Top 5 Places to Find Unique Furniture
There are lots of great reasons to buy unique furniture. Maybe for you, all the pictures in the Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel catalogs seem monotonous and predictable and you yearn for something different. If you’re a fan of eclectic interior design, collecting unique furniture pieces that reflect a range of styles is going to be essential. Perhaps you value having things around you that have lived different lives in different places and have stories to tell. Or maybe it's going to take months to get the furniture you found online or in a big box store, and shopping for in-stock pieces “outside the box” is the smarter way to go.
Whatever is driving you to do things differently when it comes to furnishing your home, finding unusual furniture and unique home decor doesn’t have to be difficult. Here are the top 5 places to find one-of-a-kind furniture pieces that reflect an independent spirit!
1) Thrift and Consignment Stores
Look for secondhand stores in your area that actually carry furniture. Many stores just stock clothing and books. Calling the store in advance to check if they have furniture can save a lot of time and energy, as most thrift stores won’t have websites that let you know in advance what types of things you can expect to find.
When you’ve found a store, talk to the staff to see if there’s a particular time of the month or day of the week that they get deliveries of furniture from a central donation site or have the staffing power to put larger items on the sales floor.
If you can befriend the manager or one of the consistent volunteers or employees, ask them if they’ll call you when the thing you’re looking for comes into the store. A plate of cookies will always sweeten the request! That way you’ll have a head start on the other thrift store devotees.
My top tip for finding chic unique furniture at thrift stores is “little and often”. Pop in as frequently as you can, take a quick spin around the furniture area and then leave if nothing catches your eye.
Finding unique furniture is possible at these places because what gets donated or submitted on consignment can be anything from a table that’s 100 years old to a brand new sofa that wouldn’t fit through the unfortunate customer’s front door. It doesn’t have to fit with the “color of the year” or what the market researchers say that most people want.
That said, a lot of the furniture at these places isn’t going to be your cup of tea. Thrift store donations will often be inexpensive particleboard pieces which break or get damaged easily. Although consignment stores tend to be pickier about the quality of what they will sell, much of what you find may be a gently used version of what you can buy at the big box places, i.e. not particularly unique. And just because something at the store is different from what you’ll find at the high street national retailers, doesn’t mean that it’s going to be the style you like.
I once found some library steps at a Salvation Army store. I didn’t need library steps and I didn’t even like the shape or wood color. However, I noticed some unusual lion-head style solid metal pulls on either side of the top step, presumably just for decoration. The set of library steps came home with me that day. I removed the lion head pulls and used them on some nightstand drawers that needed sprucing up. To fill the holes in the steps I screwed in some boring cabinet knobs I had salvaged from something else. Then I donated the library steps back to the thrift store on my next visit. Someone who needs some steps and doesn’t care about the decorative accents will still get to use them. And the Salvation Army gets double the donation to its worthy cause!
2) Interior Designers
If you’re looking for a 53.5 inch wide cabinet in peacock blue with silver accents and a pebble texture and with exactly seven drawers and soft-white LED lighting built in, then you need to call an interior designer. They are the people who not only know someone who can make this one of a kind furniture piece from scratch, but can shepherd this piece from concept to reality. Whatever you can dream up, an interior designer can get made for you. For a price, of course!
My top tip for working with an interior designer to collect unique furniture pieces is to be up-front about your budget. If they know what budget they are working with they can be infinitely more efficient when searching for what you’ll love and helping you make intelligent compromises if necessary.
The world of furniture is thousands of times bigger than the regular retail stores that we see each day or can access online. Highly trained artisans all over the world make bespoke unique furniture pieces which run the gamut from intricate antique reproductions to sleek futuristic high tech works of art. Better still, you don’t need to be able to specify exactly what style, dimensions, practical requirements and color you want. A good interior designer will work with you to help you find completely unique furniture items based on what they learn about your aesthetic preferences, needs and lifestyle.
Of the hundreds of custom pieces I designed and had fabricated in my career as an interior designer, one I remember most fondly was a bespoke entry hall rug we created for an historic home in San Francisco. Not only were the dimensions designed to fit the hall with exactly the right amount of inlaid wood floor showing on all sides, but the curving pattern of the rug was inspired by the design of the original Victorian stained glass panels in the front door. The silk and wool gold, salmon and beige tones made a perfect segue between the main living room and dining room’s color palettes. It was the definition of a unique home decor item. Whenever I drive by that lovely home, I think of that rug!
3) Vintage and Antique Furniture Stores
At vintage or antique furniture stores, what you gain in curation, you pay for on the sticker price. Most of these stores are run by people who know how to spot something rare or something made or designed by a famous furniture company. Understandably, they will price the item accordingly. Depending on the furniture fashion of the moment, you will likely pay a lot more for a piece that is in a currently trendy style, even though it’s not new. This is where being open to older quality furniture in a style which isn’t necessarily the “in thing” right now can pay dividends.
My top tip for finding unique home decor at antique or vintage furniture stores is to keep an open mind about what a great accent item could look like. I’ve found a 1920s telephone that really stands out as a novel “objet d’art” on a desk in a guest bedroom. I love to think of the conversations that it witnessed so many years ago! A collection of baking molds or hand mirrors can make an unusual wall display. For the botanically inclined, a soup tureen or candy dish can make a distinctive plant pot or flower vase.
Once upon a time, in a shoebox under a table in a vintage store, I found some mysterious carved wood items. I didn’t know what to call them but I knew that I wanted to spend time with them! They were fascinating. Each had either a little lid or a tiny toothpick sized wood pin that held two pieces of the structure together. Some Googling later, I discovered they were shamanic medicine boxes. Given that I’m no shaman nor should I be trusted with prescribing any kind of healing remedy, these weren’t ever going to be used by me for their original purpose! The meticulous craftsmanship deserved to be honored though, and what intriguing and unique home decor items they make!
4) Flea Markets
Finding unusual furniture at flea markets is one of my favorite things to do. However, it’s rarely for the faint of heart. Here’s how to do it effectively:
Arrive early. It’s first come first served and by definition, if something’s unique, when it’s gone, you can’t just order another one.
Wear comfortable shoes, bring water, snacks and sunscreen. Some of these places are massive and will test your physical stamina if you’re determined to see it all!
Think about what you can realistically carry home. If you’re looking for a large dresser, make sure you’ve brought a van or truck, a moving dolly and/or a strong friend as flea markets aren’t the kinds of places that you can leave things for pick up a few days later.
Be willing to haggle and offer to pay in cash to sweeten the deal.
My top tip for finding unique furniture items at flea markets is to take a tape measure and a list of maximum dimensions! There’s little worse than discovering the perfect vintage rug or cabinet only to find it’s too big to fit in your space when you get it home. You’ll have to make a purchase decision there and then without the option for returns.
School chairs aren’t usually the kind of thing that spring to mind when you think of chic unique furniture, that’s for sure! But when I saw a Leaning Tower of Pisa style mountain of these vintage chrome and bentwood chairs at a flea market, I saw some blank canvases that would fit as a set of 4 into the back of my car. Many hours of work later, these had become hand painted furniture pieces that were practical collector’s items.
5) Online
While websites like craigslist can occasionally yield diamonds in the rough, I’ve found that much like thrift stores, it takes patience to dig through the listings and a good degree of luck to find a unique furniture piece that happens to be the right item at the right time.
My top tip for finding unique furniture online is to add a geographic area filter to your search so that you at least start looking for items that are within a certain number of miles from your home. Often (but not always) you’ll be able to spend less on shipping.
Various secondhand furniture marketplaces and neighborhood resale websites likes craigslist can be great tools as they enable you to search thousands of independent makers and resellers in one place. Bear in mind that once you’re searching on national or international websites, the items you find are often thousands of miles away. And when it comes to furniture, there are unfortunately no inexpensive ways to ship these unique treasures to your home. If you can find a local small business who makes unique furniture pieces like I do in the San Francisco Bay Area, you’ll likely avoid paying shipping entirely.
One of my all time favorite craigslist finds was a dresser onto which someone had clumsily pasted a map. It was peeling at the edges and had several mysterious stains.The surface on most of the case was scratched and chipped but you could just make out that drawer fronts had gorgeous wood grain under the old glue. By painting the case around the drawers and refinishing the drawer fronts I was able to give the old but much loved piece a completely new lease of life. To this day it remains one of the most popular items I’ve worked on.
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