How to Design Furniture: A Beginner’s Guide

As clothing is a necessity to everyday life, furniture is also a necessity for every home and office. If you’re a fan of custom pieces, consider developing concepts of your own.

When you design your own furniture, you get pieces tailored to your exact needs. Modern furniture design allows for self-expression. All the furniture gets designed to your unique style.

Designing your own furniture is also a better value. You save money by not paying extra fees on mass-produced furniture at big-box stores.

Have you ever thought about modern furniture design? Here’s a beginner’s guide on how to design furniture for your own home.

Brainstorm What Type of Furniture You Want to Design

Your furniture designs should answer the need of your design space. Look at what you need in your home and ask yourself some important questions.

Is the existing furniture outdated? Are you trying to fill a large or small space? These types of questions are part of the brainstorming process when you’re prepping to design furniture.

Jot of the problems, questions, and ideas in a notebook. Start developing concepts from there.

Find Inspiration

Furniture design should accomplish something. Are you trying to get closer to nature or achieve a natural look in the home?

Whatever the case, you’ll need to find inspiration. Here’s where you can start:

Find Inspiration from Nature

Although we live in a modern world, most designs are still inspired by nature. The detail in the forms of plants and animals spark a starting point for designing furniture.

Pull some abstract designs from these and go from there.

Look at Other Furniture

Antique furniture never goes out of style. That’s because it’s the inspiration for most modern pieces.

If you’re not sure where to get design ideas, visit an antique furniture shop. Take pictures of vintage furniture, then create your modern design ideas. Look online and in magazines.

Make an Image Board

Making an imageboard is the perfect way to get inspiration to design. You can create a physical board with prints outs of images or do it online.

Pinterest is the perfect place to create and build digital inspiration boards. Download the app to your smartphone or use the computer. Search for images, then save them to a board you create within the app.

All of your saved images remain there until you delete them.

Create a Model, Make a Prototype, and Start Building

After you find inspiration, create a model. Sketch it out or use computer software to make a 3-D design of the furniture piece you want.

Once you complete the model, make a trip a supply to buy the materials. Purchase everything you need to build the prototype. This process takes time. Don’t rush it.

Test the completed prototype, then search online for a custom furniture maker. Schedule a consultation and show them your design. If the maker likes your prototype, let them build it.