You Don’t Have to Be a Designer to Dream Up Your Own Custom Furniture

When Kiah Friedman and her boyfriend Jordan Felix moved in together to a two-bedroom Brooklyn duplex with a narrow living room and dining area, the couple had a challenging time landing on an affordable, high-quality dining table that they both loved that also fit the awkward space.

"We’re both opinionated and couldn’t agree on anything, so that drove us to design a custom table," says Friedman, who works at GRADE Architecture + Interior Design, a high-end residential design firm.

Because Friedman’s expertise is in interior design, the idea of getting custom furniture made wasn’t far-fetched or intimidating (she had designed a nightstand for her previous apartment)—but the young couple realized they needed to be extremely flexible given their limited combined budget of $1,000.

Friedman reached out to a local fabricator, Geo Projects NYC, whom she had a previous working relationship with through her job. The early conversations were straightforward: "I said, ‘We’re trying to build a custom table," she explains. "This is our budget, here are inspiration images, here are our dimensions. Is it possible for you to make us something for that price?" Luckily, Geo said he could pull it off.

Inspired by their success with the table, the custom projects didn’t stop there. For the narrow upstairs landing, the couple turned a non-functional wall niche into bookshelves. In the upstairs bedroom (which is used as an office), Friedman’s custom nightstand now serves as a set of desk side drawers. The couple is now mulling over design ideas for a custom coffee table and a console/shelving unit—as soon as they save up again. "My cap for any furniture [piece] right now is $1,000," Friedman says.

"I don't like to constantly buy things over and over again," says Felix. "We live in this age of instant gratification but if you can lean into the idea of saving up and waiting for something worth it, it's a good game plan." Plus, spending on custom pieces feels like a worthy investment for the couple, since almost everything else they own is sourced secondhand from family, Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, and Design Within Reach Outlet. Here, Friedman and Felix elaborate on how to design and hire a fabricator to create custom furniture pieces within your budget.

Get Inspired

Find inspiration images as a jumping-off point. To design the dining table of their dreams, Friedman and Felix spent a lot of time sending photos back and forth until they came to an agreement. Eventually, they landed on a three-legged round coffee table by the midcentury French designer Jean Prouvé that they both loved. This original coffee table doesn’t exist as a dining table, so the couple set on recreating it but with longer legs.

Design to the Best of Your Ability

Friedman is an interior designer by trade so she used industry programs like AutoCAD (for 2D drawings) and Rhino (for 3D modeling) to design to her specifications—but she insists that no real experience is required, maybe just a discerning eye and a clear idea of its purpose.

"If you don’t know how to use AutoCAD or Rhino, you can send your fabricator an image and ask, ‘Can you come up with something based on this design?’ A lot of fabricators will be open to that, even if they’re not necessarily designers," she says.