Why Custom Furniture?
“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking."
Henry Ford
Meet your maker
“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten."
Benjamin Franklin
Why buy custom made furniture? Are you looking to build a bookshelf or some alcove units in a Victorian home, with 100s of years of character? Despite what some YouTube hacks may suggest, you won’t find that on the shelf at Ikea. A table, a reading nook or a side board that fits into oddly spaced nook - none of these can be found at a chain furniture store.
Items bought off-the-shelf are always mass produced to a set number of sizes and with limited options - always optimised for profit and not with you, the individual consumer, in mind.
Not that there's anything wrong with IKEA style furniture - if that's the budget you have disposable at the moment then they certainly offer a very good, well prices selection at quality well above the lower end. And for someone like me, there's no competing with that. Large furniture companies buy materials by the truckload at deep discounts and use computer controlled machinery to cut and assemble their products to increase output, decrease prices and increase margins.
Here at Seafront Furniture, every piece of furniture is made from scratch - I design and build one project at a time with materials that are hand picked to meet client specifications. High quality materials are generally only one of the drivers of cost for custom furniture - the other is labor and craftsmanship.
To help you visualise your project, all our designs begin with a 3-dimensional digital rendering to help visualise the look of the final piece. Once we've agreed on a design and the features required, we sill start sourcing materials. The overall time frame for final delivery and/or installation varies - it is based on current work in production, plus the time to build your piece of custom furniture.
Hi I'm Chris and I run this very small business based in Portsmouth, Hampshire on the South Coast of England. My journey to furniture design and making of custom pieces is probably more unusual than most you'll read about.
I'd love to tell you a story about how as a little toddler I grabbed my granddad's hand plane and started shaving away, forming a close and intimate bond with the timber in my hands. But the truth is - for most of my life building furniture was just an idea in my head and I only started pursuing this dream in my late 30s.
I spent the vast majority of my career working corporate jobs, first as a Store Manager for an Apple Premium Reseller, then as a Senior Negotiator for a larger UK based Real Estate company. While I loved working in the Apple world, I hated the corporate element of it.
I grew up in different places - Germany, Canada, the US, then Belgium - safe to say I'm a cultural mess! I remember falling in love with maple, cherry and walnut in Canada, being drawn to their natural beauty, the grain patterns, the almost divine inspiration that can be drawn just from touching these timbers. And to this day, they remain my favourite species to work with - cherry in particular.
A few years back my brain went into meltdown during another long, pointless corporate meeting and I decided to finally follow my calling - building furniture. Every day is a learning curve but the passion for my craft keeps me going! Can't wait to see what we're building next!