7. Designing Furniture

It is interesting to plan an odd piece for some special location or to serve some particular pur­pose, and, in the case of built-in units, it is nearly always necessary to plan or lay out the parts or units for the best effect. The aim should be to secure results that combine good workmanship with nice proportion and beauty of line. The essentials of good workmanship are sound construction and first-class finish, to professional standards. Sound construction involves accurate and strong jointing and design that ensures a proper distribution of stresses. Nice proportion demands a careful bal­ancing of masses so that the piece does not look top-heavy or lopsided, or awkward. In some mod­ern pieces, however, top-heaviness may be excused, as when a case piece is mounted on spidery legs simply because those legs are of iron and therefore recognizably strong in proportion to the weight of the wooden section. Such design usually are best left to the professional designer, but in all respects well-designed furniture must appear, as well as be, wholly adapted to the purpose it is to serve. Ap­pearance is important, and second only to utility. The degree to which the two can be combined is a measure of the designer's taste and skill. But it should be remembered that any well-designed piece looks like what it is and not like something else.

Don't make a piece till you have drawn it to a fairly large scale. This will give you an idea of its final appearance, perhaps from the front and one side. Pay special attention to the joints—the potential weak spots—in deciding upon the principal dimensions. There should be no great or sudden change in sectional area, and top-heavy effects are to be avoided.

Woods such as mahogany and birch are stronger than white pine or whitewood and therefore can be used in pieces of more delicate proportions. Oak, in particular, looks best in pieces of sturdy design, while tough stock such as ash is more logically used for spindles and parts that may be expected to "give" than is a brittle wood like mahogany.

These characteristics of the various woods also need to be taken into consideration in decorating them. Simple pieces need but simple embellish­ments; you want no fancy curves or curlicues on pine pieces—simple chamfers, dentils, comparatively coarse mouldings, and no sharp arrises, and only simple designs in chisel and gouge work should be attempted. The finer and denser the wood the more complicated and delicate the decoration can be.

In designing special pieces it is usually simplest to copy or adapt existing pieces that are of ac­cepted good design, either of classical or modern styles. Even here it is necessary to exercise both taste and judgment. In copying or adapting mod­ern pieces it is much more essential to use discrim­ination or restraint, and you should have at least an elementary knowledge of design principles. Fur­niture that is to be lived with should not be extreme or freakish either in design or decoration. If you decide to copy existing pieces be sure that they are worth reproducing both from a design and appearance standpoint, and are in good taste. As a rule, you will need to copy them exactly as to size as well as proportion. Some pieces that look well in their original size are much less admirable when built to a  larger or smaller scale.

In the case of upholstered pieces it should be remembered that good design may be spoiled by the use of poorly designed or unsuitable fabrics. The covering should always contribute to the design and not detract from it, and it should match the woodwork in delicacy or ruggedness of "feel." A vast amount of ill-designed furniture has appeared on the market since mass-production methods were adopted by the industry. On the other hand there are so many excellent examples of really well-made and tasteful furniture available that there is neither need nor excuse for perpetuating these errors.

Taste is a prime factor in determining the merit of a piece of furniture. To be in good taste, a piece should be of nice proportions and design, suited to its purpose, not over-decorated or flamboyant in style, nor flashy in finish. The material should also be suited to the design. A highly decorative wood, for example, is not particularly suited to kitchen furniture, and a design that calls for surface decoration may look far better executed in a plain, straight-grained wood than a fancy one.

Use also affects suitability. Few people in the USA would approve of mahogany kitchen furniture, though  it  would   not  look  so  strange  in  tropical countries where is it commonly found. Furniture for strenuous everyday use needs to be of far more rugged design than that used in places where appearance takes precedence over utility.

When hand-made furniture gave way largely to machine products, design often had to be modified to permit of mass manufacture. In many instances design suffered because the little refinements and manifestations of careful hand work were lost. Many modern furniture designs have been intro­duced, some of them frankly experimental, but most of them intended to take full advantage of machine production while minimizing the effects of its limita­tions. In many instances this has resulted in a sharp breaking away from traditional design, but in some important exceptions the adaptations of the hand­made pieces have proved equally as attractive as the originals. In other cases, equivalent results have been achieved by hand-finishing the machine, products.

Paralleling this development has been the intro­duction and use of formerly rare and exotic woods and modern finishes that entirely alter the charac­teristic appearance of the commoner woods. Many designs have been developed to take advantage of the special characteristics of these woods (grain, color, and surface texture), and combinations of contrasting woods. For example, a particularly at­tractive cabinet can be made in light mahogany veneer, with front panels of olive-figure ash and Bombay rosewood.

Mahogany in the modern light finish is popular in many pieces, as is beech. These blond woods lend themselves very well to use with a wide variety of fabric colors and designs, and sometimes with table tops or cabinet fronts of brightly colored plastics.

In all these adaptations and combinations of materials the important thing is to avoid any sug­gestion of cheapness, sloppy workmanship, or crudity.   The design must be good, and carried out with a high degree of skill and care. You cannot take liberties with these products of modern master-designers, any more than you can with the fine old traditional pieces, and expect happy results. Where line and proportion, color and texture are all vital components of a design, you need to give the whole piece careful study. And you need to know some­thing of design yourself before tampering with it. Therefore, if you copy any of the recognizedly ac­ceptable pieces, old or new, copy them as exactly as you can.

In that way you will gradually learn to detect and appreciate the elements of good design and how to incorporate them in any original piece you attempt yourself.

Gone about in a proper manner, the designing of a piece of furniture for your purpose can be as exciting and satisfying as painting a picture. When once you have grasped the essentials of design, the rest is merely a matter of patient concentration in laying out the design on paper.

Rough out the shape of the principal parts to scale on squared paper. Then, when you are satis­fied with the general proportions you can transfer the outlines of the various units to a large sheet of drawing paper at as nearly full scale as con­venient. This enables you to visualize the shapes of the parts and their actual proportions and relation­ships to one another, and to experiment with the curves and joint angles.

When you are satisfied with the actual shapes and proportions of the various parts, you can make a complete scale drawing showing them assembled. Finally, the details of the parts can be transferred at full size to sheets of brown paper to be used as working drawings or even cut out as patterns.

If you are dealing with a bulky piece such as a set of shelves and cupboards (a shallow cabinet without legs), a moderately large scale drawing, showing the proportions and relationship of the divisions or units from the front, may be sufficient. In such a case it is as well to shade the enclosed parts (i.e., those having doors or panels) to give a more solid effect for comparison with open parts, such as shelves, which do not seem so heavy in the finished  job.

Modular Furniture

Modular furniture is furniture designed to con­form to architectural conceptions of mass and form. The furniture pieces are made to certain standard sizes and proportions, multiples of the unit size or module, and when assembled in a room should pro­duce the effect of architectural balance. In many designs, two or more of the unit pieces can be assembled to serve different purposes. For example, small cubic tables can be put together in twos or threes to make end tables, or assembled in a row as a cocktail table.

It is quite easy to adapt this principle to the design of a piece of furniture that can be pro­gressively altered to suit changing conditions. For example, you might start with a top and base of a fairly large cabinet, and fit between them a pair of small  cupboards.   These  might  be  placed  at the ends of the base to leave an open storage space between them. The next stage of the project might be to move the two cabinets together in the center, and add a narrower cabinet at each end, these having doors in their ends—or one of them might be equipped with drawers. This is a simple example of how such a piece might be designed and then built and finally assembled in stages.

EXAMPLE  OF  PROGRESSIVE  MODULAR  DESIGN

Sectional upholstered pieces likewise are made that can be used as separate chairs and stools or to form a complete sofa. All of these and similar pieces are interesting to the home furniture maker because of the variations they permit in furniture arrangement. Today much furniture is planned carefully to serve one or more purposes, since mod­ern homes, in the aggregate, are smaller and need more services, and therefore increased flexibility in furniture arrangements.   One designer has developed 12 basic shape units from which 150 different pieces of furniture can be assembled.   Other have designed standard units with various bases and tops that permit varied grouping and completely change the appearance of the original basic pieces.  Many such pieces are now available and can be examined in the larger stores by anyone interested.   For the home craftsman the modular system offers a challenge to develop designs of his own.

Are You Ready To Move Onto The Next Lesson? Click Here….