Expert Advice : How To Shop For Custom Furniture
Today’s article is born out of frustration. My frustration. A few weeks ago, I was looking for a shelving unit, but every time I found one whose style I liked, its size didn’t work for my space. And I hated the style of the ones that fit my space. Arrggghhhhh. After fruitlessly searching every furniture store website on planet Earth, I finally admitted that I needed to look at custom furniture. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to shop for custom furniture, who I should hire to make it, how much should I expect to pay and so on…
Fortunately, Isaac Daniel from Toronto Workshop was kind & patient enough to answer all of my rambling questions about custom furniture. And because I love y’all so much, I turned our conversation into this expert article on how to shop for custom furniture in Toronto.
Interior Design Toronto: Why should anyone commission a piece of custom furniture?
Isaac Daniel - Toronto Workshop: The most important reason to buy custom furniture is that it pays my bills, and that’s great for me :) In all seriousness, when it comes to most home-related most trades, finding help is pretty easy. It’s not hard to find trades for almost every specific job, from undeveloped land or out-dated building to renovations or newly built finished home.
When it comes to furniture, there are two ways to go:
Custom furniture…which is a skilled trade
Mass-manufactured furniture…which makes up the vast majority of the marketplace.
Even though designing and building custom furniture is a skilled trade, for the majority of home decor applications, consumers tend to gravitate towards manufactured furniture pieces. The old adage for buying manufactured furniture is that “Ikea shelving units are going to look real janky after a year”, but to be honest, I love Ikea and it has its place. It’s like coffee…you can buy a fancy barista-crafted coffee at a boutique roaster, or you can buy a cup of drip coffee at McDonald’s, and they both have their advantages.
The most obvious reasons why a consumer may need custom furniture include:
specific design requirements
unique sizing
matching existing furnishings
specific build quality
Perhaps you have one area of the room where nothing fits. Perhaps you have a collection of furniture in your room that you want to build upon and keep your interior design consistent. The majority of our clients have something specific that they are looking for, that they either cannot find, or has some aspect they would like changed or is outside of their budget.
Custom furniture design, like any other trade category, is a term that is incredibly broad. Most custom furniture makers specialize in one aspect of the trade, and can probably refer you to another maker who is better suited for a commission if it is not their forte.
Someone who specializes in pouring epoxy river tables isn’t likely going to be the person you want to hire to make your rustic pipe-and-wood console, and you wouldn’t want to commission your barn-board furniture maker to make your unique shaker chairs.
NOTE: This is a good place for me to plug some other makers that I believe deserve the attention as well:
Brittany from Pipe and Wood in Toronto makes amazing pipe and wood furniture
Paul from Canadian Woodworks is a great person to go to for epoxy pour furniture
Martin from Forever Interiors is a great reclaimed wood furniture maker
Matt and Terry from TEB interiors are amazing upholsterers with an eye for the edgy for those unique upholstery jobs.
Interior Design Toronto: What services do you provide?
Isaac Daniel - Toronto Workshop: I specialize in taking that idea you had, that you couldn’t find at any store, communicating its details, and producing it in reality, and doing it pretty affordably and rapidly. At Toronto Workshop, we provide our clients with the ability to turn their imagined concept, into a physical article, whether that is a piece of furniture, home furnishing, or any other custom creation. We work with wood, metal, stone, glass, and composite materials to our client’s preference to make their dream a reality.
We design, build, deliver, and install all of our custom creations.
Interior Design Toronto : What types of furniture do you build?
Isaac Daniel - Toronto Workshop : Welcome to the world of rectangles and boxes.
When it comes to products we have been commissioned for, there is an incredible range of oddities, from ax-throwing trophies and bottle openers to baseball tables, bike tables, dog bone tables, and more. Having said that, we generally specialize in residential and office furniture. The majority of homeowners and consumers we assist are looking for custom dining and other tables, desks, shelving units, cabinets, and similar articles.
Almost all of our projects involve some variation of rectangles or boxes, whether it’s a mid-century-modern expanding table, or shelving solutions, or cabinets.
I started Toronto Workshop because I love making things, especially when it’s someone’s dream article that used to exist only in their imagination and get to see turned into a physical object that is perfect for them.
There are a number of reasons to build custom vs buying it in stores.
The most heartwarming reason would be that buying custom furniture supports a local tradesperson instead of, in a lot of cases, supporting foreign child-labour and other unethical mass production.
When it comes to practicality, if you were to buy a mass-produced table on sale from a local department store that doesn’t match any of your other furniture, doesn’t fit in your room, and falls apart because it’s poorly made, then the low price doesn’t mean much.
On the other side of that coin, there are high-end stores that sell great designs by designers that sell pieces that are truly well-engineered. In that situation, you are paying for more than the physical materials and workmanship involved, so the price can be substantially inflated and that may be another good reason to buy custom.
On the other hand, a practical reason to NOT buy custom would be for something like lower cabinets for your kitchen renovation, you can buy this ready-made of decent quality and put the money you’ve saved into a nice marble slab to go over-top, as almost every interior designer recommends.
Interior Design Toronto : How do I find the right person or company to build my custom furniture?
Isaac Daniel - Toronto Workshop:
Option #1: Just find your neighbour with lots of tools in their garage, they can probably DIY your new dining table.
Option #2: A better option is to start looking for people that specialize in that specific piece of furniture you want to be built.
If you need a chair, go to a chair maker
Go to a barnboard maker for reclaimed items
Go to an epoxy slab maker for that type of table.
Each maker has fine-tuned their process and invested in equipment to improve their workflow, create a better product and lower your costs. If I was advising a family member about finding someone qualified to build custom furniture I would recommend they:
Meet the maker,
Visit their shop,
Look over their portfolio
And read reviews
Also, you should ask about their business, their warranty, guarantees, and if they are insured for damage.
If you’re looking to weigh the pros and cons of hiring a big company versus a small company, note that they can be very different and very similar.
Custom Furniture from a Big Company
You may find the design process to be about the same, but facilitating every step afterward can become muddled with larger companies. With a big company, the custom furniture manufacturing process begins with a designer, then moves to a buyer, to a labour technician, to assembly, to the warehouse, to delivery, and every stage has the potential of damage and mistakes along the way.
Custom Furniture from a Small Company
Working with a small company, if you have a BIG project, your requirements could be too much to handle, whether that’s a short delivery window or just the size or cost of the project.
For us, we’ve been fortunate to have been featured in Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, BlogTo, and more, which is great for giving potential clients confidence in our ability to look after their custom furniture needs.
That being said, we are absolute strangers when our clients first come to meet us, so we’ve streamlined our process to be transparent from start to finish, and communicate and detail as much as possible before we even take on a commission.
That transparency is very important.
Never assume that someone is going to do something for you that is not clearly detailed in the contract
Never pay a single dollar of deposit until you know exactly what you’re going to be getting and when
Interior Design Toronto : Describe your process from start to finish to aftercare
Isaac Daniel - Toronto Workshop : And now for the part our competition would love to imitate…how we take someone’s non-existent idea and turn it into a piece of furniture, I will be as vague here as possible so as not to give away our winning secrets.
Most of our clients either call or email us looking for us to take on their commission
If you’re calling and starting to tell me about your idea, I generally try to politely refer you to our email and to include as many pictures, details, references, etc as possible
We then invite you to come introduce yourselves at our shop and go over physical material options for your project, sample finishes, and other details, as well as quickly draft your project together so we can expedite the design process
At this point, you’re familiar with the physical materials in the project and how they’re finished.
Next, we create a complimentary 3D proposal of your project, that includes notes of technical details, and dimensions
With this done, we as the maker and you as the buyer can feel pretty confident we are on the same page
If you like our 3D rendering, we quote based on that drawing
if not we revise it until you’re happy.
To begin a project we will send over an invoice and take a deposit, at which point our client knows exactly what they’re going to be receiving and when.
The majority of what we make is built and finished in shop, but on occasion, we do build on-site. But we’re more than happy to communicate what we need in advance before we even take on a project, as well as work with our client’s needs & requests.
The most important thing for a consumer who’s looking for custom furniture to do is to communicate as much as possible to their builder. We won’t be annoyed, we like to do a good job and want to know that we are satisfying our clients.
That being said, we live in the age of restaurants being closed because of yelp reviews, where one salad was one olive short too many times. If we do a great job with your table or shelves or whatever custom project in all reality you may tell five people, if we do a bad job you’re going to tell five hundred. It is in my best interest to make sure the project goes perfectly, every time, because like a restaurant we’re only as good as our last dish.
Interior Design Toronto : As a person who could NEVER do what you do, I am curious about the skills, tools & tricks of the trade you have picked up along the way…can you share?
Isaac Daniel - Toronto Workshop : I’m not an engineer, or an architect, and I’m not a interior designer or trend setter either. I am just a maker, with experience making, that wants you to be happy to receive and use what we make together.
The fact is that when you’re looking to build something, you need to be open to feedback as not everything is physically possible or recommended. I almost never advise my clients in their choice of style for their creations, that is their world. Where I do chime-in will be functionality, when a table leg is going to interfere with legroom, or where an elongated shelf will sag over time, that is where as a maker I have a responsibility to communicate issues that will arise for our client. You have your dream style that your heart is set on, and I want you to get that style, but if your piece isn’t functional then the experience will be lost.
Interior Design Toronto : What about the money side of the business? Gurarantees, pricing, payments?
Isaac Daniel - Toronto Workshop : We guarantee our work, we don’t guarantee someone else delivery. If we build and deliver you know you’re going to get your piece safely to its destination unharmed. If you come to the shop to pick up and strap it to your roof I obviously cannot tell you it’s going to make it home safe and sound.
We take deposit payments from our clients to begin projects. We do that so we don’t have to invest our own money in these custom creations that are usually very personalized and would be difficult to recuperate if something went south. We take the remainder on completion when our clients take possession of their articles.
We price based on material and dimension as all materials cost different amounts. A small piece of pine will have a different price than a giant piece of gold plated steel or slab of polished marble. With that being said, it’s always good to be open about your project vision and what you want to get at the end of the day. Open communication allows us to recommend options and help you build within your budget, or itemize aspects of your project to see where your money will be going.
About Isaac Daniel - Toronto Workshop
At Toronto Workshop, Isacc & his team designs, builds, delivers, and installs their own wood and metal products. Everything they produce is 100% made in Canada with the majority of the work being done in their downtown Toronto woodshop.
Website : www.torontoworkshop.ca
Phone : 416-821-5805
Instagram : @torontoworkshop
