we wait. We’re expecting our furniture to arrive around the last week of May, but we’re going to make a lot of progress between now and then. Check back next week when we’ll have some pictures to share of the early stages of our design.