Do-it-yourself furniture is the ugly duckling of the furniture industry. It is boring to look at, boxily shaped and made from cheap, lightweight materials like particleboard. Worse, it's a bore to assemble. Right?
Not always. In the past year a diverse group of cutting-edge designers have stepped into the ready-to-assemble arena with stylish designs that 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 like Ikea and Home Depot at a greater rate than ever before.
Most of this is furniture that simply slides, zips or clips together. Assembling this 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 it. I have never been a big fan of do-it-yourself projects. In high school I 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 had always 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 miles an hour. But does anyone really have $15,000 to spend on an artfully tilted armoire?
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. At its 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 was still 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.
To assemble traditional RTA, you need the patience of Job and skin like cowhide.
(Ikea will assemble your purchases at the store for a $59 fee. Pay it, unless you know the Army Corps of Engineers.)
It was a huge relief to learn soon after that Douglas M. Green, a designer and cabinetmaker 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," he continued, "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.
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's already been assembled. Green's furniture is made of one-and-a-quarter-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 like $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, the Italian-born artist and designer Silvio Russo's Dipiu collection of nine bookcases, tables and screens are an explosion of cartoonlike shapes and acid colors. Russo, who now 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 so precise that they glide smoothly together and stay in place without screws and glue. But the 10 pieces that make up Russo's seven-foot-high Chissa bookcase ($2,485) didn't fit quite that snugly. (I assembled a prototype, I was later told; the connections would work smoothly with the real thing.)
After being knocked down by one of the seven-foot sections of plywood, I called in two neighborhood heavies. They began by daintily pushing and tugging. Twenty minutes later, with both men literally 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), their underpinnings 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 now selling low-cost crowd-pleasers that neither challenge the status quo nor move the furniture industry forward technologically.
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.
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.