The Backward Path Through Furniture Design

I’ve edited a librarian’s butt-load of books on design – and furniture design in particular.

One recommendation that gets repeated a lot is this: Begin by building classic pieces from different furniture styles or traditions. This will give you a taste for “good design,” and it will train your eye for when you decide to make pieces of your own.

It sounds like good advice. First, build stuff that the world says is “good.” That will train you to see “good” and design “good.”

But that’s not how I learned to design furniture, so I cannot in good faith recommend this path for young furniture makers.

Here’s the map that I followed, and it is the only one I know.

Step No. 1: Design Your Own Shit. By the time you are capable of reading the words on this screen, you have seen thousands, maybe millions of pieces of furniture. You know what you like and don’t like – even if you cannot express it in words more profound than “Dude!” or “Krag!”

I think you should then grab a cocktail napkin and a pen and start designing stuff. Yes, I’m being honest. Draw things that you like. Don’t invoke proportioning systems or the Golden Ratio or the Fibonacci Reach-around.

Draw. And if it looks like crap, draw it again. Draw quickly and get your ideas on the napkin. If you have to darken the lines or refine them with your pen, do it. (Most design books say this is a no-no.) Draw something that you like. In fact, keep working until you get something on the napkin that is pleasing – even if it is messy, indistinct and smeary.

Step No. 2: Try to Bring it Into the Real World. Can this napkin Rorschach be birthed into the real world? This is a valid question. If you design a bookcase, it has to hold books. Can you monkey wrench the sketch to actually work? Example: Many books are 9" tall and 11-1/2" tall. Can your design hold those?

Step No. 3: Build It. Then you will really find out how truly flawed your napkin design is. And it probably is flawed in ways you could have never anticipated. But, and this is important, you won’t make those mistakes again. (You’ll make different ones.)

Build and design and build and design. But don’t read design books. Just do your own thing and build as much stuff as you can. My guess is that most of it will be OK. A few pieces will be firewood-ready. A few will surprise you.

I’m sure that if you read a few design books at this point you might learn some lessons. But really the better thing to do is to keep building. Use standard lumber sizes (all the 1x and 2x stuff from the lumberyard). These standard sizes can make your life as a builder a little easier. If the moulding comes at 7-1/4" wide standard, then why would you use 8"-wide moulding? (Answer: You’re a numpty.)

I followed this path for years and years. I built dung pile after dung pile (with the occasional quite-fetching dung pile). I invented joints. I made an Aztec-Shaker Blanket Box. I just built stuff.

Then, about 1995, I became obsessed with one perfect piece of furniture. It still makes me crazy to this day. It’s owned by a museum that doesn’t display it and that has declined my requests to even look at it in person.

Zulma Steele’s drawing for the door’s panel.

This piece was the turning point for me, design-wise. I’d encountered a wall cabinet made in 1904 by Zulma Steele, who was one of the designer/makers at the Byrdcliffe Colony. Byrdcliffe was an Arts & Crafts utopian community in Upstate New York that had a short, wild, sexy and glorious history.

The piece is now held by the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. I urge you to click on this link and gaze upon it. It is magnificent.