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I'll be honest I have no idea where you're looking. If you're looking at retail furniture stores in the US, then no you're not going to find it, unless you go f

I'll be honest I have no idea where you're looking. If you're looking at retail furniture stores in the US, then no you're not going to find it, unless you go far upmarket. But hop onto any woodworking forum/subreddit (well not r/woodworking as that's mostly beginners) and you'll find cabinetmakers willing to work with you for pieces. Few retail furniture outlets have a customer base willing to pay the prices needed for cabinetry, though I presume on a Silicon Valley tech salary you should be fine. Alternatively, reach out to an interior designer in your area who probably has contacts with many small cabinetry shops in the area. I'd link a few cabinetmakers I know of but I'd rather not call them out in a public forum. Patreon is going to have some also. Reddit's r/finishing has some experienced cabinetmakers. Another strategy is to go to a used furniture store, pick up an old piece made of solid wood/plywood, and ask a cabinetmaker to restore it, the same as furniture used to be passed down. If you're in the Bay Area I'll recommend Urban Ore as a good, cheap place to find used furniture. There are antique stores galore which restore old furniture and sell them for large amounts of money. In the past, the capability to build cheap furniture just wasn't there so everything you bought was made from solid wood and was hand-joined which is why your grandparents' family's furniture seems so much stronger. The market also had a floor on how cheap it could get before mechanization and the invention of composite materials so it was "easy" to find expensive furniture and "hard" to find cheap furniture. FYI plywood can make furniture that outlasts individuals and has been in use in furniture since the early 1900s. When you're thinking of crappy veneered engineered wood, you're probably thinking of MDF and OSB furniture. Most furniture at retail furniture stores are majority MDF and OSB because of cost and largely weight as both plywood and solid wood tend to be very heavy for their load bearing capabilities.

jjav 5y ago
> I'll be honest I have no idea where you're looking. Silicon Valley area. At the very top of the market, yes, one can get fully custom furnitue to any spec you like, for a very high price. I know a few people who have done remodels with such custom furniture and the cost has been over 100K on the low end to closer to a million on the high end. Even with a senior silicon valley salary, that's as good as impossible. That's why I mention that in my grandparents generation, even low-income families could afford solid quality furniture. Today it is a privilege limited to those who hit major IPOs.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > That's why I mention that in my grandparents generation, even low-income families could afford solid quality furniture. Today it is a privilege limited to those who hit major IPOs. Then go to an antique store. They restore old, expensive pieces, the same way people in the past would pass down heirloom furniture and the same way most poorer folks would buy their furniture. You're just not going to be able to get new, solid wooden furniture as cheap as you did even 80 years ago and this has nothing to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress". There's exponentially more people in the world now, correspondingly less wood, and greater awareness about how to sustainably forest. Modern cabinetry is done with PPE to keep the woodworker safe and shops are ventilated and vacuumed to keep the area clean. None of this has to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress". The ideology itself is tautological; instead of exploring what the problem is, it purports itself to be the solution to all problems. Good cabinetry is still available in the market at expensive prices but there are reasons why solid wooden furniture has become more expensive. These reasons are immaterial in the face of "good old days before progress for the sake of progress", even though PPE and occupational safety has been some of the gains made through this "progress for the sake of progress."
  - Clubber 5y ago
    >None of this has to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress". It wasn't for the sake of progress, it was for the sake of profits. Making something almost as good that costs half the price is what the US has been doing for the last 30 years. After 30 years of "almost as good," turned in to absolute shit when compared to the older stuff. Technology of course isn't bad for the sake of being bad. Electric tools is what allowed the old furniture to be so good at a reasonable price. Wood glue and sawdust being pressed into something that looks like wood but falls apart fairly easily, is an example of when technology makes things much worse and is used strictly for maximizing profit at the expense of quality. There's a lot of that today.
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      > Wood glue and sawdust being pressed into something that looks like wood but falls apart fairly easily, is an example of when technology makes things much worse and is used strictly for maximizing profit at the expense of quality. There's a lot of that today. Right so let's dive into that a bit. Why is this maximizing profit? Because solid wood is expensive. Why is solid wood expensive? Because it's a limited resource. I can guarantee you that if governments took away forestry restrictions that solid wood furniture would start to be built in a matter of months as new wood mills setup churning through previously restricted lands, at least until the Earth is deforested and climate change wreaks even greater havoc than it is already. Then once the forests are gone, the wood industry will collapse and wooden furniture would end until some brave government musters the will to repopulate a few forests. Profit isn't the scary boogieman that this ideology likes to make it out to be. Profit is the difference between revenue and expense. Reducing expenses is a way to use resources more efficiently. In this case, we stave off deforestation by pressing low-quality wood scraps and sawdust into OSB and MDF boards. Would you rather we deforest the Earth instead? Remember that working with OSB and MDF is tricky because of how brittle they are as materials. It is much easier _and cheaper_ to design processes around solid wood or plywood if possible. Fundamentally wood is a limited resource. Learning how to use wood more efficiently is what allows more humans to have a quality of life where they can afford furniture at all while keeping the Earth forested. In general though, applying the critique that chasing profits has impacted furniture quality is shortsighted. Margins on furniture are tiny. Consumers only have so much money they are willing to spend on furniture and cabinetmakers and industrialized furniture companies respond in kind. The critique would be more cogent _if_ furniture profit margins were higher but they really aren't. Unfortunately, wood really is just that expensive. Don't believe me just ask some woodworkers. Or go to the lumberyard and just try to do some rough calculation on how much it would take to build a piece out of solid wood. This all comes back to my main point. The ideology that progress/profits/conspiracy is what's making things worse and the past was a better status quo is tautological; there's no proof or even research necessary to make the statement, only the invocation of conspiracy (c.f. profits.) Markets are complicated because reality is complicated. Some markets are indeed full of morally bankrupt boards charging huge margins on cheap goods. But reality has a surprising amount of detail and using some tautological ideology to advocate for technological regression is short-sighted. Go talk to a few cabinetmakers and ask them about their feelings (or complaints lol) on Ikea furniture. I can guarantee you that will give you better insight into the world of furniture and wood than making a tautological anti-capitalist statement would with ideological eschatological fervor.

jjav 5y ago

> I'll be honest I have no idea where you're looking. Silicon Valley area. At the very top of the market, yes, one can get fully custom furnitue to any spec you like, for a very high price. I know a few people who have done remodels with such custom furniture and the cost has been over 100K on the low end to closer to a million on the high end. Even with a senior silicon valley salary, that's as good as impossible. That's why I mention that in my grandparents generation, even low-income families could afford solid quality furniture. Today it is a privilege limited to those who hit major IPOs.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
> That's why I mention that in my grandparents generation, even low-income families could afford solid quality furniture. Today it is a privilege limited to those who hit major IPOs. Then go to an antique store. They restore old, expensive pieces, the same way people in the past would pass down heirloom furniture and the same way most poorer folks would buy their furniture. You're just not going to be able to get new, solid wooden furniture as cheap as you did even 80 years ago and this has nothing to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress". There's exponentially more people in the world now, correspondingly less wood, and greater awareness about how to sustainably forest. Modern cabinetry is done with PPE to keep the woodworker safe and shops are ventilated and vacuumed to keep the area clean. None of this has to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress". The ideology itself is tautological; instead of exploring what the problem is, it purports itself to be the solution to all problems. Good cabinetry is still available in the market at expensive prices but there are reasons why solid wooden furniture has become more expensive. These reasons are immaterial in the face of "good old days before progress for the sake of progress", even though PPE and occupational safety has been some of the gains made through this "progress for the sake of progress."
- Clubber 5y ago
  >None of this has to do with the "good old days before progress for the sake of progress". It wasn't for the sake of progress, it was for the sake of profits. Making something almost as good that costs half the price is what the US has been doing for the last 30 years. After 30 years of "almost as good," turned in to absolute shit when compared to the older stuff. Technology of course isn't bad for the sake of being bad. Electric tools is what allowed the old furniture to be so good at a reasonable price. Wood glue and sawdust being pressed into something that looks like wood but falls apart fairly easily, is an example of when technology makes things much worse and is used strictly for maximizing profit at the expense of quality. There's a lot of that today.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    > Wood glue and sawdust being pressed into something that looks like wood but falls apart fairly easily, is an example of when technology makes things much worse and is used strictly for maximizing profit at the expense of quality. There's a lot of that today. Right so let's dive into that a bit. Why is this maximizing profit? Because solid wood is expensive. Why is solid wood expensive? Because it's a limited resource. I can guarantee you that if governments took away forestry restrictions that solid wood furniture would start to be built in a matter of months as new wood mills setup churning through previously restricted lands, at least until the Earth is deforested and climate change wreaks even greater havoc than it is already. Then once the forests are gone, the wood industry will collapse and wooden furniture would end until some brave government musters the will to repopulate a few forests. Profit isn't the scary boogieman that this ideology likes to make it out to be. Profit is the difference between revenue and expense. Reducing expenses is a way to use resources more efficiently. In this case, we stave off deforestation by pressing low-quality wood scraps and sawdust into OSB and MDF boards. Would you rather we deforest the Earth instead? Remember that working with OSB and MDF is tricky because of how brittle they are as materials. It is much easier _and cheaper_ to design processes around solid wood or plywood if possible. Fundamentally wood is a limited resource. Learning how to use wood more efficiently is what allows more humans to have a quality of life where they can afford furniture at all while keeping the Earth forested. In general though, applying the critique that chasing profits has impacted furniture quality is shortsighted. Margins on furniture are tiny. Consumers only have so much money they are willing to spend on furniture and cabinetmakers and industrialized furniture companies respond in kind. The critique would be more cogent _if_ furniture profit margins were higher but they really aren't. Unfortunately, wood really is just that expensive. Don't believe me just ask some woodworkers. Or go to the lumberyard and just try to do some rough calculation on how much it would take to build a piece out of solid wood. This all comes back to my main point. The ideology that progress/profits/conspiracy is what's making things worse and the past was a better status quo is tautological; there's no proof or even research necessary to make the statement, only the invocation of conspiracy (c.f. profits.) Markets are complicated because reality is complicated. Some markets are indeed full of morally bankrupt boards charging huge margins on cheap goods. But reality has a surprising amount of detail and using some tautological ideology to advocate for technological regression is short-sighted. Go talk to a few cabinetmakers and ask them about their feelings (or complaints lol) on Ikea furniture. I can guarantee you that will give you better insight into the world of furniture and wood than making a tautological anti-capitalist statement would with ideological eschatological fervor.