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Elite Anywhere runs a receiving warehouse for interior designers in Hayward, serving San Francisco and the wider Bay Area — receiving Monday to Friday, 9am to 3pm, by appointment — then delivers and installs. Vendors ship to the Hayward dock, the pieces wait there in secured, climate-controlled storage, and when the house is ready a crew carries everything in, assembles it, places it and takes the packaging away.
For a Bay Area designer, though, the warehouse is rarely the hard part of a project. The hard part is the house. A great many of the homes designers work on here are old, tall, narrow or built into a slope, and the furniture specified for them was built in a factory that has never seen a staircase with a turn at the top. This article is about that last stretch: getting a project from a dock in Hayward into a hillside or older home without anything scraped, stuck or sent back.
Older homes in San Francisco were not designed with modern furniture in mind. Front steps climb from the sidewalk before you reach the door. Halls are slim. Staircases double back on themselves, sometimes more than once, and the landing where a long sofa has to pivot is often smaller than the sofa. Hillside houses add their own problems: a front door well above the street, a long run of exterior steps, a driveway too steep or too short for a truck, and rooms on several levels with the main living space anywhere but the ground floor.
None of this is unusual for the Bay Area, and none of it is a reason to change the design. It is a reason to plan the delivery before the order is placed rather than on the morning of install day, when the only options left are expensive ones. The receiving warehouse helps with that, because it puts time and a fixed staging point between the vendor's ship date and the moment the piece meets the house.
When a designer opens a project with Elite Anywhere, the most useful thing they can send, after the list of what is coming, is a plain description of the way in. Which floor each room is on. Whether there are exterior steps, and roughly how many. Where the staircase turns and how tight the turn feels. Whether there is an elevator, and if so whether the building lets furniture ride in it. Whether a truck can stop outside or the carry starts some distance away. A few phone photographs of the entry, the stairs and the hardest corner tell the crew more than a page of description.
This is not a form to fill in for its own sake. It decides how the delivery is crewed and scheduled. Crews are sized to the job, and a four-story carry up a narrow stair with a long upholstered piece is a different job from a ground-floor room with a wide door. Telling us early means the right crew, the right equipment and the right amount of time are booked for that address, instead of being discovered on the doorstep.
It is also worth flagging, at the same time, any piece the designer already suspects will not go up the stairs at all. More on that below.
One more detail belongs in that first message: who will be at the house on the day. An older home under renovation may have a contractor on site who controls the keys, the parking and which rooms are finished. If the crew knows who to call when they arrive, and the contractor knows a delivery is coming, the first half hour of install day is spent carrying furniture rather than waiting at a locked gate.
Every piece reaches the house by way of the dock, so it helps to know how that end works.
Carriers book a delivery appointment within the receiving hours. Each shipment is checked against the list you sent us, the designer's own record of what was ordered, rather than whatever the vendor printed. At the dock, the outer wrapping of every carton and crate is condition-checked and photographed. Damage on the outside, a crushed corner or a split crate, is reported to you before anything is shelved, and the call on what to do about it is yours. Cartons are opened and inspected whenever you ask, and there is no charge for it.
We also ask for proof of shipment, the bill of lading, so the record shows what the vendor actually put on the truck. About two in ten arrivals turn up without anyone having announced them, a back-ordered lamp or a split shipment; when that happens, the team calls the carrier or the company that sent it until the piece is matched to the right client. When damage is found, it is documented and the claim is filed with the vendor. Every piece is barcoded, so two matching armchairs, each in its own carton, are two records rather than one line on a pallet.
On a ground-floor delivery, a damaged piece found in the room is an inconvenience. On a hillside house with forty exterior steps, it is a crew carrying a ruined sideboard up the hill, unpacking it in the dining room, and carrying it back down again.
So for the pieces going into the most difficult part of a house, it is worth asking for an inspection while they are still at Hayward. The carton is opened, the piece is checked and photographed, and it is repacked and stored. If something is wrong, the problem is raised with the vendor weeks before install day, while there is still time to fix it, and the crew never hauls it anywhere. Inspection is free; the only cost to the designer is remembering to ask for it.
Older homes are often in the middle of work when the furniture is bought: floors being refinished, a kitchen being rebuilt, a stair being repaired. Pieces can stay at Hayward for as long as the job needs, with no minimum period, in climate-controlled storage with humidity and pest control. The warehouse is secured, and cover applies to goods while they are in storage. You or your client can visit to see a stored piece, and fresh photos can be taken on request when nobody has time to drive over.
The point of holding everything in one place is that the house only has to be disturbed once. A steep street with nowhere to park and a long carry to the door is a hard place to receive six separate deliveries from six vendors. It is a much easier place to receive one.
When the house is ready, orders from several vendors leave Hayward together on one delivery, in climate-controlled vehicles. Around 30 minutes before the crew pulls up, the client receives a text.
The first thing the crew does is protect the route. Blankets and coverings go on railings, door frames, newel posts and anywhere the delivery has to pass, which in an older house can mean a long, narrow path past original woodwork that nobody wants touched. Heavy pieces travel on professional moving equipment rather than being wrestled up the steps by hand. The carry is planned from the street to the room before the first piece leaves the truck, so the crew knows which item goes first, where it turns, and where it can be set down safely if a landing has to be cleared.
Each piece is carried to its room, unpacked there, assembled and placed. Unpacking in the room, rather than on the sidewalk, means the piece travels up the stairs protected by its packaging and only comes out of it where it will stay. Then the packaging leaves with the crew, all of it, so nobody has to carry flattened cartons back down a hillside staircase after the crew has gone.
Some pieces will not make the turn however carefully they are carried. A long sofa that does not come apart, a large cabinet, a headboard built in one section. For those, hoisting is offered, and the time to raise it is when the order is placed, not when the piece is halfway up the stairs.
If you think a piece may need it, say so when you send the house details. The delivery is then planned around it, and the client knows ahead of time what install day will involve. If a piece will clearly fit neither the stair nor a hoist, that is a conversation to have with the vendor before the order is confirmed, which is one more reason to describe the way in early.
Not every Bay Area project is a house on a hill. Condominium towers and managed buildings set their own conditions: most ask for a certificate of insurance before any crew comes through the lobby, and expect the freight elevator and a loading window to be reserved ahead of time. Many designers arrange that with the building themselves, and that works well. If you would rather hand it over, Elite Anywhere will send the building its certificate of insurance on request and make the elevator and dock reservations itself, so the approval is waiting at the front desk before the truck leaves Hayward.
An older house tends to ask more of the installation than a new one, because walls are plaster, floors slope and nothing is quite square. The crew hangs art and mirrors, mounts pieces to walls, levels case goods on uneven floors, and assembles and places the furniture. Light fixtures, chandeliers included, are hung for an electrician to wire; the wiring stays with the electrician. A big job that will not fit in one working day can run over several days, planned with the designer in advance so the client knows which rooms will be done when.
Before the crew leaves, the client is asked to report any damage and give feedback, and that sign-off is documented and kept on record. Condition is photographed at delivery as well as on arrival at Hayward, so the record runs from dock to room. Everything handled with care.
A design studio working with Hayward is given a login to Elite Anywhere's own warehouse system, Terminal. From the studio, a designer can check which pieces have landed and which are still with the carrier, look up where any single item stands, follow a shipment that is on its way, and write to the warehousing team about a particular piece without picking up the phone. The client can follow along too, through photo check-ins and live tracking. On an older-house project, where the carry plan may hinge on one sofa having arrived and been inspected, that saves a round of calls before every scheduling decision.
Designers are the main users of the Hayward dock, but they share it. Art galleries send work there before it goes to a collector's wall; showrooms hold sold pieces until a buyer's home can take them; furniture manufacturers without their own crew in the Bay Area use it to get product received and properly installed; procurement offices, hospitality projects and private households use it too. Whoever the customer is, Elite Anywhere installs as well as delivers. A gallery sending a large canvas into a hillside home meets the same staircase a designer does, which is part of why every carry is planned the same way, whoever is paying for it.
Hayward is one of ten warehouses Elite Anywhere staffs itself, and the network has 34 warehouse locations in all, with more than 50,000 deliveries a year and delivery anywhere in the country. A move between states is handled end to end. For a designer whose client also has a home somewhere else, that means one account and one record for both projects, rather than two receiving companies working from two lists.
In the Bay Area, the house sets the terms. Describe the way in when you open the project, not on install day. Ask for an inspection on the pieces going into the hardest rooms, while they are still at Hayward. Hold everything until the house is ready, then bring it in once. Raise any piece that might need hoisting early. And make sure the company that received the goods is the one carrying them up the stairs, because the crew that knows what is in each carton is the one best placed to get it to the room intact.
Robert Sabo is Director of Operations at Elite Anywhere, which provides white glove delivery, receiving and installation from ten staffed warehouses, delivering nationwide.