Southern Interiors Gives Customers A Unique Turnkey Experience

According to statistics by HomeAdvisor, the average homeowner today spends between $35,000 and $100,000 on a new kitchen, and Today’s Homeowner reported a new bathroom will run $15,000 to north of $40,000 per project. Remodels are equally big, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies states, noting that Americans spend a whopping $475 billion annually on home improvements. Spending that kind of money shows how seriously people take the matter of beautifying their living spaces.

 

However, people who have actually taken on a dream kitchen or bathroom job can also attest to its headache-inducing complexity. Running from place to place for components, dealing with multiple vendors, contractors and subcontractors, and the stress of hoping the pieces all come together as designed, on time and on budget is enough to give anyone sleepless nights — anyone, that is, except customers of Southern Interiors in Sherwood.

 

 

Founded nearly 30 years ago, Southern Interiors follows a much different business plan than the competition, offering turnkey services that deliver a truly one-stop shopping experience for homeowners from design to fabrication to installation.

 

“We make it really simple; we do it all,” said Brian Hagewood, who co-founded the company with his wife, Donna. “What we’ve done and what has led to our growth as a company is we’ve tried to look at things from the customer’s perspective. From the customer’s’ perspective, remodeling projects are overwhelming. In fact, the reason so many people put off their dream project is because it’s so confusing and disruptive and frustrating, actually, to have to go multiple places and deal with multiple vendors.

 

 

“We’ve grown because we’re different. We get such great feedback from our customers that say we make the process so much easier and so much more enjoyable.”

 

Hagewood, who has been in the home improvement and residential interior construction space his entire working life, said the evolution of what Southern Interiors has become started as just another flooring company that branched into countertops. Like most in the industry, the company initially relied on third-party fabricators and installers, which led to problems.

 

“That was just challenging because sometimes the third-party guys didn’t show up when they said they would or didn’t do what they said they’d do. They just didn’t do it right, you know?” he said. “It was a bad reflection on us, but I couldn’t really control all that. I enjoyed the countertop business, and I didn’t want to give up on it, so it was frustrating.

 

 

“I remember one day, we had a job that just didn’t go as well because of what a third party did. I was at a golf event where I made the comment ‘I’m just dumb enough to go start a granite fabrication shop,’ just kind of joking.”

 

As it happened, a fellow member of Hagewood’s country club, the longtime owner of such a business, was looking for a way to retire. He contacted Hagewood, who purchased the man’s equipment, including computer numerical control machines, and moved them into an 8,000-square-foot space adjacent to his existing showroom.

 

 

“That became our fabrication shop, and since then, we’ve added a water jet, which is a real nice piece of equipment to have for countertops,” Hagewood said. “Fast-forward probably seven, eight years ago, we had a chance to buy the property next to us, and we turned that into our custom cabinet shop.”

 

Bringing on the production facilities closed the loop on Southern Interiors’ offerings, allowing the company to walk customers through every step of the process while maintaining strict quality control at every stage. Everything from the on-site technology to the combined expertise of the staff has been designed to make the experience as painless and hassle free for the customer as possible.

 

 

It is an approach that is so different that new customers are often taken aback by it. Once they experience the company’s process, Hagewood said, the vast majority are delighted.

 

“The feedback we have received has been just incredible,” he said. “We’ve got this beautiful design showroom where they come in, they can pick everything out, and we work them up a really cool 3D rendering of what it’s going to look like. They get to sign off on every detail — cabinets, placements, knobs, a full line of window treatments, anything they want — before we ever start the project.

 

 

“From there, we fabricate it in-house. We go to our cabinet shop, and we meet with our team over there, and they build it. We do the same thing for our countertops. We do our flooring in-house. We do our glass in-house. We even do our own custom quartz shower pans for the custom showers we build. It’s a lot of moving parts on our end, but the benefit to these homeowners is a start-to-finish service they just couldn’t get anywhere else.”

 

That alone would be enough to put Southern Interiors into its own category, but inspired by his earlier negative experiences, Hagewood takes things a step further. His team also schedules and performs installation, assigning designated personnel to ensure the finished product meets and exceeds the client’s expectations, be it with indoor projects, window treatments or outdoor kitchens, a growing segment of the company’s work.

 

“A lot of places, you see someone who sells the product; then they hand it off to someone else. We don’t consider that a great way of doing things,” Hagewood said. “Our estimators stay on the job from the beginning to the end, working with project managers who are doing the daily stuff. They’re never out of it until the job’s completed and the customer is satisfied.”

 

 

Little wonder, then, that Southern Interiors has routinely placed high in various polls in its classification by AY About You, including “AY’s Best Of” reader’s poll, “Faces of Arkansas” and “Innovative Home Awards,” among several others.

 

Hagewood said for all of the equipment and technology at work in the company, the most important difference lies with Southern Interiors’ skilled and customer-driven staff.

 

“We have such a good team,” he said. “We don’t turn over a lot of people, and so our employees have been here for a long time. As a result, we don’t have the quality-control issues like you see from some places because they take a lot of pride in their work and they want to send out a good product.”

 

 

Some of the company’s employees are particularly invested in maintaining the Southern Interiors way of doing business, including Brian’s father, John, who pitches in part time, and the Hagewood’s children, daughter Alyssa and son Hunter, who represent the future of the family business.

 

“It’s a blessing to be able to work with family,” Hagewood said. “As a matter of fact, I consider it a blessing to work with such an amazing team top to bottom. They truly care about every job, and it shows in the finished product and in the opinions of our customers.”

 

Photos courtesy of Southern Interiors

 

SEE THE FEATURE BELOW AND IN OUR SEPTEMBER 2026 ISSUE OF AY MAGAZINE

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