Customer Reviews

Upholstered Furniture: Design and Construction

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Woodworkers tend to be purists. They love the material
and look of wood as nature made it.

While customers may ooh and ahh about the beauty of solid-wood
furniture, making it nice is a helluva lot of work, and
doing the finishing right is even more.

Add to that this truth: Upholstered chairs and couches are
more comfortable than hard, expensive, labor-intensive,
solid wood art furniture.

While the public may appreciate your craftsmanship as a
wood artisan, few will pay you fairly for it if you choose
it as your career. Of course a niche may be carved-out
with relentless marketing, though many who earn their
living building fine wood-furniture are backed into
supplementing their incomes through teaching or writing.

So how, you ask, does this relate to modern upholstered
furniture and making money at woodworking?

Well, the public doesn't, in general, care how great and
pure you are at woodworking. They care about whether
their furniture looks good, in nice to live with, and
meets their needs.

Upholstered furniture, while not necessarilly easy to
design, is cheap to manufacture. Cheap in terms of labor,
primarily, because there is no real need for joinery,
nor sanding, nor finishing. Here and there of course
wood parts may poke out and need special treatment,
but as a rule the wood parts in upholstered furniture
are sawn-out, quickly joined with the staples, screws,
nails, and metal gussets... in fact the frames are quite
ugly and uncraftsmanlike.

It is in the upholstery-work and in the designer's
mind such furniture comes alive... and once the
design problems are worked-out, upholstered furniture
can be cranked out quickly and cheaply. Even
when done in fine silks the cost of materials and
labor is much less than it would be with solid-wood
pieces.

So the real question is... do you want to make money
as a furniture designer?

If so, get this book. It's the only one I've ever
found that shows you the insider tricks to designing
and building this stuff. Sure, there are some books
that show you how to do a Chippendale couch... or
fix one anyway - you'll bury yourself in horsehair
and cotton batting doing that sort of traditional
work. This book is all about foam and vinyl and
plywood and pre-fab metal parts and how to put it
together as a "product".

And with such a line of "products" you can move
from humble, sweating craftsman to semi-famous
designer of furniture.

Something to think about.