Beau":3an8n73r said:
I don't think you want to be selling just furniture as mentioned there is lots of good functional furniture out there going for peanuts. You need to make art that works as furniture then money seems immaterial to those that want it. This is coming from someone who was a good maker but bad designer and never made any money after 15+ years of furniture making.
You raise a very interesting point.
For most of the 20th century the majority of independent furniture makers, no matter what particular style they worked in, followed the Arts & Crafts ideal of making functional furniture that was intended for real homes or real workplaces. It rarely worked out that way, as bespoke furniture was just too expensive for anyone but the wealthiest few percent. But sometime during the late 1980's and early 1990's something remarkable happened in both the US and the UK, a few audacious makers began to position their furniture as either artworks or as future antiques, so not for the top 1% but instead for the top 0.1% or 0.01%, and previously unimagined prices began to be achieved. Suddenly the target market for bespoke furniture was no longer well-off but still middle class lawyers and company directors, it was now super rich hedge fund managers and museums.
Many people have identified John Makepeace's "Millennium Chair" as a turning point in the UK (despite its name I think the first of these chairs was actually made in the late 1980's). This article from 1993 gives a flavour of the impact that this movement, often called Studio Furniture, was having,
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 62748.html
A generation of furniture makers in the UK and US looked at these six figure prices and concluded (not unreasonably!) that instead of walking a perilous financial tightrope they'd get themselves an agent, produce just one or two astonishing pieces a year, and cash in on this new bonanza.
It also heralded a desperate scramble to raise skill levels in order to make pieces which were at the very cutting edge of what could be achieved. This is a bit of sidetrack but it's an important one. To make good quality
rectilinear furniture isn't all that difficult. Maybe something of the order of 1,000-1,200 hours of training will normally get someone to the level where they can make most furniture that's primarily composed of straight lines and right angles (think Shaker style furniture for example), a dedicated hobbyist could reasonably aspire to this standard. To become a fully rounded "cabinet maker", i.e. able to make veneered, curved, laminated, shaped, and compound angled work such as jointed chairs or a Carlton House Desk, is a level above this, and probably requires 10,000-12,000 hours, so in effect not much different to a traditional apprenticeship. But the astronomical prices for "Studio Furniture" required the maker to raise their game to a third level, where they were making pieces that involved genuinely new and highly demanding techniques like free form lamination. So there was a migration to the workshops of Makepeace, Barnsley, Osgood, and Krenov where designer makers thought (rightly or wrongly) they could equip themselves with the masterpiece skills to break into this new super priced market. It's also no co-incidence that in the UK the Guild Mark took on a new significance, as makers hoped that by winning a Guild Mark they could join this elite club and attract the attention of museums and collectors.
But here's the thing. When the 2007/8 crash happened the Studio Furniture market was one of its first victims, commissions evaporated overnight. And, when I talk to people who were or are genuine players in this category, I'm told sales have been very, very slow to come back. Even though six figure prices are still occasionally being realised today, it does seem they are now very much fewer than they were. Maybe this business will bounce back, who knows, however as of today it seems it was a brief twenty year aberration that's been and gone. But that hasn't prevented a small group of extremely talented makers doggedly pursuing this particular dream. Good luck to them, even if the super high priced market isn't there, they're pushing the boundaries of what's possible in furniture making and as far as I'm concerned that's a wonderful thing in itself!
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