WMC’s Design Salon opens to public

By Mark Hansel

Friday, April 3, 2009 | 2 a.m.

The Design Salon at the Las Vegas Design Center is open for business.

The salon will give the public an opportunity to use professional design consultants and realize tremendous savings on brand-name home furnishings.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony March 25 included Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, World Market Center Las Vegas officials and prominent members of the local design community who explained how the salon will function.

“I came out here because there was an opportunity in Las Vegas to build a brand-new model for a design center that welcomes the public,” said Randy Wells, vice president of the Las Vegas Design Center. “It’s also a part of a much bigger initiative and that’s our World Market Center, which is in and of itself changing the way markets work.”

The World Market Center Las Vegas is a home and hospitality furnishings showroom and trade complex.

Its two annual markets and a planned series of specialty markets on an integrated campus, which includes 5 million square feet of space in three buildings, have begun to redefine the furniture market business. The goal is to provide industry professionals with a single, compact location that can accommodate all of their needs.

The Las Vegas Design Center, a year-round resource for designers showcasing name brands in the home furnishings industry, is located within the World Market Center.

Although the complex has become recognized within the industry, it has largely remained a mystery in its own back yard.

Wells hopes the design salon will help change that by serving as a conduit between the public and the Las Vegas Design Center and by extension, the World Market Center.

“If you want people to be involved in design, you’ve got to let them in,” Wells said. “We want people to see what is going on here and take part in the design of their home.”

When the decision was made to open up a design center to the public, Wells said it was crucial to enlist the support of the design community.

“You don’t want to alienate the design community in the process of welcoming the public, that’s like trading one for the other,” Wells said.

He approached influential members of the local American Society of Interior Designers, who embraced the concept.

“We wanted to make it very meaningful to our partners here with showrooms, to the design community and to the community at large,” Wells said. “We needed to rip the doors off and bring in the consumers.”

Wells was joined at the presentation by Bobbie Jo Kinsey, president of Kinsey Design Group and president-elect of the California Central/Nevada chapter of designer society, and Michelle Eaton, the group’s current president.

“The design salon is putting together a whole new type of design community,” Kinsey said. “We’re opening the design center to the public. They can come down to the design salon and have a consultation with a designer and purchase items at 50 to 70 percent below what they would cost in retail stores.”

The initial one-hour consultation is free and customers will have access to more than 50 showrooms. Subsequent consultations cost $100 per hour, which Kinsey said is still below the market rate of about $150 per hour.

The service is available to customers looking for a single purchase or an entire home interior. An interior renovation can be time consuming and expensive, but by taking advantage of the enormous discount prices over retail, consumers can save money while enlisting the services of a professional.

The designers, she said, use their education and training to develop a rapport with clients and ask questions about lifestyles, tastes and preferences that can help avoid costly errors.

Goodman welcomed the newest addition to the World Market Center campus, saying it would not only benefit the community, but also create another attraction for visitors.

“What I’m going to try to do as the (chairman of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority) is to make it part of the rounds that conventioneers and their wives or husbands go to,” Goodman said. “I think it will draw a lot of people in and make people more cognizant of downtown. I think it’s going to be a big deal for us.”

The Design Salon will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. The 1,200-square-foot boutique space on the first floor will also serve as the exclusive Nevada office of the American Society of Interior Designers.