Written by Diyana J
First time hearing about Custom Furniture? Here’s some know-how and useful tips to keep in mind when tackling your ideas and most importantly – how to make it work for you and your family!
1. Inspiration – Custom Furniture should dress up the interior of your home.
Whilst Urban Salvation is progressively updating our Socials (Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook) with previous custom and original furniture pieces, we strongly recommend coming to the Gallery with reference photos of the furniture pieces you have in mind. From materials to dimensions, to intricate design patterns and bold color palettes – the more information we receive, the more solid your design vision. Here’s some of my favourite places to look at to get your inner interior stylist going!
Stacked Homes is famous for their well-thought-out videos that provide detailed insight on local homes and their homeowners. Their YouTube videos and interviews typically detail what the homeowners had in mind whilst planning the look and feel of their environment, and the steps they took to realize their visions. It’s a great place to source out ideas that many fellow Singaporeans have used when faced with a lack of space or daylight.
What I typically do all the time, is searching through Pinterest. What’s unique about it is that there are millions of images and videos floating about, and because its database is commonly used by designers, the right search might lead you to the exact image references you might need to make your vision a little more accurate to what you have in mind. It’s also pretty accessible. Creating a Pinterest Board to collate all of your reference photos in one place is an easy way to keep track of where your design vision may lead you to- and any possible changes in the future.
My personal favourite: The Local Project is a YouTube Channel featuring exclusively Australian and New Zealand interior designers and architects. Their film language is spectacular and the interviews they conduct with the designers themselves, always shed light to the initial brief of the Houses/Apartments featured. While you might think that sourcing for inspiration from designers overseas may not feel appropriate, the best way to create a unique furniture piece is to broaden your horizons. Taking a portion of what you like and making the right tweaks here and there is the best way to achieving a unique, one-of-a-kind design.
Having a rough idea of what the interior of your home looks like, would make it easier for you to decide the general details on what furniture pieces should fill up its space. As they say, it’s always better to look at the bigger picture.
2. Dimensions & Configuration
Let’s say you want to customize a vinyl console. Typically, you’d need to sketch out a rough idea of the dimensions. The easiest way to do this is to take measurements of where you’d be placing it in your home, and taking note of any size limitations you might run into. There’s also the issue about configuration – this is where our designers come in. If you have a specific audio set up with stereos and panels that may be a bit too large, take those dimensions as well so that we can create specific compartments for you to store them to your liking.
There are different types of cable management to choose from as well- from narrow trunks built in at the back of your vinyl/tv console, or even a separate compartment built in. So have the dimensions ready and we’ll handle the rest. Fun fact! Our Vinyl Consoles have front and top compartments specifically fit to the size of vinyl records.
This also goes for the rest of the furniture pieces we offer (tv consoles, shelves, cabinets etc.) You can always choose to add in extra shelves, or even take away a shelf to make for a larger space. The configuration, or rather, the number of shelves, compartments and sizing is completely up to you.
3. Materials & Design
At Urban Salvation, we use mainly reclaimed teak, available in different tones of cognac, tobacco, clear matte and natural. As of now, you may have ideas in mind that require detailed wood carvings or even a very specific shape, for example oblong dining tables to TV consoles with fluted panel sliding doors. Once you’ve decided on a specific pattern or design, our designers would be able to tell you if these ideas are possible, or whether certain tweaks have to be made for Urban Salvation to create them for you. All of our furniture pieces are handcrafted and made to order- so wood carvings that are too detailed may not be possible. Unlike typical furniture shops, our furniture pieces are not mass produced and certainly, you’d get the highest quality product due to the fact that we have a dedicated team in Indonesia putting together your furniture pieces by hand.
If you are looking to purchase a dining table – we offer reclaimed teak, suar and mahogany. The dimensions are totally up to you, although we’ve capped it at 2.1m so that our delivery team would be able to transport the dining table slab to your doorstep without any hiccups (most lifts have a height of 2.3m).
To Wrap Up…
More often than not, there’s a common misunderstanding of what Urban Salvation does. We’re not a typical furniture company- we’ve been built on a solid foundation of sustainability and reinvention whilst constantly balancing the expectations of our customers and communicating to them what steps we take to produce high quality furniture that makes their purchase part of a sustainable movement. Our aim to reduce wood wastage, employ locally and educating our customers on the possibilities of our materials and designs, has always been what makes us different.
Photos by Irfan Rosli (@_roniin)
Location: Urban Salvation Main Gallery