Why Does Furniture Selection Matter in a Custom Home?
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When you think about building a custom home, furniture can feel like the thing that comes at the end. You design the architecture, select the hardwood floors, plaster, cabinetry, windows, and all the other permanent pieces. Then you put some furniture inside.
But Mysa Hus was never designed that way. The architecture of this house is incredible, but we also knew it needed another layer to make it feel like a home. Furniture, fabrics, wood, rattan, and other natural materials brought in that softness. That's where Francis King came in.
Why does furniture selection matter in a custom home? Because great furniture doesn't just fill a room. It changes how the architecture feels, how the home functions, and, if you choose it well, can become part of the home for generations.
How Did Francis King Help Create the Look of Mysa Hus?
Francis King supplied a huge portion of the furniture and textiles throughout Mysa Hus. We're talking living room sofas and armchairs, sunroom chairs, office furniture, bedroom furniture, the lower-level sectional, game table and chairs, pieces for the golf simulator, lamps, benches, nightstands, and a lot more.
Francis King gave the Oho design team access to this huge breadth of manufacturers and fabric lines, which allowed the house to feel collected and layered rather than like we walked into one store and bought the entire showroom.
There are a lot of Lee Industries upholstered pieces throughout Mysa Hus, along with Four Hands and other furniture lines. Fabrics from Carolina Irving, Cowtan & Tout, and Colefax and Fowler show up throughout the home. You can get incredibly specific. That's how you create a house where everything belongs together without everything matching.
Why Were Natural Fabrics Important in Mysa Hus?
One of the guiding principles behind Mysa Hus has always been wellness, so we wanted that thinking to continue all the way down to the furniture and fabrics.
The design team intentionally looked for natural textiles like 100% cotton, linen, and wool, and chose not to add chemical treatments to protect those fabrics. We also paid attention to the furniture itself. Lee Industries, for example, makes its furniture in America and puts an emphasis on minimizing off-gassing. That mattered to us.
Throughout Mysa Hus, you'll see a lot of wood, rattan, linen, and other natural materials. They're beautiful, but they're not there just because they're beautiful. They support the bigger story of the house.
They also provide something the architecture itself can't. When you have plaster walls and hardwood floors, furniture and textiles introduce softness. They help balance all of those harder architectural surfaces and make the spaces feel comfortable and inviting.
Find out what Mysa Hus taught me about healthy home building.
Is High-End Furniture Worth the Investment?
I think the best way to answer that is to look at how long you expect it to last. The furniture we selected through Francis King isn't inexpensive. But these aren't pieces we're expecting someone to use for a few years and throw away. They're forever pieces.
Eventually, the fabric on a sofa will wear out. That's just life. But if the frame underneath it is still incredible, you don't need a new sofa. You recover it. Maybe one day your kid takes that sofa for their first house and puts completely different fabric on it.
That's the kind of furniture we're talking about. For Mysa Hus, the goal was to choose pieces with the same longevity and intentionality we're trying to put into the rest of the home.
Why Does Custom Furniture Require So Much Collaboration?
There's another side of working with Francis King that you don't necessarily see when you walk through the finished house: the amount of coordination happening behind the scenes.
Take one armchair. You're not simply selecting the chair. You might be specifying the fabric, how that fabric is laid out, the drape, a ruffle, the finish on the legs, and all these tiny components that determine what the final piece actually looks like. Francis King helped the design team navigate that entire process.
And Mysa Hus had a really tight timeline for selecting, ordering, manufacturing, and receiving all of this furniture. Francis King helped manage deadlines, checked pieces when they arrived at the warehouse, and worked directly with manufacturers when something arrived damaged or needed to be addressed. That part isn't sexy, but it's a huge part of executing a house at this level.
What Makes Furniture Feel Like Part of the Architecture?
I think it comes back to intention. We didn't want Mysa Hus to feel like this incredible architectural home that somebody happened to move furniture into afterward. We wanted those layers to belong together.
The custom cushions, café curtains, natural upholstery, furniture, vintage pieces, and textiles all soften the architecture without competing with it. Some pieces are new. Some are antique. Some may eventually be passed down and recovered by another generation.
Together, they make the house feel lived in. And that's what I love about what Francis King helped create here. Great architecture can create an incredible house. It's the layers you add to it that help turn it into a home.