The Most Beautiful Way to Furnish Your Home
In this interview by Robyn Vogels, Founder of Personnel Relocations and Co-Author of Your D.I.Y. Move Guide to Australia, Keith Chen, Managing Director of MORC Interiors shares his expertise in furnishing your home and creating beautiful spaces and how you can transform an “empty space into a beautiful place you can call home.”
Let’s dive in for loads of practical and helpful stuff on:
- How you can save time and free yourself from the hassle of furnishing your home, whilst overseas or interstate.
- Why shipping your ‘old’ furniture from overseas or interstate is less efficient and more costly.
- Why renting furniture is not a cost effective option.
- Furniture package options that will suit your budget and needs
- Why hiring an interior fit-out professional is a better alternative.
Q: Tell us about MORC
MORC Interiors is an interior furnishing company that provides furnishing services to help homeowners save time and hassle to furnish their home. At the end of the day, we understand that many families when they’re looking to move into a new home, the entire process of planning to shopping to, measuring and organizing all the logistics and delivery can be a very long and tiring and troublesome process that can take up to 6 months and so we want to be able to help them streamline and make that whole process a lot easier by offering furniture packages. It’s a one-stop shop furnishing service that includes the designing, delivery, the assembly of furniture, removing all the rubbish from the property in one fixed price.
“MORC Interiors is a one-stop shop furnishing service that includes the designing, delivery, the assembly of furniture, removing all the rubbish from the property in one fixed price.”
Q: What positives are there about using yourself to furnish their home rather than shipping?
So, with us, we can plan ahead of time whilst you’re still overseas or interstate, whilst you’re planning to move, looking for a place to move or when you’ve even found a place but then you have to start thinking about packing up everything and what furniture to bring. All that logistics, you don’t have to think about, because once you give us the floor plan, you give us the address, what we do is, our design team will look at all the information you’ve given us and design a tailored package that is suited for not just a property, but for you, for the needs during the duration that you are living in Melbourne. So, we help you save time and hassle to have the property ready when you come here instead of having you to think about that whole process; the whole process of shopping for furniture when you arrive in Melbourne.
Most people, some of the interstate or overseas clients that we have serviced before, the only furniture company that they would know is Ikea. And even if they try to get from Ikea, they have to one, make sure they have a car to go and make sure they have the time on the weekends but if they’re bringing family along, it’s already hard enough to find time to like even just put food on the table. And get everything organized before even having to go and shop for furniture. I mean you’re talking about let’s say three items per room and then you have your living bedroom and dining room as your main rooms for a house or for a property. And if each room has about 3 or 5 items. That’s up to 15 items that you have to worry about. I used to try and fit furniture from Ikea in my car. Even though it’s a flat pack it’s a lot of work and a lot of hassle and you probably have to do multiple trips as well. There’s a lot of cardboard plastic that you have to remove and you probably find out they’re very small, that means you’re going to have a lot of cardboards in your property.
Q: Why not just rent furniture?
With renting furniture, number one, it’s secondhand. So, you would need to hope that it’s in good condition and it’s clean. Most times it should be but over time, over two years, the cost can really add up and it’s not a very cheap option. So, at the start renting it may seem cheap but over time, the cost really adds up for what you are getting and also a lot of times they also don’t offer a lot of linen accessories. So, that means you still have to go and buy and shop for, bed linen, quilts, covers, pillows, or your kitchen and bathroom accessories to make sure that your house is fully equipped that you can actually cook when you arrive or that you have plates to eat your take away when you arrive as well. So, that’s something that we provide that you won’t be able to get through renting furniture.
Q: Why should people use MORC?
First things first, what’s really important is to understand your space. Number one, go draw a floor plan, measure every room – the four corners of every room so that you know what you can and cannot fit. So you know whether you can fit a king- or queen-sized bed in the bedroom. It’s so important to know what you can and cannot do in your space.
As mentioned before, we want to help streamline and save time and hassle for our clients so that they can just move in straight away. And we strive to provide the best possible service and make it as easy as possible for our clients. So, what that will look like is, it’s part of our design, it’s part of our packages which I’ll show you in a second.
So, just to give you an example, what I mean by, we listen to our clients. This is our client recently that we helped. We furnished her three-bedroom house in Craigieburn.
She was expecting twins and she’s also a working mom with a son already and so she didn’t have time to plan and design and shop around, to make things even harder, while her house was being built, so what that meant was she didn’t even have a house, an actual space to go and measure and actually get the feel of what that would look like and how much space she had.
So when working with us, one, we listened to what she wanted, what she needed, and then we also looked at what could actually fit in her space. So, after we asked her what kind of furniture she wanted in her living room, her master bedroom the nursery, the kids’ room, then we put together a mood board that to do just like a very simple mood board to give her a feel and idea of what kind of furniture will be fitting in her space and then once she was happy with all the furniture for each and every single room then we went through and finalised what each room would actually look like. With a bit of styling and finishes and as you can see with some of the cushions, the artwork, the decorative items, even the master bedroom as well. And this is what the nursery would have, this is what the nursery looks like. This is what the kids room looks like and as you can see, this is what the final product is.
So, we’re very happy. She was very happy she gave us an absolute glowing review and literally with about 3 months to plan in advance of what she wanted and to finalizing every single detail to once her house was built, she gave us the keys, we went in there within three days, we completely furnished, styled, removed all the rubbish, and she moved in on the 3rd day. And she didn’t have to lift a single finger and she just bought her luggage. So, yeah, she was absolutely happy.
“Wow, look! I left you with an empty house and I came back to a home!”
Q: What are the MORC furniture packages?
So let me open our packages for you and give you an idea. We want to provide options to our clients depending on their budget or their needs or what can even fit in their property as well.
So, this is how we work with our clients. We start with the essential package or the basic package as most people would know and it includes the essential furniture items for the three main rooms that we talked about. So, the living, the dining, and the bedroom. And then you also talk about the three main appliances. So, your TV, your washer-dryer combo and a fridge. So, everything to get the property furnished and ready for someone to move in and if the client wanted something a little bit more complete, they wanted all the linen, the decorative items, they wanted the whole property to completely look like a home but they can just move in straight away and not have to do anything. So, then we have our stylish package, and this includes all the decorative items. The lighting, the cushions, the bed linen, pictures, plants and things.
Q: Some people they might not really understand how much it could cost them to ship their furniture. For example, I was moving a couple coming from London, they might have a twenty-foot container, they’ve had an apartment in London and they’re moving to Australia? If we found them an apartment before they arrive, we hand them over to you, the furniture is arranged with them, and you will consult with them over Skype or whatever you need to do. And it’s just a no brainer, it’s much cheaper, makes it much easier.
I think yeah and I think one thing that some people may miss out as well just to remember from some of the clients they work with. Some clients, some of our homeowner clients, have old furniture that they want to bring to their property as well. Whether it be from interstate or overseas. But the thing is they don’t know if the furniture will fit well or if it will fit at all. So just to give you an example and one thing that we always do and make sure we check for our clients is, even though this client, she was used to a king-sized bed but she wanted something new but assuming she wanted to bring a king-sized bed we told her when we measured the space it was going to be tight but she said she really really needed the king size bed because she was pregnant. She needed that space. And so, we said okay we’ll make sure that we select, we will choose or we’ll make sure we get a king size bed but also select bedside tables that will fit perfectly within the space. And so, for this client we were able to tell her, “Look! Yes, you can fit the king size bed. You can fit two bedside tables on each side. But there was only like fifty mil of space on each side.”, but for someone who’s bringing their own furniture and they didn’t have the floor plan or weren’t able to actually measure the space beforehand, can you imagine if they brought the furniture over and then it can’t fit then where are you going to put your king-sized bed?
Virtual Tour
Just to give you an idea of what a 3-D process looks like. So, this is a virtual tour that anyone can view online whether you’re interstate or overseas.
You can actually walk through this apartment. You can click on the points around. And this is actually Melbourne in South Bank next to the CBD. That’s Eureka Tower, the tallest building in Melbourne, oh second tallest now. So, people can actually view this, they can get a good feel and example of how we can help our clients as well.
Q: How quickly would you be able to source and install furniture if we needed?
Typically, if it’s from our normal packages, usually it takes about 1 to 2 weeks for us to prepare and deliver the package and it only takes us 2 days to install. And if it’s something that’s very custom depending on the property or the client’s needs then that can take about 2 to 4 weeks to finalize the design and organize delivery and then it’s only 2 days to install. So, the most that they would expect is one month.
Q: What areas do you cover?
We cover CBD and actually all over Melbourne. Most of our projects are in the CBD but we have done projects up to Geelong, even Sydney as well – we have a team in Sydney. And it just depends on where the client’s property is but, we definitely cover a whole of Melbourne.
How to get in contact with MORC
Phone: +613 8761 6769
Email: [email protected]
Facebook: www.facebook.com/morc.interiors
Instagram: www.instagram.com/morc.interiors
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/morc.interiors
Website: www.morcinteriors.com.au/contact
Key Takeaways
- Stress less by taking advantage of a one-stop shop interior fit out service that includes design, delivery, furniture assembly and removal of all the rubbish from your property in one fixed price.
- Furnishing your property even if you are overseas or interstate is possible and saves you time and hassle so your home is ready when you arrive.
- While renting furniture may seem cheaper for the short term, the costs add up (e.g. deposit, rental fee, interest charges, repair, etc.) over time making it a more expensive option.
- Benefit from the experience of the professionals that will not only save you money, time and energy, but will ensure you get the bang for your buck with better quality furniture whilst achieving the look you want for your property.
Conclusion
Designing and furnishing your home is a huge task filled with a myriad of minute details and a lot of decision making that can cause stress.
Hiring a professional that has years of training and experience will help eliminate the stress and the costly trial and error phase of doing it yourself. Apart from having a good network of skilled trades and unique local sources for furniture and materials, the true value of an interior fit-out professional is in the strategy, planning and project management they provide. Why do the heavy lifting if someone else can do it for you, literally and figuratively!
At MORC, we not only listen to your needs, we are able to look at the big picture and also give you ideas you might not have previously thought of. With a set of experienced and trained eyes, we can help you create your dream home so you can have a brighter future.
Let Us Help!
If you are looking to furnish and style your investment property that is focused on achieving the results you want, contact us so that we can help you out.
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