ArchiTakes on integrating furniture into our design:
Furniture itself is architecture, and its design has as much bearing on quality of space as do walls and finishes. Include its cost in the budget for a house and, before scrimping, weigh its impact against other costs. Consider that a person can be only one place at a time, and will spend the great majority of time in one or two preferred seats. Match furniture to the character of its users and setting.
In our places — whether our first, second, or third place — we have a chair, a table, a corner of the room that we sit on or touch. Plan for those places, invest in those places. Marco Arment recently with a simple metric:
If you sit on, sleep on, stare at, or touch something for more than an hour a day, spend whatever it takes to get the best.
The Philip Johnson Glass House, thought of as a single house, is, in fact, a series of them on a 47-acre property connected by pathways. A series of places for people to sit, connected intentionally. “What is a house but a seat?” said Thoreau. We might consider a single room, then, as a series of houses with pathways between them. Change your vantage point, and design for furniture.
