Upholstered Furniture: Design & Construction

by Mario Dal Fabbro

Created by a well known designer and furniture engineer, this book provides you with a unique pictorial approach to the design, construction, and upholstering of contemporary furniture. The book is... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0070151806
• ISBN13: 9780070151802
• Release Date: January 1969
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
• Weight: 2.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

modern furniture only, but if you design and make modern furniture, this book could make you rich

Woodworkers tend to be purists. They love the material and look of wood as nature made it. While customers may ooh and ahh about the beauty of solid-wood furniture, making it nice is a helluva lot of work, and doing the finishing right is even more. Add to that this truth: Upholstered chairs and couches are more comfortable than hard, expensive, labor-intensive, solid wood art furniture. While the public may appreciate your craftsmanship as a wood artisan, few will pay you fairly for it if you choose it as your career. Of course a niche may be carved-out with relentless marketing, though many who earn their living building fine wood-furniture are backed into supplementing their incomes through teaching or writing. So how, you ask, does this relate to modern upholstered furniture and making money at woodworking? Well, the public doesn't, in general, care how great and pure you are at woodworking. They care about whether their furniture looks good, in nice to live with, and meets their needs. Upholstered furniture, while not necessarilly easy to design, is cheap to manufacture. Cheap in terms of labor, primarily, because there is no real need for joinery, nor sanding, nor finishing. Here and there of course wood parts may poke out and need special treatment, but as a rule the wood parts in upholstered furniture are sawn-out, quickly joined with the staples, screws, nails, and metal gussets... in fact the frames are quite ugly and uncraftsmanlike. It is in the upholstery-work and in the designer's mind such furniture comes alive... and once the design problems are worked-out, upholstered furniture can be cranked out quickly and cheaply. Even when done in fine silks the cost of materials and labor is much less than it would be with solid-wood pieces. So the real question is... do you want to make money as a furniture designer? If so, get this book. It's the only one I've ever found that shows you the insider tricks to designing and building this stuff. Sure, there are some books that show you how to do a Chippendale couch... or fix one anyway - you'll bury yourself in horsehair and cotton batting doing that sort of traditional work. This book is all about foam and vinyl and plywood and pre-fab metal parts and how to put it together as a "product". And with such a line of "products" you can move from humble, sweating craftsman to semi-famous designer of furniture. Something to think about.