You don’t need a lot of tools or experience to make furniture. Over the years we’ve posted about simple DIY furniture resources, mostly, but not all, from the 1970s, and I thought I’d collect those posts into one mega post.

It turns out I’m not the only nerd obsessed with dated DIY furniture manuals. In compiling this list I came across a bibliography by designer Sam Winks that included many of the books I own or have digital copies of and many more that I’ve never seen before. You can read his post and bibliography here. In addition to furniture manuals, Winks has a bunch of DIY home building books that I haven’t included in this list. He refers to his collection of books as “The Self Determination Library.”

The plan is to keep adding to this post. If you know of books and resources for cheap, easy to make, well designed furniture leave a comment. For every resource that I’ve mentioned there’s probably a dozen more. When possible I’ve linked to free pdfs or books you can borrow at the Internet Archive.

Gerritt Rietveld
I built a set of Gerritt Rietveld crate chairs for our patio recently and I really like them. They were easy to build and surprisingly comfortable. There’s a handy, bilingual Dutch/English book of plans How to Construct Rietveld Furniture/Rietveld Meubels om zelf te maken that includes Rietveld’s crate furniture as well as many of his other designs. Most projects in this book require a table saw, but many of the designs could be built with a circular saw and/or chop saw and screws.

Enzo Mari
Root Simple reader Mosscarpet tipped us off to the extraordinary a DIY furniture manual Autoprogettazione (roughly translatable as “self design”) by Italian designer Enzo Mari. Here’s a free download of Mari’s 1974 manual Autoprogettazione.

Instant Furniture
Peter Stamberg’s 1976 book Instant furniture : low-cost, well-designed, easy-to-assemble tables, chairs, couches, beds, desks, and storage systems, provides clear plans for some of Enzo Mari’s pieces as well as Stamberg’s own designs that show a heavy Mari influence.

EOOS Open Design Manual
Originally conceived for a refugee aid project the design collective EOOS has a free Social Furniture Open Design Manual featuring some simple and handsome tables, shelves, kitchen cabinets and even a raised garden bed. The designs remind me of Joep van Lieshout’s work.

Will Holman
We had Will Holman on episode 55 of our podcast. He collected his stylish and resourceful wisdom into a DIY manual called Guerilla furniture design : how to build lean, modern furniture with salvaged materials.

Nomadic Furniture
The 1970s was a golden era for DIY furniture manuals. Two of my favorites are Nomadic Furniture, and Nomadic Furniture 2 by designers Victor Papanek and James Hennessy. Nomadic Furniture . The MAK Museum in Vienna did an exhibition of Papanek and Hennessy’s work and put out a catalog called Nomadic furniture 3.0. You can watch a 2013 lecture James Hennessy did about his work on the YouTubes.

Put That Pipe Down and Make a Chair
Bean bags, houseplants and macrame are back thanks to the Silver Lake Shaman. Sunset Magazine’s Easy-to-Make Furniture will not only help you make furniture on the cheap it might just open your third eye in the process.

Spiros Zakas and Parsons Design Students
Spiros Zakas and his students put out two classic 70s DIY Furniture manuals, Furniture in 24 Hours and More Furniture in 24 Hours. You’ve got 24 hours. Get busy.

Ken Isaacs
Ken Issac’s work inhabits the liminal space between architecture and furniture. Here’s a download of Isaac’s classic and hard to find manual How to Build Your Own Living Structures.

Isaacs’ method, sometimes called “Grid Beam” relies on either wood or metal with a regular series of holes drilled to accept bolts. Grid Beam is modular and you can use the method to make chairs, tables, beds and rooms. Pieces can be taken apart, reused and reconfigured. If you want to try it you’ll definitely want a drill press and a jig to make the holes uniform and square. Thankfully you can find many used drill presses in the wild as they are a common tool in both wood and metal shops.

Open Structures

Open Structures is a similar modular concept by Brussels designer Thomas Lommée done with metal tubes and connectors. I find it a bit more aesthetically pleasing than the drilled 2×2 lumber in the Grid Beam system, but you’ll need to be handy with metal if you want to try to homebrew this.

Hauntological Furniture
If vaporwave is your thing this is your furniture manual: Designing Furniture : From Concept to shop Drawing. Most woodworking instruction has an unintentional, high 1980s postmodernist vibe. As a perpetual contrarian I’m waiting for the big postmodern design revival. Embrace the glitch!

Now for some more advanced manuals that will require a proper woodshop:

Arts and Crafts
The ugly truth is that, while I admire 70s furniture manuals from afar, I much prefer Arts and Crafts era furniture which, unfortunately, requires a more substantial investment in tools and training. But there’s one thing this style of furniture has in common with the 70s stuff above. Gustav Stickley encouraged his readers in his magazine The Craftsman to roll their own furniture. If you’re in this camp, you’ll need to get a copy of the Great Book of Shop Drawings for Craftsman Furniture. I’m also a fan of Nancy Hiller’s book English Arts & Crafts Furniture: Projects & Technique and used it to make a Voysey chair. I’d also suggest taking some classes and a subscription to Fine Woodworking. Put all these things together and you’ll be down a rabbit hole deeper than those weird Q Anon folks.

My Trad Life
If hand tools are your thing or if, like me, you use a blend of hand tools and power tools, Lost Art Press has some beautiful and useful books one of which I used to make a desk for Kelly. I’d also recommend By Hand and Eye and Mortise and Tenon Magazine if trad design floats your boat. Measured shop drawings for American furniture has a lot of nice early American designs some of which would be fairly straightforward builds.

Brown stained furniture is way out of fashion right now, cast aside by the blond wood and brass aesthetic tyranny of the Silver Lake Shaman. As a hopeless contrarian, I’ve spent the past few years attempting to replicate the shades of brown favored by American Arts and Crafts furniture designers of the early 20th century. But last week, I did a brown stain experiment that just might get the attention of the Silver Lake Shamans.

One of the oft mentioned ingredients in these old-timer brown stains is asphaltum. Asphaltum, also known as bitumen, is a semi-solid semi-liquid form of petroleum. Confusingly, it’s also called “tar,” but tar is actually a byproduct of coal and petroleum distillation that can also be obtained from wood and peat. To stain wood I needed asphaltum not tar.

You can buy asphaltum in one of two ways, as an art supply or in five gallon buckets of roofing cement. But get ready for confusion. A tube of “asphaltum” oil paint I picked up did not actually contain any asphaltum and was expensive. It was just “asphaltum” colored. Art supplies that actually contain asphaltum were not to be found at my local art supply store. You can get asphaltum in the form of non-fibered roofing cement but, for some mysterious reason, I can only find fibered roofing cement Los Angeles and those fibers mean that it won’t work as a wood stain.

But a light bulb went off last week when I realized that asphaltum can be wild harvested at one of Los Angeles’ oddest tourist attractions, the La Brea Tar Pits. If you haven’t been there, this park consists of a paleontology museum dedicated to ancient creatures that got stuck in the tar as well as a fenced off and stinky pond with a tarry waterline and occasional methane bubbles. The large expanse of grass surrounding the pit was sparsely populated on the weekday we visited. In the distance I could see the ongoing demolition of the LA County Museum of Art. As I said goodbye to the high 60s modernist art museum cafeteria my mom used to take me to, I scanned the park for asphaltum plumes.

Thankfully, park employees facilitate hipster artisinal asphaltum collection thanks to cones marked “tar pits” to keep people from spreading their picnic blankets over the foul smelling, sticky stuff.

I discovered one particularly prodigious asphaltum seep and gathered a small amount for my stain experiment. When I got back to the workshop I mixed the asphaltum with some paint thinner and rubbed it on a piece of white oak. It worked beautifully. White oak has a very open grain and the tar both accentuated that grain and gave an overall brown hue to the wood. I wore a respirator to apply the finish but once dried I couldn’t detect any fumes. If I was using asphaltum on a piece of furniture I would top coat the wood with a wipe on varnish or shellac.

But will I actually ever use asphaltum? The gel stain I use as part of a multi-step process to simulate Stickley type finishes is pretty similar to asphaltum, safer (maybe?) and gives reliable and repeatable results. But perhaps it’s worth using wild harvested asphaltum just for the bragging rights. Watch out for the drop of my new La Brea Tar Pit furniture collection!

A tarry digression

I put on a jacket for this expedition that I hadn’t worn since the beginning of the pandemic. I fished around in the pocket only to find a wrist band for the museum and remembered that we had gone to the Tar Pits in January of 2019 with some friends and their teenage son. This triggered a hauntological memory. On March 24, 1985  a friend needed to get some socks so we set off for the Ross Dress for Less on 3rd street near the La Brea Tar Pits. I have no idea why I was along for the ride. Just minutes before we got there the store exploded due to the methane deposits in the ground in this part of LA. By the time we got to 3rd street it was blocked off but, in the distance, you could see flames shooting out of the sidewalk. It was just the sort of apocalyptic scene that’s fodder for countless LA disaster movies. While there were no deaths, several people suffered serious burns. The real blame for this incident was due to the area’s legacy as an oil field but this was swept under the rug.

On our way back from the park, I was shocked by the state of the city during these quarantine times. Kelly and I haven’t left the house much in a year. Wilshire Blvd. seemed abandoned, with lots of closed businesses and hardly any people. It was unseasonably warm and it hasn’t rained much in a month. The pandemic and George Floyd protests of the past year could have been an opportunity for the city to make dramatic changes, to seize hotels to house the homeless, to deal with the hot mess that is the LAPD, to make it easier and safer for our elders and children to get around. Sadly, it seems we’re still stuck in the tar like those doomed prehistoric animals.