Nobody stops mid-conversation at a dinner party to ask about the sofa. It’s a nice sofa. It does its job. But it’s not the thing people walk over to touch, or crouch down to look under, or ask, “Wait, how did you even make this?”
That reaction is something I think about. The pieces that get people talking are almost never the ones that were picked from a catalog. They’re the ones that started as a blank page and turned into something nobody else in the world owns.
Two projects come to mind right away.
The Chess Table That Almost Beat Me
A client wanted a sculptural piece to display a handmade chess set, something that felt more like a sculpture than a table. We landed on a root-over-rock concept: a bonsai-style base, walnut roots wrapping around an actual stone, with the whole thing carved to look like it grew that way naturally.
It sounded great as a sketch. It was one of the harder builds I’ve taken on.
The roots had to be scribed to fit the stone exactly, and the stone is visible from every angle, so there was no back corner to hide a fudge factor. I spent somewhere between 40 and 60 hours just on the scribing. There was a point about halfway through where I genuinely wondered if I’d taken on more than I could pull off.
Once the base was carved, I used floating tenons to attach the walnut branches to the trunk, then shaped the whole assembly into its final bonsai form. For the top, I kept things simple and let the chess set be the star: wenge to tie the color back to the base, a pull-out shelf on each side for wine glasses or captured pieces mid-game, and a mirror inlaid into the surface to highlight the board itself. The final piece pairs a walnut and wenge base with a silver and copper chess set sourced from an artist in Mexico City.
It’s the kind of piece that stops people. Not because it’s flashy, but because there’s genuinely nothing else like it. You can see the full piece here.
The Swoosh That Continued into the Next Piece
The second one is a quieter design, but it’s become one of my favorite recurring details. A while back, I built a headboard with a series of decorative swooshes carved into the walnut and painted black, a relief that starts on one side, sweeps across the face, and comes back down the other. It gave the whole piece a sense of motion that a flat headboard just doesn’t have.
That client loved it enough that when they came back for a dressing vanity, they asked me to carry the same swoosh across the new piece so the two would feel like they belonged together. Same relief, same contrast between warm walnut and black paint, but reworked to fit a different form. I finished the vanity with a single drawer sized for the everyday stuff such as hairbrushes and jewelry. Instead of a hardware pull, we carved an organic finger notch into the drawer face itself. No hardware, no store-bought pull, just a shape cut to fit how a hand actually reaches for it. You can check out the vanity here.
That’s the kind of detail that starts a conversation without anyone even asking a question. Someone runs a hand along the relief, or asks why the drawer doesn’t have a handle, and suddenly you’re telling a story instead of just describing a piece of furniture.
Why This Only Happens With Truly Custom Work
Here’s the thing both of these projects have in common. Neither one exists anywhere else. Nobody else has a root-over-rock chess table built around their specific chess set, and nobody else has a headboard and vanity carrying the same hand-carved swoosh. That’s not something you can spec off a floor model or order in a different fabric.
I get into this more in my post on what actually makes furniture genuinely custom, versus just customizable, but the short version is this: when a piece starts from your specific idea instead of an existing product line, it ends up carrying a story that people can feel, even if they can’t quite put their finger on why. That’s what turns a piece of furniture into something people ask about; it’s not something you can buy off a showroom floor.
If you’ve got an idea rattling around that you think could become that kind of piece, I’d love to hear it. Half the fun of this job is finding out how far a good idea can go once you actually build it.
I’m the owner of Benham Design Concepts, a mixed media art studio where I design and build custom furniture and other works of art using wood, glass, stone, and various metals.
In this blog, I talk about the art I create, my journey, and the things I learn along the way.