Furniture Line Design (Pt. 1)
Let’s begin with a question you may be thinking, “Why a furniture line? Why not just stick with custom furniture?”
Well, that requires a two part answer.
The answer to the first question, without getting all philosophical on you is because I have designs in my head that have to take shape. It is not enough for me to just draw or sketch the design on a piece of paper or in SketchUp, and it is not enough for me to just build furniture from a pre-designed template. I love beginning with an idea in my head, flushing out all the various aspects of the piece in the design process, further refining the details in the milling and assembly stages, and finally being able to take a step back and admire a piece of furniture that you created from start to finish.
The answer to the second question is because with the slowing economy, my custom work has slowed as well, and like all good companies which desire to be around for many years to come, it became time to innovate and branch out into other areas of the furniture market.
To launch any furniture line one must have prototypes of the desired product, and in order to make prototypes, one should have a collection of designs to work off. So, that is where I started when I decided to create a furniture line.
The furniture line really began about 12 months ago when I designed this coffee table for the 2008 Chair Affair furniture competition:
I learned about the competition about two months before it was scheduled to take place and used it as an excuse to design and build a fully custom piece that I had been working on in my head for quite a while.
It is hard to describe the feelings I get when I set out to design furniture that has to appeal to absolutely nobody other than me. It is a mixture of incredible freedom, liberation, and one of sensory overload, akin to a kid in a candy shop. The world of furniture is my oyster. There were no fences, no constraints, and because of that, there was no starting point for this coffee table.
I did have a few ideas that I wanted to incorporate. I wanted all the parts (legs, tabletop, etc.) to be thick and substantial with long graceful and sweeping curves. I wanted all the joints to be connected with metal connecting rods, giving the entire piece a lightweight, airy feeling. Really juxtaposing the weighty, solid feel of the wooden parts with the lightweight, floating feel of the joinery. I also did not want to use any stains in the finishing process, just a few coats of oil to really make the beauty of the wood take center stage.
The Capulus coffee table was the end result of that designing and building brainstorm session last March, and in the next post, we will look at the design process of the other seven pieces in the line.