Do-it-yourself furniture is the ugly duckling of the furniture industry. It is boring to look at, boxy and made from cheap materials like particleboard. Worse, it’s a bore to assemble. Right?
Not always. In the last year a diverse group of designers have stepped into the ready-to-assemble arena with stylish designs they say are idiot-proof.
In some cases, these are enterprising artisans who were unable to find a manufacturer during the recession and so decided to go it alone. But in other cases, older design businesses are trying to reach price-conscious buyers who are trekking to do-it-yourself titans such as Ikea and Home Depot.
Most of this is furniture that simply slides, zips or clips together. Assembling his chair and table would be no more difficult than securing the lid on a box of shredded wheat, one of the furniture designers promised from the safety of his home in California. A test seemed appealing.
I admit that I never have been a big fan of do-it-yourself projects. In high school I had made a single bookend, and that collapsed into a pile of sticks.
Moreover, as a design writer whose tastes had been honed on the avant-garde of the ’80s, I always had thought that one day, when I had money, I would buy furniture like a little Italian sofa that looked as if it were doing 80 m.p.h.
I sampled a traditional ready-to-assemble product first. Ikea is the grandfather of ready-to-assemble-RTA, for short-having been in the self-assembly business in Sweden for 50 years. (In this country, Ikea has stores on the East and West Coasts only, but it offers a mail-order service, and its 1994 catalog is available for $2 from Ikea, 600 San Fernando Blvd., Burbank, Calif. 91502.)
Quick assembly?
At Ikea’s Elizabeth, N.J., store I chose a smart-looking six-drawer chest with the letters “QA” on the price tag. “It means `quick assembly,’ ” a clerk assured me.
One person’s quick assembly is another person’s hike up Everest. Half an hour after opening the box of my Natura chest of drawers ($345), I still was counting out the 194 screws, nuts and grommets into teacups (a friend sagely advised that this was the only way to preserve one’s sanity).
The 45 pieces of wood made negotiating my way through a Manhattan studio apartment a bit like competing in an Olympic track-and-field event. No tools came with the pieces (an electric screwdriver is essential). I donned ski gloves, and three hours later the chest was complete.
Almost. I couldn’t face assembling the little vanity tray for the top drawer.
Ikea will assemble purchases at its stores for $59. To assemble traditional RTA yourself, you need the patience of Job and skin like cowhide.
It was a huge relief to learn soon after that Douglas M. Green, a designer and cabinet-maker from Maine who had trained with the renowned craftsman Thomas Moser and graduated in industrial design from Pratt Institute in New York, had had an equally humiliating experience with RTA furniture.
He said that when his mother bought a new house on Cape Cod, “she couldn’t wait for me to design something. So she bought all this RTA furniture because it was cheap. Of course, I ended up putting it all together. It was a miserable experience.”
Now, four years later, Green has started his own company, Green Design, with a line of ETA furniture (his shorthand for “easy-to-assemble”). But whether his mother could assemble any of the 12 pieces, which include a sofa, bookcase, dining table and side table, is debatable. Not because the furniture is difficult to slide together; this can be done in anywhere between 10 minutes and a half-hour. Even the drawers require no screws.
Aerobic assembly
The problem is that if you are a slim woman with slim muscles, it is difficult to slide the panels together without your weight trainer around to hold what already has been assembled.
Green’s furniture is made of 1 1/4-inch-thick slabs of oak, ash, maple or cherry. He admits that he rather overestimated the thickness of the wood needed, which helps account for prices such as $3,400 for a sofa and $1,650 for a chair.
Green’s forms are a modern interpretation of Arts and Crafts designs, harking back to a safe, comprehensible past.
On the other hand, Dipiu collection of nine bookcases, tables and screens by Silvio Russo, an Italian-born artist and designer, are an explosion of cartoonlike shapes and acid colors. Russo, who works in New York, uses a similar technique for his furniture and his sculpture: The pieces are cut by a computerized router that should make interlocking slots precise so that they glide smoothly together and stay in place without screws and glue. But the 10 pieces that make up Russo’s 7-foot-high Chissa bookcase ($2,485) didn’t fit quite that snugly. (I assembled a prototype, I was told later; the connections would work smoothly with the real thing.)
After being knocked down by one of the 7-foot sections of plywood, I called in two neighborhood heavies. They began by daintily pushing and tugging. Twenty minutes later, with both men bouncing up and down on the vertical sections, the pieces all finally creaked into place to make one of the craziest and most exciting bookcases around.
Russo’s pieces are plywood covered with bubblegum-colored laminates. His inspiration, he said, was the recession: not cheaper products but brighter products.
“I wanted some hint of fantasy, to give light to our houses, which are so gray and sad because of the economy,” he said.
While Ikea has spent years perfecting ways to conceal joints and screws, David Kawecki, of 3D Interiors in San Franciso, has created the furniture equivalent of the Pompidou Center in Paris: the Puzzle armchair (about $400) and side table ($220), whose underpinnings are revealed on the outside in a riot of primary colors.
The Puzzle chair has an inordinate number of joints to interlock, but it knits together like a child’s toy. Only the final maneuver was a problem. Somehow the birch plywood armrests had to grow an extra inch to meet the row of tabs underneath. Fortunately, I had developed new muscles. I wrestled with it on the floor for 10 minutes, and then the chair arose complete and comfortable to boot.
The more difficult of the two pieces was the fairly innocuous-looking side table. Like Green and Russo before him, Kawecki failed to mention in his instructions that I would need two Cub Scouts to steady things while I crunched together the 21 joints.
Kawecki never expected to have to go into business for himself. He envisioned a life designing objects that would be manufactured by the industry’s giants. But thanks to the recession, most of these giants are selling low-cost crowd-pleasers that neither challenge the status quo nor move the furniture industry forward technologically.
Fire up that laser
To get his unusual designs produced, Kawecki had to manufacture them himself. To do this, he had to find an industrial process he could control with a computer. He settled on a device used in the aerospace industry: the computerized laser.
“It can be programmed by computer to cut birch plywood panels to any shape you like and with a precision of one ten-thousandth of an inch,” he said.
Jeffrey Murphy, a New York architect, is also using sophisticated production technology from outside the furniture industry. The steel legs on his ’50s-style Wireworks side and tea tables are formed using a pneumatic wire-shaping technique usually reserved for making shopping carts and postcard racks. There is nothing fragile about the side table ($100). It’s tough enough to support Murphy, who weighs 180 pounds. The four steel legs simply hook together, and a series of metal pegs fit into the table top. It’s child’s play. If the pegs don’t glide into place instantly, Murphy recommends a clout with a hammer.
A cost-conscious feature of the design is its use of a hard-wearing, 18-ply prefinished wood, normally used to line cargo containers, for the table tops. They are available in nail-polish red, apple green or lemon yellow. Among the advantages of using such a material is that its coloration isn’t achieved using any environmentally harmful processes.
“I had thought of coloring the top using aniline dyes,” Murphy said. “But they emit ozone-unfriendly hydrocarbons during their manufacture.”
Eco-furniture?
Sigmar Willnauer, a designer in Berkeley, Calif., asserts that RTA will be the wave of the future because it is more environmentally friendly in terms of packaging and transport. Shipping objects disassembled costs less. In addition, RTA pieces, instead of being rewrapped at the store, are picked up by customers in the boxes in which they came from the factory.
Assembling Willnauer’s featherweight Zip-Light table lamp is as easy as dressing yourself. You simply zip up the leather base, then zip up the top, which is made of a plastic film that will not distort. Then you set one part on top of the other. The results look like a cross between a tepee and a nun’s wimple.
To make a living out of manufacturing his own designs, Willnauer also is doing a version using a rubber base, which has lowered the price to $119 from $199. Even so, he will be hard pressed to compete with RTA giants such as Ikea, which can offer such rock-bottom prices as $19.95 for a television stand and $29 for a desk.
The shapes achieved by these new designers are much more liberated and diverse than items sold by any of the RTA giants. They are ingenious in their use of sophisticated technology and bold in their insistence on top-quality materials. To be fair, Ikea is trying to upgrade its offerings with designs like Natura. But that is not Ikea’s stock in trade.
Steen Kanter, Ikea’s president for the East Coast, said: “We accept having pieces in our assortment which don’t sell well. If we just had items that we make revenue on, Ikea would be a pretty boring place.”
Finally, while the new designs are nearly idiot-proof, this idiot would like to have had clearer instructions, especially on how many extra hands she might need before embarking on another 7-foot-high bookcase.
