Custom Furniture

Starting from sketch

By Janet Eastman

May 15, 2003 in print edition F-10

MOST of us who shop for furniture ultimately take what’s out there, whether it’s perfect or nearly so or just the best we can find for the price. But the furniture secret of Los Angeles is that there is a thriving custom-made world – in some other genre, like music or film, you might think of it as an underground – populated by craftsmen who will make original pieces on demand. Quickly. Inexpensively. And well.

This world is mostly traveled by designers, architects and furniture store owners catering to picky clients. But a small number of people enter unescorted, armed only with a desire to have something translated from their heads into something for their homes.

To these people, half an inch has a lot of power. It can make a coffee-table top look elegant or clunky. A few more inches in the chrome legs might mean two drawers can be tucked underneath to hide magazines and remotes. And perhaps the table could double as extra seating when the party’s going.

As in the movies, anything is possible. Especially in California, which has more furniture makers than any other state except North Carolina. Some learned their trades before moving here; others learned in Hollywood set shops.

Many labor far from the public view, in cramped workrooms alongside muffler shops and turquoise motels with barred windows. But they’re willing to take an order from anyone who enters their doors. Even someone with just a rough sketch and a vague vision of a piece made out of wood, metal, plastic or foam.

“There’s no question that people are more design savvy here,” says Leslie Shapiro, who sells her contemporary line at 407 Furniture on Fairfax but doesn’t turn away those with a different idea. “People might really like a piece of furniture they see, but something’s off – the quality, the price, the wood color. That’s when they want to make something that’s perfect.”

The trick for do-it-yourselfers is ending up with a functional piece of furniture that doesn’t look like it should be showcased in your next garage sale.

One designer with a showroom on La Brea Avenue can only imagine disaster when a customer works directly with the workroom. He compares it to the telephone game, in which a simple sentence gets reinterpreted each time it’s passed on to the next person. “The idea has to go from your head to a workman’s tools, and how the thing comes out is anyone’s guess.”

Some workrooms will make blueprints based on dimensions given to them by people who use their hands to describe what they want or who bring in images of furniture parts they want cobbled together. There are also showrooms that offer made-to-order furniture. Shoppers can pick out the parts they like on the showroom floor – it might be a leg on one piece, a knob on another and the finish of a third.

Sketching something is the easy part, says Peter Di Sabatino, who heads the environmental design department at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Clearing the other hurdles – materials, function, structural stability, durability, safety, craftsmanship, cost – requires skill or, at least, a high threshold for trial-and-error agony.

For David Rodgers, a special-events producer, a simple drawing on a cocktail napkin prompted a journey through the foam shops, discount fabric stores and furniture workrooms of Los Angeles, then back to his office on Hollywood Boulevard with a khaki-colored chair shaped like a packing peanut.

His basic design went through a prototype stage in which it was built with lesser quality foam and fabric. He made refinements, such as making the back taller because the weight of his body squished the foam too much, lessening the back support.

Once he was happy with the design, he started again, using high-quality polyurethane foam and cotton twill.

The uninitiated usually learn about workrooms through word of mouth, by thumbing through telephone directories and doing Internet searches using the keywords “Los Angeles” and “upholstery,” “foam,” “metal,” “glass” or “plastic.” Or they stumble upon workrooms on busy streets in South Los Angeles, the Mt. Washington area and other pockets where they tend to cluster.

“If you go to one shop and they don’t do that kind of work, they are so well connected they know someone who does,” says Rodgers.

He recommends the first job you take to a workroom be a small project. That way, you can test the workmanship and see how closely the final cost matches the estimate.

To make sure it turns out as you see it, take as many images of what you want to the workroom as you can. If you have a sketch that is exact, have it scanned, enlarged to actual size and printed on heavy bond paper to serve as a template. Kinko’s charges $12 per square foot for this service.

If it’s a quick job, Rodgers stays at the workroom and watches, to make adjustments as it goes and to learn the machine’s capabilities for future projects. Like the couch for his home he’s thinking about now. Without a formal design education, Rodgers says, he learns by being hands-on.

His final piece of advice: “Don’t be intimidated about asking a lot of questions. They won’t think you’re being annoying. They really like interacting with you because they’re usually working for companies and never meet the people.”

Renee Borsack, a public relations director for St. John Knits, has had hits and misses over seven years of furnishing her San Juan Capistrano home by working directly with workrooms in Southern California and Mexico.

A miss: Borsack wanted two chaise longues for the semicircular sitting room off the master bedroom, but the showrooms she visited had only rectangular ones that she says wouldn’t flow with the room.

Instead of settling for ready-made, she went to a workroom with the idea of a rounded seat with a wraparound arm. Since she was experimenting, she thought, why not blend contemporary lines with a traditional skirt and have it all covered in beige Ultrasuede?

“I wanted it to be smooth, soft and very inviting,” she says. “A place you just want to curl up in.” So she came up with a design she thought would work.

The cost: $1,500 each.

Sounds great.

The problem? The arms were too big, eating up more space in the room than she would have liked.

Most people don’t understand scale, says Marne Dupere of Orange, a contemporary furniture showroom on Beverly Boulevard.

“They make it too big or too small, sort of like the scene from ‘This Is Spinal Tap,’ ” in which a band member draws a sketch of a Stonehenge stage set and writes 18 inches when he meant 18 feet.

About a third of the people who wander into Dupere’s showroom want customized furniture, which Orange can do in its off-site workrooms. But not without guidance from the designers who work there.

“We want it to be proportionate,” says Dupere, “unless the customer really wants it out of proportion. And if it’s wacky and they’re putting glass legs on a steel table, it’s not going to happen here.”

Despite a few setbacks, Borsack percolates with new ideas. When her daughters were born, she wanted a changing table but didn’t like what she was seeing in the stores. She envisioned a waist-level chest with three tall cabinets to hide baby lotion and other supplies and two wide drawers for blankets and linens. The chest needed to look sophisticated enough to stay in the girls’ room long after they were out of diapers. And she wanted the alder wood stained to look like the trunk of a tree to continue the room’s theme, set by a collection of colorful birdhouses on the walls.

This time, success.

“It took three weeks to make,” Borsack says with a snap of her fingers.

She has since designed two miniature club chairs for her daughters’ room.

“They are in a diamond pattern brocade with suede piping,” she says. “No one else notices these little details, but I do.”

Empowered, Borsack is eager to return to the no-frills workrooms.

“The owners are nice, but you don’t sit down and aren’t offered a glass of water,” she says.

“But it’s worth it because I get exactly what I want and I save money. I just have to invest the time.”

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START TO FINISH

It really does start with a doodle on a napkin.

The naked chair

David Rodgers, a special-events producer, wants the perfect chair for his Hollywood Boulevard office loft. A low, curvy Verner Panton-inspired chair. He’s had furniture made before – round black ottomans and milky white plastic cube tables. So he knows where to start.

First he asks a friend to scan his napkin sketch into a computer and, using design software, print out a paper template of the chair’s actual shape and size.

At Alcazar Foam Corp., in an old missile factory in South Los Angeles, Rodgers, above right, refines the template with Conrado Gomez. Gomez then traces it onto a thick block of polyurethane foam and guides it through the 6-foot blade of a vertical band saw, right. The tracing and cutting take less than 15 minutes.

A naked chair is born.

Smooshing it

Rodgers crams the chair into his Volvo sedan – “foam smooshes, so it’s easy to move” – and drives it eight miles to the Baja Upholstery Shop in Highland Park. Juggling the chair and yards of khaki-colored cotton twill that he found at the $2 Fabric Store in Bellflower, he passes through the black iron gate and into Baja’s jumbled front room.

Rodgers explains to Reyes Lopez that he wants a single-stitched seam that “disappears,” and not, he emphasizes, heavy double-stitches like the ones – he points, right here – on his jeans. Lopez chalks an outline of the foam chair onto fabric, adding a 1/2-inch seam allowance. He cuts the fabric, sews the pieces together and adds a zipper on the bottom so the slipcover can be washed or replaced, above. This takes less than two hours.

Bragging rights

Rodgers compares the finished chair to a prototype at the fabric store before smooshing it back into the Volvo and taking it to the office of Rabin Rodgers Inc, where he finally has a chance to sit down. His new chair cost $25 for foam and labor, $30 for four yards of fabric and $80 for slipcovering it. For $135, he has exactly what he wanted, as well as the right to brag.

“I’ll show everyone,” he says. “I’ll say, ‘Look at the chair, look at the chair, look at the chair. I did it. Sit in the chair, sit in the chair. Sit in the chair.’ I’m really proud of it.”

– Janet Eastman

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Where to go

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A sampling of workrooms that do custom work and welcome the public:

 FOAM

Alcazar Foam Corp., 4601 S. Main St., Los Angeles, (323) 232-8240. A large workroom that stocks 80 types of foam for commercial use – from movie studio sets to theater seats – and residential projects.

 GLASS

Campbell Custom Glass, 4845 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 735-1445; www.campbellglass.com. Designers and caterers come here to have tables, etageres, sand-carved panels and other pieces made of glass or mirror.

 METAL

O. Vartan Atelier, 12037 1/2 Regentview, Downey. (562) 923-0323. Vartan Ohanian makes original metal tables, chairs and railings.

 PLASTIC

All Valley Plastic, 10634 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood. (818) 760-7594. Tom Oteri and crew are encasing a plasma TV in plastic to be used as an aquarium. But they’ll do simple furniture as well.

 UPHOLSTERY

Baja Upholstery Shop, 3916 N. Figueroa St., Los Angeles. (323) 222-6109. Don’t be rattled by the antique cars parked behind its gates. This workroom does car interiors and furniture upholstery.

Capri Furniture, 4953 Firestone Blvd., South Gate. (323) 569-1200. Bring in a sketch of any upholstered piece – sofa, ottoman, headboard – and V.J. Jooharian will find a way to make it.

Jebejian Enterprises, 1541 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles. (310) 854-4450. Richard Jebejian quit his high-pressure job as a stockbroker decades ago and has been making upholstered furniture ever since.

 WOOD

SDM Furniture Co., 5738 W. Washington Blvd., Los Angeles. (323) 936-0295. A 30-year-old shop making wood furniture, from bamboo beds to exotic wood veneer tables.

CUSTOM-WORK SHOWROOMS

407 Furniture, 407 S. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles. (323) 525-1718; www.407furniture.com. Furniture, art and hand-painted screens, with off-site workrooms.

Orange, 8111 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. (323) 782-6898. Retro-modern furniture showroom – check out the orange beanbag chair that looks like Chewbacca from “Star Wars” is lying on it – with off-site workrooms.

Silho Furniture, 142 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles. (323) 935-9955; www.silhofurniture.com. Tables, desks, beds and upholstered pieces, as well as 1920s-1940s accessories.

Simplaform, 603 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles. (323) 857-1256; www.simplaform.com. A showroom and workroom with furniture inspired by the 1940s-1960s.

– Janet Eastman

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Putting Pieces Together

Made-to-order furniture is the custom at the Cotton Box, which also features a fabric emporium

By JANET EASTMAN

PERSONAL taste. It's so, well, personal. How else can you explain the appeal of a French chaise longue upholstered in Austin Powers' lime-green velour? Or a distressed-finished armoire with modern chrome hardware?

People's expanding need to decorate to reflect their personalities has created a spurt in stores that specialize in custom furniture, which is a part of the $24-billion residential furniture industry in the U.S., according to the American Furniture Manufacturers Assn. in High Point, N.C.

New homeowners needing to fill rooms, newlyweds looking for future heirlooms and shoppers straining to match the style and stains of existing pieces find that made-to-order fits their needs.

The Cotton Box Home on Melrose is an example of showrooms that give people the power to piece together the parts they see on the floor--a cushion from one sofa, the arms from another--and have it in their home in a few weeks.

Gavin Brodin opened the Cotton Box a year ago as a fabric store in the shadow of heavyweights Diamond Foam & Fabric Co. and the Silk Trading Co. Soon he found that many of his customers inquired about custom furniture as well, so last month he doubled his space to 12,000 square feet and stocked it with examples of traditional and contemporary European-inspired furniture that can be made in his downtown factory in two to six weeks.

The Cotton Box (a name that Brodin just liked the sound of but that doesn't reflect the fabric selection) is separated into two side-by-side stores: one for furniture and one for fabrics. (Brodin made a name for himself in south London by opening a chain of fine fabric stores.) The furniture gallery sells sofas, chairs, tables, cabinets, beds and armoires--for clothes, electronics or collectibles--that are made of solid wood with European hardware.

The Cotton Box follows the tradition of showrooms offering room vignettes to help people visualize how everything could look--in style and scale--in a room, and to present complementary pieces and accessories. But these setups are just suggestions, says Brodin, who adds, "We can make anything in every style and stain."

One vignette has a 7-foot Notting Hill-style sofa with a solid alder frame, filled with white goose down and wrapped in camel-colored ultra suede ($2,695). Boxing in the sofa is a three-piece espresso-colored modular bookcase ($2,395). Also part of the set are two oversized butter-soft black leather club chairs with modern tufting ($1,795 each), a dark-grained coffee table ($995) and a 5-by-8-foot swirl-patterned silk rug ($2,100). Completing the scene are a silver modern Deco lamp (at $450, it's "the most expensive table lamp in the store," says Brodin) as well as candles, imported ceramic vases and frames.

The fabric store houses more than 1,500 rolls, from classic silks, linens and cottons to bolder woven animal prints and velvets from the 1960s and '70s. A Ratti paisley cotton from India sells for $69 a yard while a Lismore red chenille is $23 a yard. Customers can work with staff interior designers to create wall and window treatments, bed linens, pillows and upholstered furniture.

Set directors and party planners such as Donielle Baca of Paulette Wolf Events & Entertainment Inc. use the Cotton Box as an inspiration point. Baca, who was looking for ideas for a large corporate event, was caressing a roll of khaki-colored silk with pearl beading. "Unique ideas have to come from somewhere and a fabric store is a good place to start," she says.

The Cotton Box Home, 7020 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, (323) 931-9920; www.thecottonbox.com.