How We Define Luxury at Beth Meyer Design

Luxury may be the most misunderstood word in our industry. It gets attached to square footage, to price tags, to whatever happens to be trending on a mood board that season. But a large home is not necessarily a luxury home. You can walk into a ten-thousand-square-foot house and still find light fixtures pulled straight from a box and rooms that feel impressive without ever feeling personal.

After more than three decades of designing homes for some of the most discerning families in the country, we’ve come to define luxury as something quieter and far more specific. It is not the most expensive thing in the room simply for the sake of being expensive. It is the thing that could only belong to you.

That said, we won’t pretend price doesn’t enter the conversation. The level of luxury we work in including authentic materials, true craftsmanship, and pieces made one at a time by hand inherently comes at a cost, and the families we serve understand that. The distinction we draw isn’t that luxury is inexpensive. It’s that a high price alone does not make something luxurious. Anyone can spend a great deal on a home that still feels impersonal. What we build asks for a meaningful investment and returns something that couldn’t be bought any other way.

Luxury Means It Could Only Be Yours

What makes a home luxurious is that it could not be duplicated. The materials are authentic. The furniture, cabinetry, and millwork are well crafted and made to last. And nearly every decision has been shaped around how one family lives, how they gather, and what they want to feel when they walk in the door.

The distinction is clearest in the pieces themselves. High-end retail can be lovely, but it’s made for a broad market: anyone can order the same sofa, in the same fabric, in the same standard dimensions. Custom is the opposite. We choose the fabric, the depth of the seat, the type of skirt, the detail on the leg. We’ll raise the back of a sofa by an inch so a specific console sits behind it exactly right. No catalog can make those decisions for you.






Clients often arrive with a folder of images they love, and we welcome it. It tells us what draws them in. But we tell them early that no photograph can be their home. We take the feeling behind an image and shape it into something built for them alone. Inspiration points us in a direction; from there, the result exists nowhere else.

Luxury Creates Beauty That Functions Well

There’s a version of luxury that photographs beautifully and lives terribly. Furniture no one can comfortably sit in, rooms too precious to host the people you love. That isn’t what we build, and it isn’t what discerning families want. Real luxury holds a balance between elegant, comfortable, and functional. More often than not, the greatest luxury is a home designed around how a family actually lives, rather than a family rearranging their lives around a house.

We see it most when a single custom piece changes how a room is used. In our Reimagined Home Project, we removed the dated built-ins flanking the fireplace and replaced them with custom banquette seating; the client, who entertains constantly, told us it finally let the room hold everyone. In our Auburn Townhouse Project where a formal dining room didn’t suit the owners, we designed a lounge-height table — something between a coffee table and a dining table — ringed with club chairs, and it became the room they gravitate to at the end of the day.

None of those pieces exist off a showroom floor. Each is made by hand, by a small circle of craftsmen we’ve trusted for years including cabinet makers, metal fabricators, drapery workrooms, and furniture makers. Many of whom take on only a few designers. That access is itself part of luxury. When an architect on a recent lake project wanted sconces unlike anything on the market, we brought the idea to one of our makers and asked the question we love asking: can you make this? He could, and when the homeowners saw them, the first thing they did was reach out and touch them in awe.

Click here to learn more on the impact custom furniture has in a luxury home in editorial 4. 

The Hidden Part of Luxury in Interior Design No One Sees

Most people picture luxury as the finished home. But a custom home of this caliber is a two-to-three-year relationship, and the experience of getting there is just as much a part of luxury as the result. It looks like a process that feels seamless: clear communication, work that’s genuinely enjoyable, and the weight of a thousand decisions carried by someone else so that building your home adds to your life instead of consuming it.

Part of what makes that possible is a simple posture: we’re on the client’s team, aligned with the architect, the builder, and every trade rather than protecting territory. The families we work with have the means to buy anything they want, and they’ve learned that the highest price doesn’t guarantee the best result. What they value is luxury that’s collaborative, that functions beautifully, and that’s handled with genuine stewardship of a serious investment. 

Read editorial number 2 for more details on how we collaborate with builders and architects during luxury custom home builds. 

A home is an intimate part of you, and designing one together builds a trust that doesn’t end when the last piece is placed. It’s why so many clients return to us for their next home, and why many become friends. One client relationship began with us on a lake house and, years later, invited us to her sixtieth birthday trip. The best projects never feel like transactions. They feel like something built together.

A home at this level is a significant investment, there’s no getting around that, and our clients wouldn’t want us to. But what that investment buys isn’t measured in price. It’s measured in how complete the home feels to the people who live there, and in the trust and execution of the team that builds it. That, to us, is the truest definition of luxury.

If that’s the home you’re imagining, we’d be honored to be part of your story. We invite you to inquire with us to begin the conversation.

“there’s no SKU number on a true custom piece”

Beth Meyer