You Don’t Have to Be a Designer to Dream Up Your Own Custom Furniture

When Kiah Friedman and her boyfriend Jordan Felix moved in together to a two-bedroom Brooklyn duplex with a narrow living room and dining area, the couple had a challenging time landing on an affordable, high-quality dining table that they both loved that also fit the awkward space.

“We’re both opinionated and couldn’t agree on anything, so that drove us to design a custom table,” says Friedman, who works at GRADE Architecture + Interior Design, a high-end residential design firm.

Because Friedman’s expertise is in interior design, the idea of getting custom furniture made wasn’t far-fetched or intimidating (she had designed a nightstand for her previous apartment)—but the young couple realized they needed to be extremely flexible given their limited combined budget of $1,000.

Friedman reached out to a local fabricator, Geo Projects NYC, whom she had a previous working relationship with through her job. The early conversations were straightforward: “I said, ‘We’re trying to build a custom table,” she explains. “This is our budget, here are inspiration images, here are our dimensions. Is it possible for you to make us something for that price?” Luckily, Geo said he could pull it off.

Inspired by their success with the table, the custom projects didn’t stop there. For the narrow upstairs landing, the couple turned a nonfunctional wall niche into bookshelves. In the upstairs bedroom (which is used as an office), Friedman’s custom nightstand now serves as a set of desk side drawers. The couple is now mulling over design ideas for a custom coffee table and a console/shelving unit—as soon as they save up again. “My cap for any furniture [piece] right now is $1,000,” Friedman says.

“I don’t like to constantly buy things over and over again,” says Felix. “We live in this age of instant gratification but if you can lean into the idea of saving up and waiting for something worth it, it’s a good game plan.” Plus, spending on custom pieces feels like a worthy investment for the couple, since almost everything else they own is sourced secondhand from family, Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, and Design Within Reach Outlet. Here, Friedman and Felix elaborate on how to design and hire a fabricator to create custom furniture pieces within your budget.

Find inspiration images as a jumping-off point. To design the dining table of their dreams, Friedman and Felix spent a lot of time sending photos back and forth until they came to an agreement. Eventually, they landed on a three-legged round coffee table by the midcentury French designer Jean Prouvé that they both loved. This original coffee table doesn’t exist as a dining table, so the couple set on recreating it but with longer legs.

Design to the Best of Your Ability

Friedman is an interior designer by trade so she used industry programs like AutoCAD (for 2D drawings) and Rhino (for 3D modeling) to design to her specifications—but she insists that no real experience is required, maybe just a discerning eye and a clear idea of its purpose.

“If you don’t know how to use AutoCAD or Rhino, you can send your fabricator an image and ask, ‘Can you come up with something based on this design?’ A lot of fabricators will be open to that, even if they’re not necessarily designers,” she says.

For her nightstand, Friedman enlisted her mother, who has carpentry experience, to make a slightly oversize version. “I saw a nightstand online that I liked and said, ‘How can I tweak this to be exactly what I want?’ I drew a sketch on a notepad with my ideal dimensions and sent it to my mom and said, ‘Can you make me something like this?’ If you can pick up a pencil and make a doodle, that can be enough.”

Make Measured Decisions

Be specific with your dimensions. For the dining table, the couple spent a long time figuring out how the piece would work with their apartment layout. They settled on a 36-inch diameter, a 29-inch height, and an inch-and-a-half thickness for the tabletop and legs.

Friedman also advises making sure the fabricator knows if you have any strict criteria, like, “It needs to sit five people,” for example. “We decided seating for three was enough since it’s just us two, and we have a stool that slides under if we have an extra person,” she says.

Be Open-minded 

You’ll have design ideas but your fabricator will have design ideas, too. And if you’re working with a tight budget, chances are you’ll likely need to compromise on a few things. For the dining table, it was Geo who recommended white oak—a wood that’s affordable, sturdy, but also light enough to be carried up four flights of stairs where the couple lives. He even had the couple visit his workshop so they could hand-select the piece of wood.

He also advised Friedman to simplify her table design by removing original cutout details around each leg. “He was worried those reveals might mess with the integrity of the table over time so I said, ‘If you think that in four years it’s going to become wobbly because of that detail, I’m fine to get rid of it. It’s important to stay flexible,” she says.

It’s Fine to Scale Back, Too

For the bookshelves, the fabricator came up with a floating shelving concept where the brackets would be hidden. The couple, however, were fine with visible brackets so they just requested six planks trimmed to size—Geo used leftover cutoffs from the couple’s dining table—and they installed the shelves themselves using metal brackets they found on Amazon.

You can obviously save money based on the materials used—plywood, for example, is generally cheaper than solid wood—but other cost-effective options include revising the design and handling the pickup and transport yourself.

Patience Is a Virtue

From start to finish, the dining table took two months to complete. Smaller projects are likely to have a quicker turnaround. “Our fabricator’s working with our budget, he’s working within our parameters, so he should benefit from us not being a headache,” says Felix. “It has to be easy all around. You have to be patient.”

Photos by Jordan Felix

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