Ready-to-assemble furniture (RTA), also known as knock-down furniture (KD), flat-pack furniture, or kit furniture, is a form of furniture that requires customer assembly. The separate components are packed for sale in cartons which also contain assembly instructions and sometimes hardware. The furniture is generally simple to assemble with basic tools such as hex keys, which are also sometimes included. Ready-to-assemble furniture is popular with consumers who wish to save money by assembling the product themselves.
Producers and merchants benefit from selling ready-to-assemble furniture because furniture is bulky once assembled, and thus more expensive to store and to deliver. Since the assembly work is done by the consumer instead of by the manufacturer, its price can be lower. A furniture assembly service industry has developed, making it easy for consumers to employ someone knowledgeable to assemble their furniture for them. [1]
Produced mainly from particle board or medium-density fibreboard (MDF), the cost of producing this type of furniture is cheaper than using solid wood. The low grade timber is coated with a polymer laminate to replicate various types of wood, allowing a high quality looking finished product.
Ready-to-assemble furniture has roots that extend back a long way, as cabinetmakers have been making furniture that is easy to disassemble for transport for centuries. The New American Cyclopaedia of 1859 listed the assembly of furniture as an "American invention" [2] that emphasized ease of transport, but this claim is rather vague. A better claim to the earliest RTA furniture is the Thonet No. 14 bentwood chair, which was specifically made to be easily disassembled to save space during transportation. [3] It was first produced in 1859. Slightly later there is an American patent of 1878 that defines some prefabricated furniture as follows: "The invention refers to a class of furniture in kit to be packaged and transported in pieces and assembled by specialized and unqualified people." [4]
An early attempt at a business selling RTA furniture was set up by designer Louise Brigham and two partners during World War I. By 1915, Home Art Masters was offering RTA furniture kits at moderate prices through a mail-order catalog. The buyer received a set of parts that the company stated could be “quickly put together and finished. Everything including instructions, furnished. A boy or girl can set it up.” [5] Home Art Masters was short-lived and it is uncertain how many of their RTA furniture kits were ever sold. [5]
The next experiments in running an RTA business stem from the 1940s and 1950s. In the late 1940s, the Australian designer Frederick Charles Ward founded a mail-order RTA furniture business because he was disturbed by how little affordable furniture there was for people of modest means. [6] Lena Larsson helped to create one of the earliest Swedish brands of ready to assemble furniture, the TRIVA line, for Nordiska Kompaniet in 1943. [7] In 1953, the Ohio cabinetmaker Erie J. Sauder received the first U.S. patent for RTA furniture for a table that could be assembled without either hardware or glue; he called it "snap-together" furniture. [8] [9]
In the Scandinavian countries, the furniture kit may have been independently invented by Swedish technician Gillis Lundgren, who had the idea when trying to transport a table in his car. According to reports, he had to saw off the table's legs so he could put it inside the car and bring it home. He talked about the idea with his boss at IKEA, and IKEA started selling flat-pack furniture in 1956. [10] [11] [12] [13]
Ready-to-assemble furniture can be purchased for a number of purposes:
Inter IKEA Systems B.V., trading as IKEA, is a Swedish multinational conglomerate that designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture, kitchen appliances, decoration, home accessories, and various other goods and home services. Started in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad and currently legally headquartered in the Netherlands, IKEA has been the world's largest furniture retailer since 2008. The brand name is an acronym of founder Ingvar Kamprad's initials; Elmtaryd, the family farm where Kamprad was born; and the nearby village of Agunnaryd, Kamprad's hometown in Småland.
Hans Jørgensen Wegner was a Danish furniture designer. His work, along with a concerted effort from several of his manufacturers, contributed to the international popularity of mid-century Danish design. His style is often described as Organic Functionality, a modernist school with emphasis on functionality. This school of thought arose primarily in Scandinavian countries with contributions by Poul Henningsen, Alvar Aalto, and Arne Jacobsen.
A knock-down kit is a collection of parts required to assemble a product. The parts are typically manufactured in one country or region, and then exported to another country or region for final assembly. CBU, on the other hand, stands for "Completely Built Up" and signifies import of a finished product.
The No. 14 chair is the most famous chair made by the Thonet chair company. Also known as the 'bistro chair', it was designed by Michael Thonet and introduced in 1859, becoming the world's first mass-produced item of furniture. It is made using bent wood (steam-bending), and the design required years to perfect. With its affordable price and simple design, it became one of the best-selling chairs ever made. Some 50 million No. 14s were sold between 1859 and 1930, and millions more have been sold since. "It represents the best example of a design which has been refined to the point where there is no way to improve it."
Cardboard furniture is classified as furniture designed and made from corrugated fibreboard, heavy paperboard, honeycomb board, fibre tubes or a combination of these materials. Cardboard furniture is misleading, since "cardboard" is a depreciated term, sometimes describing corrugated cardboard, but sometimes to any heavy paper. but not being sufficiently specific to describe the various forms of paper-based boards used today in order to make furniture.
Michael Thonet was a German-Austrian cabinet maker, known for the invention of bentwood furniture.
James Irvine was a British industrial designer who created furniture and product designs for many well known companies and brands such as Artemide, B&B Italia, Cappellini, Foscarini, Ikea, Magis, Muji, Thonet, and WMF. He once described the product designer's job as “the work of an unknown hero.”
Stefan Diez is a German industrial designer whose Munich-based studio, DIEZ OFFICE, develops furniture, accessories, and exhibition designs.
Danish modern also known as Scandinavian modern is a style of minimalist furniture and housewares from Denmark associated with the Danish design movement. In the 1920s, Kaare Klint embraced the principles of Bauhaus modernism in furniture design, creating clean, pure lines based on an understanding of classical furniture craftsmanship coupled with careful research into materials, proportions, and the requirements of the human body.
Home Reserve, LLC, is a furniture manufacturing company headquartered in Fort Wayne, Indiana, US. The company manufactures ready-to-assemble furniture and operates an e-commerce site in which sales are made direct to its customer base.
Louise Brigham was an American early-20th-century designer and teacher. She was a pioneering champion of the use of recycled materials in furniture design. A system she invented for building furniture out of packing crates represents one of the earliest to adopt a modular approach to the design of individual units. She also founded one of the earliest ready-to-assemble furniture companies, as well as the Home Thrift Organization (HTA) to teach woodworking to New York City boys. In 1940, she received a medal from the HTA in honor of her quarter century of service to the organization.
The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which consumers place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created. The name refers to Swedish manufacturer and furniture retailer IKEA, which sells many items of furniture that require assembly.
Modern Gothic, also known as Reformed Gothic, was an Aesthetic Movement style of the 1860s and 1870s in architecture, furniture and decorative arts, that was popular in Great Britain and the United States. A rebellion against the excessive ornament of Second Empire and Rococo Revival furniture, it advocated simplicity and honesty of construction, and ornament derived from nature. Unlike the Gothic Revival, it sought not to copy Gothic designs, but to adapt them abstract them, and apply them to new forms.
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Emeco is a privately held company based in Hanover, Pennsylvania. The Emeco 1006, known as the Navy Chair, has been in continuous production since the 1940s. Today, Emeco manufactures furniture designed by notable designers and architects such as Philippe Starck, Norman Foster, and Frank Gehry.
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Gillis Lundgren was a Swedish furniture designer and the fourth employee of IKEA. He designed the Billy bookcase of which over 60 million have been produced.
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A furniture retailer, furniture store or furniture shop is a retail businesses that sells furniture and related accessories. Furniture retailers usually sell general furniture, seats and upholstered suites, and specialised items produced for a commission. They may sell a range of styles to suit different homes and personal tastes, or specialise in particular styles like retro style furniture.
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