The Arrangement’s two showrooms in Houston and Dallas total more than 25,000 square feet and employ a team of interior designers and decorators that consider themselves more family than firm.
Somewhere in Mexico, Katherine Snedeker is texting a photo to her associate back in Dallas. On the other end, Cheryl Davis thinks she’s looking at a picture of a pile of rocks with a skinny stray dog in the background. To Snedeker, this is simply the before image of what will become an exquisite stone table (no canine included). Days later, she’ll start the process of polishing that pile of rocks into something custom that can’t be found anywhere else but at The Arrangement, the Texas-based purveyor of Western furnishings that Snedeker has owned since 2003.
“She found the diamond in the rough that no one else could see,” says Davis, Snedeker’s text recipient and the marketing director at The Arrangement. “I didn’t get anything about why she sent me that picture. All this just came to her. Who can do that? No one can do that.”
Inside the Houston and Dallas showrooms of The Arrangement, Snedeker’s imprint is thoughtfully threaded into every cowhide rug, reclaimed coffee table, and custom-covered chair that fills the 10,000- and 15,000-square-foot spaces, respectively. Davis points out an industrial chandelier hanging in a corner — it’s adorned with antique black railway lanterns that Snedeker collected from one of her worldwide sourcing expeditions. One of only four that The Arrangement offers, it won’t be reproduced for the masses or photographed for a catalog mailing. One-of-a-kind designs don’t work that way, and Snedeker’s clients know this.
“We are different. We are doing different things. There is innovation to what we’re doing,” she says. “If we do this right, we’re stewards of history. We’re honoring the past and respecting it, but interpreting it in a new way so that it can function in your home.”
At The Arrangement, there’s nothing cookie-cutter about this interpretation, which Snedeker brands as “the best of the new West.” Despite the proliferation of inexpensive imitation pieces like faux-antler accents or replica Mason jars that trickle into big-box chains throughout the country, The Arrangement firmly believes in finding what’s new, what’s novel, what’s next, and what nobody else has. “I think people want fewer pieces, but more statement pieces, so that they’re unique and reflective and balancing whatever it is they have in their homes,” Snedeker says. “What’s inside counts, so how do we help you have a remarkable home?”
We are different. We are doing different things. There is innovation to what we’re doing.
Approaching interior design from a sartorial angle is one answer to that question. “Furniture is fashion,” Snedeker says. And in fashion, there’s always another collection, “another show.” That insight is the reason clients have sought Snedeker’s advice since she started working the floor at The Arrangement’s original store in southern Dallas more than 30 years ago.
In that time, the owner and her taste have become synonymous with The Arrangement. It is her store, and it is her singular vision for innovative, sustainable, and rustic-modern design that her staff fully embraces.
Like the pile of rocks she photographed in Mexico, The Arrangement back then was just the before image, the foundation for what Snedeker would refine into something rare, something only she could see. What Snedeker sees on the horizon — though she is often unable to describe it herself — is the world that Western aficionados, homeowners, and her clients desire. “They want a vision,” she says. “They want to have a home, they don’t want to have a place that they just visit. And how do you make a house a home? That is an art.”
The Arrangement
1721 Post Oak Blvd
Houston, TX 77056
(713) 627-9009
Photography: Courtesy The Arrangement