These home stores have the goods — and the services

Authentic Home

Stores sell: Paint, home accessories, gift items, custom window coverings, custom upholstery, a few furniture items, and complete interior-design services.

Price range: $4 for a sample pouch of paint to $1,500 for a rattan settee with a custom-made cushion. Design services are $100 an hour, whether it's a quick one-room consultation or a more involved project such as finding custom draperies and furniture for an entire home.

Who owns them? Interior designer Kathy Banak founded Authentic Home in West Seattle in 2003. The West Seattle resident unveiled a second store near University Village last month.

What's unique? Authentic Home offers a rare mix of retail products and design services.

Banak's concept is based on the foundation of selecting colors for the surfaces of each room, so the stores carry the 128 hues of Devine Color paints, a mixture with no gray undertones. Oregonian Gretchen Schauffler created the line for those who live in the Northwest, with its overcast days.

The product sells for $38.95 to $42.95 a gallon and $4 for sample paint pouches. A $30 portfolio kit with dabs of paint from the whole collection also is available.

What's functional? Banak designed the West Seattle 1930s Craftsman home-turned-retail space and the new spalike shop.

For $250, designers provide a one-time on-site color consultation for every room of the home, keeping customers' paint colors on file. For other design services, they charge $100 an hour.

How do the stores work? Some customers drop in just to look around at the products, while others come prepared with photographs or tear sheets from magazines.

The stores' designers are friendly and patient and will sit with customers to pick out paint colors free of charge.

Customers pay for services when designers drive to their homes or when designers are actively working on a project — finding fabric to upholster a certain chair, for instance.

One more thing about the stores: Banak founded the business to enable people to express themselves through design, she said, the same reason she dubbed her stores "Authentic Home."

Judy Chia Hui Hsu,Seattle Times staff reporter

Window Shopping, a regular feature in digs, takes readers into various stores around the Puget Sound. Send us ideas at homegarden@seattletimes.com.