An insight into our creative furniture design process
Here at The Odd Thing, we always live up to our name. Our furniture designs are unique, innovative, bold, and sometimes a little bit quirky.
There’s nothing we love more than the challenge of a creative brief. When a client gives us a budget and free rein to come up with a new concept or look for their furniture. It’s a privilege to have clients that trust our design instincts to such a degree.
It’s one of the qualities that makes us stand out from the crowd.
The 5-step creative process
Initial chat by phone, email or video call to take details of the project, budget and understand the result you’d like to achieve. We’ll ask you to take some photographs of the piece and/or the space where it’s going to live, then make some initial suggestions for you to think about.
For larger projects we visit your property and assess the room where the piece will live. This involves looking at the décor and colour palette, other furniture in the room, likes/dislikes, taking measurements and chatting further about the look you’d like to achieve.
We go away and and do some further research about the look and style you’d like to achieve, and price up all materials, fixtures and fittings needed for the job.
This is where our graphic design skills come into their own. We create a selection of individually priced scale digital design concepts for you to choose from. The design work is all included in the price of the job. If you choose not to go ahead with any of our designs, we reserve the right to charge a fee for any bespoke design work undertaken.
We share our designs with you, then comes the hard part - choosing which one to go for! At this stage, we’ll usually have another chat to discuss the concepts you like and make tweaks based on your feedback. Sometimes this means taking your favourite elements of two designs and merging them into one.
Then it’s off to the workshop to transform our designs into reality...
A simple change makes a huge difference
Every piece of furniture sparks a creative thinking process. We love to bounce ideas around with clients - and they absolutely love us for it! Even if you don’t consider yourself creative, our questions usually spark something within.
For example, we suggested adding a simple upholstered seat cushion to a client’s bench seat. It was something they had never thought of and completely transformed the seat with a splash of colour (and makes for a comfy seat for taking your shoes off!). Sometimes the simplest of changes can make such a difference.
A cute alternative to rainbow brights
On another project upcycling a chest of drawers for a rather special 6-year-old client, we found out she liked the colour blue and rainbows. Rather than go for clichéd rainbow stripes, we focused our unusual design on three shades of blue and added the rainbow through the drawer handles.
Mum also told us she was hoping the drawers would encourage her daughter to put away her clothes. We suggested adding drawer dividers to make the task easy.
Here’s what she had to say about the finished result:
“Matthew helped us to save a broken chest of drawers from going to landfill. He didn’t just re-build the drawers, he took us on a creative journey and completely transformed them.
Matthew asked about the room’s colour scheme, my daughter’s likes and dislikes, and even suggested adding drawer dividers to encourage her to fold her own clothes - genius! He came up with some really unusual and creative designs and listened to our feedback to achieve the perfect colour combination.
The end result is fantastic! We’re so pleased with it. I’m already budgeting for our next upcycling job!”