New Company Offers Custom, On-Demand Furniture
One of the more difficult aspects of furnishing a small house or apartment is finding properly proportioned furniture. A good deal of what’s out there is designed for girthsome American homes: big tables, deep desks, huge hutches and so on. For example, when my wife and I were furnishing our home, it was tough to find a very shallow, medium-width desk designed for a laptop and nothing else. We ended up ordering a custom desk, but the end-product was both expensive and because it was a handmade one-off, it ended up being not quite what we wanted/expected. A new Kickstarter project called PARSONAL by design studio Arrister is trying to sidestep the expenses and perils of one-off furniture manufacturing by creating on-demand, custom furniture.
It’s probably more apt to call PARSONAL “semi-custom” as you choose from one of their basic designs, which at this point includes tables, desks, shelves and various stands. But from the basic design you can use PARSONAL’s web-based “Configurator” software and customize the size of the piece, shelf configuration (when applicable) and the finish of the tops and trim.
PARSONAL’s pieces are attractive in a nondescript, lots-of-right-angles sorta way (this is actually a compliment). Make Magazine says of PARSONAL’s aesthetic, “The simplicity of the design makes it ideal for their first offering as it simplifies both the software and fabrication considerations.” The designs would fit in easily to a variety of modern interiors. All the furniture is made of solid wood sourced near Arrister’s Tennessee homebase, so this is actually stuff you might consider holding on to. And prices are decent. Their big ticket item is a dining table that comes with a $650 pledge–pretty reasonable considering you can tweak to your specifications.
The company told us that they plan to expand their catalog into more complex furniture in the future and once production is ramped up, they expect turnaround to be about three weeks from ordering to the furniture’s flatpack delivery. Check out their Kickstarter campaign page for more info.