Built-in Furniture

Here are some of the best examples of built-in furniture and cabinetry for nearly every room in the house. Jim Tolpin treats you to a room-by-room survey of unique design solutions and strategies that you can use to add functional and delightful built-ins to your home.

Built-in furnishings offer many advantages over freestanding furniture: They are generally less expensive to build than stand-alone furniture of the same type and size. They give you great latitude in designing the look and function of your interior spaces -- you are not limited to designing around existing furniture pieces. And because of the manner in which built-in furnishings are constructed, you can maximize the use of the most unusual spaces while creating an effective and aesthetically pleasing design solution.

Introduction

1 Architectural Furniture

2 Designing Built-ins

3 Principles of Built-in Construction

4 Foyers and Living Rooms

5 Dining Rooms

6 Kitchens

7 Rooms for Reading and Entertainment

8 Home Offices

9 Family Rooms

10 Utility Room

11 Bedrooms

Contributors

Index

"It is quite impossible to consider the building as one thing and its furnishings another...the very chairs, tables and cabinets -- where practical -- are of the building, never fixtures -upon it."

-- Frank Lloyd Wright, American Architecture

I'd wager that you could find built-in furniture in nearly any type of American home: from the parlor-wall storage cupboards of the earliest New England saltboxes to the family room/audiovisual entertainment centers of the neo-modern villas lining California's Skyline Boulevard. Why are built-ins so ubiquitous in our homes?

For the early colonists, storage and comfort were important needs. Built-in cupboards provided the most storage space for the lowest cost and maximized the use of the interior space of the thick, timber-framed walls. Other built-in furnishings were created to satisfy the need for comfort: Benches worked into an alcove by the fireplace created a warm, cozy space within these notoriously chilly homes.

For later American designers and builders -- notably Frank Lloyd Wright and Greene and Greene -- architectural unity, was the goal. Built-in furnishings allowed these designers unprecedented control over the ultimate look and function of the home. Rather than having to work around existing free-standing furniture, they would, with built-in furnishings, design interior spaces that achieved a unique, yet comfortable, effect: an interior landscape in which highly functional furnishings blended harmoniously into their surroundings.

Because the creation of built-in furnishings often demands unique design, construction, and installation techniques, this book begins with chapters devoted to these issues. Armed with some fundamental principles, you then embark on a room by room inspection of contemporary built-ins chosen for their visual appeal, unique design solutions, or extraordinary detailing. It is a close look that includes detailed explanations and illustrations of the special design, construction, and installation strategies used by their builders. By the end of this book, I'm sure you will agree with me that built-in furnishings are far more than "furniture without legs."