This post isn’t really for you.

It’s for the person you’re about to forward it to — the friend, the family member, the colleague who just announced they’re making the move. To Jacó. To Herradura. To Quepos or Esterillos or anywhere along Costa Rica’s stunning Pacific coast.

They’re excited. They’re a little overwhelmed. And somewhere in their planning, they’ve started thinking about the furniture. Specifically: ship it, or start over?

If you care about them, share this before they make an expensive mistake.

We understand the impulse completely. Your furniture is yours — broken in, familiar, full of memories. Leaving it behind feels like leaving part of yourself. But let’s look at what shipping furniture to Costa Rica actually costs:

And that’s before the climate gets involved.

Costa Rica’s Pacific coast is one of the most beautiful environments on earth. It is also one of the most demanding on furniture.

Furniture built for a home in Canada, the United States, or Europe was simply not designed for these conditions. Wood that isn’t properly treated for tropical humidity will warp and crack. MDF and particle board absorbs moisture and swells, causing drawers to stick, joints to fail, and surfaces to delaminate. Within a year, sometimes less, beautiful furniture from back home can look like it aged a decade.

Furniture that performs on the Pacific coast shares a few characteristics: materials that handle humidity, finishes that resist salt air, and the lightness and proportion that coastal living demands. That’s not a coincidence — it’s intentional design for a specific environment.

At RIVIERA, everything we carry and everything we build is chosen with the Costa Rican coast in mind. Our imported collections come from suppliers who understand tropical climates. Our custom workshop here in Jacó builds pieces from materials selected for this specific environment — the heat, the humidity, the salt, all of it.

Here’s what we’ve learned from working with hundreds of expat families over the years: the ones who arrive ready to start fresh almost always end up happier with their homes than the ones who spent months and thousands of dollars fighting to keep the old furniture alive.

Starting over means your home can be exactly right for the life you’re actually living now — not the life you had somewhere else. Furniture scaled to your new condo’s dimensions. Colors and textures that work with Pacific light, not grey winters from a different hemisphere. Pieces that are genuinely comfortable in the heat, not just surviving it.

We’ve helped people go from empty-house panic to a fully furnished, beautiful home — quickly, without stress, and for far less than the cost of a shipping container. We can do the same for anyone you send our way.