Plywood Flatpack Furniture Is Having a Moment. We Put It to the Test

Flat-pack furniture gets a bad rap—it’s often considered flimsy, poorly-constructed, and cheap in a way that is visually (and actually) unappealing. Ikea, the leader in this field, has made strides towards improving the category’s reputation, but the vast popularity (and convenience) of furniture that can be built just as easily as it can be broken down has cleared the way for designers to experiment. 

In recent years, we’ve been tracking the rise of smaller designers putting their own spin on this style. But the best way to see if something is worth it is to try it for yourself. So three Dwell staffers tested out products from three such brands—Studio Furnis, Unfnshed, and Lucca House—to see what all the fuss is about. 

Studio Furnis

It’s no secret that "I found it on Instagram" isn’t usually a compliment when it comes to your latest impulse purchase. So you’d be forgiven in thinking that since, as memory strikes, Studio Furnis’s items were brought to our attention from that very platform. When it comes to quality, however, their products are far from what you’d happen upon while idly scrolling.  They're designed intentionally for city living, where, according to their website, "apartment living often means constant change," but the furniture made to easily accommodate easy moves is often poorly made. The small, Brooklyn-based team was founded by Tomás Mor in 2023, who leads design and production. Studio Furnis, which has collaborated with Viso, makes it furniture out of Baltic birch wood, and they now offer a small array of bed frames, side tables and chairs—and produce very cool custom pieces as well—all of which is made to order, and designed to be flatpacked and put together without screws or any tools.

Once we arranged the piece I’d be testing—the tall, slim, Scandinavian-meets-’70s-undulating-curves bookcase from the Nü collection—Mor offered to drop it off, since their workspace isn’t far from my home. Since this is solid wood, the box it came in was long and heavy, but maneuverable. I was hesitant to begin assembly without some assistance; what if I messed it up?  The unit came without a manual, so I relied on pausing the video on the website in my quest to put it together. After sliding the shelves into the slots of the two sides-slash-legs of the bookshelf, I realized I had put it together backwards, reversed everything, and was finished. This meant that my process from unpacking to completion took probably five minutes instead of the two and a half it would take someone paying attention. That’s literally it.

The bookshelf is freestanding, the quality of the wood and the smooth finish extremely satisfying. There’s perhaps an expected roughness to furniture this simple, but when done successfully, it can have the level of detail that Studio Furnis has put into these pieces. The entire thing seemed almost too good to be true—exactly what you want from flatpack furniture. I have no plans to move anytime in the near future, but they now have me wondering if I need a new bed frame. —Kate Dries

Unfnshed

Despite living in an apartment that is already filled with furniture, an occupational hazard is the constant desire for more. Inundated as we are every day with beautiful objects, when a particular item does catch my attention—and holds it—then that’s something worth investigating. Unfnshd is one such company. Their wares held my attention over the course of a couple of nights’ worth of Instagram scrolling, and, thanks to the algorithm, after clicking on an ad for it just once, my feed was flooded. A corner of my living room desperately "needed" a side table—something petite and narrow but also nice to look at—and Unfnshed’s Side Table fit the bill.

According to the website, Unfnhsed was founded by Abdel Ibrahim in 2023; after he realized an earlier prototype of their first product, made from laminated plywood, would be too expensive to produce, he pivoted. The result is a suite of very reasonably-priced furniture made from Baltic birch plywood that is, as the name suggests, unfinished—a beautiful canvas for creativity, if the wind moves you that way.

My little stool arrived in one box and was dead easy to assemble. The stool came in just three parts—the top and then the bits that form the legs—and slotted together so fast that I was nervous that I did something wrong. And I’m not surprised to say that I did—like my colleague Kate, I had inadvertently put the legs on in a way that felt (and was) wrong. I corrected my error, deconstructed and reconstructed the stool a few times to make sure, and then did what I love to do to wooden furniture: painted it.

To be clear: the stool did not need the paint, because the material itself is so high-quality, smooth to the touch, and beautiful in its own right. (If you do want to paint or stain your piece, the website offers some simple tutorials for inspiration.)

However, I love a project and was briefly obsessed with the idea of an icy, prissy blue side table. So I took matters into my own hands and painted the stool’s top and just one of the legs, for a subtle moment of contrast. When it came time to reassemble the stool after the paint had dried, I realized my mistake. In my exuberance I painted the part of the legs that slot into the table, which made the pegs thicker than they were before. It was a bit of a struggle to put the stool back together and I did have to really put my back into it in order for the stool to be structurally sound. I did the best I could, cursing my impetuous nature, and put the stool in its place, where it now holds a fake plant.

Despite the user error detailed above, I love my stool! The rest of Unfnshed’s offerings are alluring to me, too—I could always use a bookshelf or a bench or really, any surface upon which to pile things. For right now, though, I am at capacity for furniture—but there’s a rickety Ikea bookshelf in my apartment that’s fighting for its life. Once it succumbs, I have a vision and this time, I won’t make the same mistake. —Megan Reynolds

Lucca House

The first thing I notice about the Lucca House 4x2 shelf when it arrives is that it’s light—important if you live in a fifth floor walk-up with crumbling stairs, as I do. The next thing I noticed is that even though it’s light, it’s sturdy. As I unpack it and slot it together, the maple plywood is more resilient than the cheaper particle-board stuff offered by other, larger brands. The pieces slide together tightly, so I have to take a hammer and tap the pieces together (with the protection of an improvised cardboard cushion), but everything holds up. The whole process is very fast, and there are no confusing directions or hex keys to figure out. There is no hardware at all, actually, but it’s still sturdy enough to handle everything I’ve loaded onto it.

Visually it fits into my home as easily as it does physically. I’m not generally a light wood kind of person, but the little strips of color on the edges keep the shelf from going too Scandi-modern. I got the multicolor/Harlequin option, and the colors are muted enough to keep it from feeling childish. It feels distinct without screaming for attention, and I can see myself holding onto it for decades.

All this supports the ideas behind Lucca House: that young-ish urbanites are moving every few years and need nice, affordable furniture that they can easily move with them. "We're trying to make it as simple and straightforward as possible," Lucca House’s founder, Lucca Zeray, tells me. The shelves are meant to be "idiot-proof" and fill a niche between the usual disposable furniture available elsewhere and the gallery-quality stuff that most 20- and 30-somethings can’t afford. Which is not to say that the brand is not sophisticated; Zeray worked previously at Matter, the collectible design gallery in New York, and cites Dutch flatpack furniture from the 1940s as inspiration. Zeray brings that design intelligence to Lucca, which makes everything in house at their shop in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Though shelves are the company’s only offering now, he promises more soon, potentially a desk and other kinds of furniture that urban professionals have to tote with them from home to home. 

Zeray recognizes that there are a bunch of flat-pack design companies out there, but he embraces the company. "I do think a rising tide lifts all ships," he says. "More people making stuff more or less locally is a good thing. I think it will make consumers and make us designers a little bit sharper and more critical of what is being produced and being consumed." So far, Lucca stands up to scrutiny. —Jack Balderrama Morley

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