Here’s what “customizing” might mean at a furniture store: Flip through the swatch book and choose from a dozen fabrics. It leaves much to be desired if what you seek is the pièce de résistance for your home—or just a practical piece that’s ideally suited to your specific needs.
Custom furniture buyers have as much or as little creative control as they like. “We sometimes need to make ultimatums concerning structural concepts or functional concepts,” says Willie Willette, owner of Willie Willette Works (williewilletteworks.com) in Minneapolis. “But the cosmetic—unless it’s really, really awful—is up to the client.”
More surprising than creative freedom might be the price you get at a custom shop. Often, it lands somewhere between big-box retail and high-end showrooms. Again, you exercise control, based on the choice of materials and scope of the project. Turnaround time is a few weeks to a couple months.
The creative process starts with a consultation in your home or the designer’s studio. Keith Morgan, principal of Bespoke in Minneapolis and London, says clients bring their ideas to the table and “it becomes a melding of our expertise and their thoughts and inspirations.” The designer delivers a draft drawing of the piece and a cost estimate, and that’s when you finalize materials and design details.
Some designs are driven by extraordinary requirements. Bespoke recently built a 16-foot-long curved dining room table out of “waterfall bubinga,” a wavy-grained wood that’s often used to make musical instruments. Because the table was to be bolted to the deck of a yacht, it “had to withstand all of the twisting and racking forces from the hull,” Morgan says. “We approached the problem from an aviation perspective and built the top like the wing of an aircraft—being able to withstand great forces, flexing, environmental concerns, while at the same time being lightweight and rigid.”
Ruth Ofstedal wanted something tamer: more built-in storage space in her newly converted Minneapolis loft. But the dimensions she wanted weren’t available in any of the prebuilt closet systems she looked at. “I wanted to utilize one entire wall—left to right and floor to 13-foot ceiling,” she says. She sought a custom bid from Willie Willette Works and got a quote of $14,000—comparable to the cost of the high-end prefabricated systems she had shopped. She and Willette selected zebrawood, an exotic blonde, striped wood that enhanced the architectural uniqueness of her loft space.
“Friends visiting for the first time often remark how much they like the wood wall, not realizing that it is actually doors behind which is hiding clothing and bedding,” Ofstedal says. “This is the exact response I wanted—that the wall of storage would appear simply as a minimalist wall, and nothing else.”
