What Does Turn-Key Interior Design Include?

“Turn-key” is one of those design terms that gets used a little differently depending on who you ask. At PECKY, it has a specific meaning: a home that’s completely furnished and finished before you ever step inside to live in it.

The Short Answer

Turn-key furnishing means every room is finished, down to the dishes, silverware, and linens. You walk into a home that’s ready, not a shell you still need to fill in.

What’s Actually Included

Furniture and Layout
Every piece of furniture in the home is selected, placed, and arranged before you arrive, based on decisions made earlier in the design process.

Art and Accessories
Original artwork and finishing accessories are sourced and installed, so walls and shelves don’t sit empty waiting for a second round of decorating.

Window Treatments
Custom drapery, shades, and hardware are sized and installed for every window in the home, matched to the finished design.

Tabletop and Kitchen Essentials
This is the detail that surprises people most: dishes, silverware, and linens are included. A turn-key home is genuinely ready to host dinner the first night.

Who Turn-Key Furnishing Makes Sense For

This service comes up most often with clients building a home from the ground up, or clients relocating to Sarasota from out of state who don’t want to spend months furnishing a new house piece by piece. It’s also common for a second or seasonal home, where the goal is walking in and being able to actually use the space right away.

What Turn-Key Doesn’t Mean

Turn-key doesn’t mean generic. Every piece in a turn-key project is still chosen specifically for that home and that client, the same way it would be on any PECKY project. The difference is scope, not customization; turn-key simply means the scope covers the entire home rather than a single room.

It’s a common assumption that a fully finished home means a generic one, since move-in-ready furniture packages from big retailers often look exactly like that: pleasant, coordinated, and forgettable. Turn-key design at PECKY starts from the opposite assumption. The goal is a home that looks like it was lived in and loved before you ever walked through the door, not a hotel room scaled up.

It also doesn’t mean you lose input along the way. Clients choosing turn-key furnishing are still involved in fabric, style, and layout decisions throughout the process. What changes is that once those decisions are made, our team handles everything through to completion, rather than leaving pieces of the project for you to finish later.

Turn-Key and Custom Furniture

A turn-key project often includes custom-ordered pieces alongside stock furniture, particularly upholstery through our Verellen line. If a room genuinely needs a specific size or fabric that isn’t available off the shelf, that gets built into the turn-key timeline rather than treated as a separate purchase. See our custom furniture page for more on how that process works.

A Realistic Timeline

For a typical single-family home, expect the process to run in phases rather than all at once: space planning and sourcing first, then installation once furniture and custom pieces are ready. Your design team will keep you updated at each phase rather than leaving you to wonder where things stand.

Turn-key furnishing takes longer than furnishing a single room, simply because there’s more ground to cover. The exact timeline depends on the size of the home and whether any pieces are custom-ordered, but our team will walk through realistic expectations with you before the project begins, so there are no surprises about when the home will actually be ready.

How It Fits Into a Larger Project

Turn-key furnishing is typically the final phase of a full design project, following space planning and, for new construction, input on the architectural plans themselves. See our interior design services page for how the full process works from first meeting to finished home.

If you’re picturing a home that’s genuinely ready the day you arrive, that’s exactly what turn-key furnishing is built for.

Turn-Key vs. a Room Refresh

It’s worth distinguishing turn-key furnishing from a room refresh, since both fall under our full-service design work but solve very different problems. A room refresh updates one space that’s outgrown itself. Turn-key furnishing finishes an entire home, typically a new build or a home you’re relocating into, so that nothing is left unfinished when you move in.

Most clients know pretty quickly which one describes their situation. If you’re not sure, that’s a completely normal question to bring to an initial conversation with our team.

Talk to our design team about a turn-key project.