My first luxury: a custom mohair sectional

Shopping for designer goods is about more than beauty, workmanship and cost. It’s an emotional experience that often comes with a personal story. In this series, women recall a singular piece and a moment in their journey into luxury. 

Kai Williamson, 37, of Los Angeles, is an interior designer for celebrities and owner of the all-female firm Studio 7 Design Group. The firm counts athletes, including Dallas Cowboys linebacker Micah Parsons, Denver Broncos cornerback Patrick Surtain II, Denver Nuggets guard Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Philadelphia 76ers forward Robert Covington, as clients. Williamson describes using texture to create luxury in her home.

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My journey into interiors started with a love of fashion. It’s where I began to understand the joy of composition, and I have been able to translate that joy at scale at this point in my career. 

Everything in your closet should make you feel amazing when you get dressed. When you have this idea, you don’t allow things that don’t quite meet the need, and it doesn’t mean it all has to be occasion-based. In terms of fit, quality, and feel, it should not occupy space if it doesn’t bring you joy. That’s true for me and interiors, as well. 

I enjoy the process of creating a style, and my style is a huge part of my signature and career. In the beginning stages of my career, people trusted my fashion style to guide their home decor, so ultimately, that aesthetic is where I build trust from my clientele.

I’ve done a bunch of sneaker closets and custom closet designs. That’s where we get to have a lot of fun. We have one project that inspired me. I went to Tokyo, went through the shopping districts, and went to all the sneaker stores to see how they displayed [items]. So I became a Japanese retail display student and brought some of those concepts back to projects here where we were working with our pro athletes who not only sometimes have 200 pairs of shoes and up. But, they’re also like size 13, size 15. It’s a different accommodation. You have to consider how you’ll take a retail display where you only have to display one shoe and make it functional because you need to display both of these pairs of size 13 and size 15s to fit and still feel clean.

One of our clients, an NBA player, has a secret door. So we had a door with an access panel that only he noticed, so the kids didn’t even know where it was for quite some time.

Sometimes, our clients are willing to spend a lot of money on what I call a high-profile piece, which lives in the foyer when you first enter the home or the dining room, even if they don’t use it a lot. They’re like, “I want this to be amazing,” because dining rooms are often one of the first focal points when you walk into the house, especially in more transitional architecture. When it’s in high use, I suggest investment pieces.

We customize for many of our clients, so custom fabric choices are called CLM, like the customer’s own materials. We want to customize items that are going to be high-use. For me, the family room section is super-important. For our pro athletes, we raise the height. So, the standard seating height is 18 inches. So we have some pieces made at 19 inches, some even as high as 20 because when you have, for example, a client who’s 6 feet 6 and the wife is 5 feet 11. They’re tall.

Recently, I designed a new sectional for my home. I talked about how important that family room sectional is, so I designed a large sectional made of mohair.

Mohair is a very luxurious material. It ranges [in price] at the lowest end, $190 per yard, and it can go up to $350 per yard. There are even some vendors who can exist above that. I needed 44 yards of material for my sectional. That fabric investment alone was significant. Then you have the labor cost. What a lot of people don’t know is that when you’re dealing in custom furniture, there’s a cost to construct the piece and then the cost for your furniture.

For example, when looking for more retail, they come with what they call graded-in fabrics. You’re going to get what they have, which is probably ivory or gray or something neutral, and then you can get that level of customization, sometimes even at retail. Still, I would rather get exactly what I want for that time, right? The piece also has an integrated marble table.

The mohair is a bluish color, and I’m really into color. Calming tones are amazing, but having something that feels more curated and collected for you is about the careful infusion of color. So it is a bluish-grayish tone mohair. As a designer, I’ve always just admired mohair. It’s a very soft fabric, but it has a higher pile [a process that locks individual fibers into a lightweight knit backing] and a bit of a sheen. It transforms in different lights.

I’ve specified it for projects but have never done anything for myself. And I remember even, you know, when you’re selecting for projects, sometimes you’re still like, ‘Hey, this is expensive. Like, I want to tell you all this is expensive, right?’ We have clients who can afford that, but it was a treat. I said the next piece I designed for myself would be exactly what I wanted.