Quality Peoples

Marcia and I have been living in our apartment for about a year and half now. To say we hate the furniture that the apartment came with would be the understatement of the year. I’d love to have a huge bonfire with the furniture if I could. Unfortunately, that’s not gonna happen.

We’ve grown so detestful, we’ve decided to either buy it from our landlady (and burn it) or put the dough up to stick the god-awful crap in storage. One of the moves toward doing so is to buy new furniture. New furniture is either crappily designed or way too expensive (or both). if you think american furniture prices are redonkulous, you should try buying it here in Mex. Ikea hasn’t exactly made it into Mexico yet.

So we’ve decided to design our own furniture and have it built. Tomorrow we have a meeting in Guadalajara with the carpentry shop we visited last time (where I shot The Doors). In anticipation of the meeting I have designed a bookshelf system with four modular units, eight drawer like cubes to accompany the bookshelves, a work table that is integrated into the bookshelves (non-fixed) and a tv unit.

For this series, I’ve liberally appropriated the feel of a bookshelf in my old house in LA that was designed and built by RM Schindler. His bookshelf was my jumping off point to something very modernist, yet warm and functional. Having paged through Eames Design, I looked to the Eameses for simplicity and a hint or two of George Nelson as well.

Each unit will be made from 3/4 inch maple plywood and finished with wood wax. The drawer units will have accent colors in the light blue/green range, with one panel of red in the bookshelf, just for fun (made from laminate). I love plywood. it’s one of the most interesting and beautiful surfaces. My old house had whole rooms covered with the stuff as a finishing surface. For the functionality of the bookshelves, I designed them to be stand-alone units in case we moved into a new apartment or house and the dimensions needed to be changed. The modular units can be stacked any which way, horizontally or vertically and the work table which relies on the bookshelf for one of it’s legs can adapt seamlessly to the bookshelf being in either position. The work table and tv unit table surface will be made from cutting plywood into 4cm strips and putting the strips on their sides, so the grain is showing and then glue the strips together and sand. So that, in essence, the table surface is the grain from all those pieces of wood being sandwiched together. beautiful.

This is my first attempt at designing furniture and most surely not the last. I’m not sure how long it will take to build the pieces, but I thought I’d upload the sketches I’ll be presenting to the carpenter tomorrow. It could all be a big crap shoot, but I love the idea of creating furniture from relatively cheap materials. My big insecurity is that I don’t have the engineering know-how to really pull off the level of detail I have in my mind, plus working with a carpentry shop three hours away, I can’t sit over the carpenters’ shoulders. It’s definitely one big learning experience.

slideshow | photoset

technorati tags: furniture, design, industrialdesign, build, modernist, eames, georgenelson, schindler, architecture