Style statement: Designer furniture on display

Looking for a trendy and chic lifestyle? A home, which is inviting, with living rooms that speak of elegance and comfort; and plush beds, which promise instant sleep. This is the designer lifestyle, which appeals to the youngsters of today. And to cater to their whims, a new breed of furniture designers are striving hard to bring international standards of comfort and elegance to the Indian market.

Gone are the days when you had to buy whatever your local furniture store had in stock. Today, you can order exactly the kind of furniture you want. And when it comes to innovative, state-of-the-art design, furniture designers are producing incredible designs to sweep people off their feet.

Moreover, buying furniture has now become a matter of personal taste, limited only by practical considerations like the size of the room and the climate of the place you stayed in.

Bold colours, a modern and peppy look, fusion designs and furniture with details, have come to dominate the style. Apart from designing, furniture designers also give advice on the arrangement of furniture to give it a specific feel.

What do i have to do?

Furniture designers advise, select and assemble furnishings, colour schemes, artefacts, etc. to do up a place, keeping in mind a client?s taste, personality, lifestyle and budget.

They often use original artwork, exquisitely crafted furniture and accessories, exclusively designed. Furniture designers use a wide variety of materials from commercial plywood, decorative plywood to panel doors with designer PVC sheets and imported veneer etc. The material used is of course, dependent on the budget of the client.

To succeed in this field, you need to be creative, with the ability to respond to the practical and emotional needs of people at home, in the work place, and at leisure.

Ergonomics plays a major role in comfortable office furniture. The course in furniture design combines the functional and aesthetic aspects of designing and producing furniture for residential, commercial and the hospitality industry.

One should also have an awareness of how businesses operate, knowledge of contemporary design and craft, and sensitivity to historical and cultural aspects of design.

What should i study?

For most courses in furniture design, you should be a graduate in any stream. For the postgraduate diploma in furniture design offered by NID, you should have completed your graduation in engineering, architecture or interior design.

The goal of the furniture design programme is to encourage and assist students in the development of an individual artistic statement based on intellectual, aesthetic and technical capabilities.

After undertaking this course, the students are capable of designing various types of furniture with the optimum utilisation of space while at the same time creating a comfortable and pleasant atmosphere.

What next?

Furniture design offers great prospects in the hospitality industry, especially in doing up the interiors of hotels, restaurants, private homes, schools, government organisations, museums, handicraft emporiums etc. You can be employed as a professional for organising large scale exhibitions.

Furniture designers can also set up shop as entrepreneurs or even venture into retailing brand furniture. Some of the well-known companies in furniture design like IKEA, Durian, Shilpi Udyog, Anand Furniture, Collins India, Usha Shriram Furniture Industries, Design Space, etc. employ these designers.

You can also graduate from designing upholstered furniture to working on office chairs, or into a more retail-focused area, like becoming a buyer for furniture associated with different stores, or choosing and selecting furniture for individual clients.

The remuneration depends on the scale on which the designer operates as well as the nature of the projects.

Success in this field will depend on talent, contacts, self-promotion and marketing. Reputation and generating goodwill is also very important in this field.

where to study

• National Institute of Design, Paldi, Ahmedabad www.nid.edu
• Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Yelahanka New Town, Bangalore
• South Delhi Polytechnic for Women, Lajpatnagar, New Delhi
• Apeejay Institute of Design, 54, Tughlakabad Institutional Area, New Delhi