We Designed and Built a Custom Headboard and WFH Station for Just $865

Designing a custom piece of furniture—whether you're building it yourself or working with a maker—always starts with identifying a real need and then envisioning a solution. For my boyfriend and me, it was about fixing the layout in our loft without losing the open, airy feel we loved—and about creating a separate workspace without blocking any of our windows. What came next wasn’t exactly a straight line: lots of brainstorming, even more sketches, and eventually a DIY project that completely changed how the space feels. Here’s how we got there—and a few lessons we learned the hard way.

Find your inspiration 

When we moved into our loft, our first big purchase was three tall Ikea pax wardrobes that served as our main clothes storage and as a divider between the bedroom and office.

By doing this, we inadvertently created two rooms, breaking up our view of the apartment’s three massive window bays. We were searching for ways to move the wardrobes so that we could see all of the windows at once. My boyfriend Josh did several versions of a floor plan, each time finding a new place for the bed, but none of them felt quite right.

A story in the July/August 2024 issue of Dwell pushed us in a new direction. This photo of a room at the Rosemary in Marrakech sparked an idea. In all of our brainstorming, the bed had always been against a wall. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s typically where beds go! But in the Rosemary, the bed was up against a tiled wall that appeared to float, serving as both headboard and design feature. "What if we could walk behind the bed?" I asked Josh, showing him the magazine. "What if our headboard was also a partial wall that concealed our desks?"

This brought us back to a consistent source of inspiration for our apartment: David Harbour’s loft. His living room had a similarly low room divider with storage, separating it from his office. This concealed his desk but kept the open feel of the space. 

Using the tiled wall in the Rosemary and the shelving unit in Harbour’s loft project as conceptual inspiration, we turned to a very familiar (and expected) source for the design itself: Donald Judd. Listen, I know, I’m rolling my own eyes at this. Two creatives living in a Brooklyn loft who say they’re inspired by Donald Judd’s work? Big surprise! But Judd’s furniture is monolithic and simple and it doesn’t draw attention to itself. And in an open space, you just can’t have too many pieces of furniture competing for your attention.

Once we landed on a concept and aesthetic, the real design work began. Josh’s first version was a room divider packed with as much storage as possible. It was a great idea in theory—but in reality, it would have been a nightmare to build, wildly expensive, or, likely, both. So he started scaling it back, refining the design into something we—technically, he— could actually execute.

We ended up with two three-sided, five-by-two-by-four foot boxes . "I decided to make these 4 feet tall because that’s the width of a sheet of plywood," Josh said. "So that was one less cut I had to do." The closed sides of the boxes served as our headboard and the open side is where we tucked in our existing desks, a standing desk and an Ikea desktop. Josh reused two pieces of Baltic birch plywood leftover from another project to add a long shelf across the top of each box. This gave us a place to put plants, books, and these really cute clip-on desk lamps we bought a few years ago.

Get your materials and get ready to build

Once we landed on a design, it was time to pick the materials. There’s a diverse mix of wood finishes in the apartment but for this piece we decided to go light. We settled on one-inch Baltic birch plywood because it’s sturdy and readily available at most lumber yards. Baltic birch is made of many layers, making it more dimensionally stable and stronger than regular plywood, and is a great option for most furniture projects.