Craft Master: Inside Thomas Fetherston’s Bay Area Furniture Workroom

The talented San Francisco Bay Area fabricators and craftspeople that Niche Interiors collaborates with make our job as interior designers so rewarding. The unparalleled excellence in craft and attention to detail is evident in the work of Thomas Fetherston and his team at CFD Studios, who have been fabricating exquisite custom furniture pieces in a variety of mediums including wood, metal and lacquer for the past 47 years. We were thrilled when Thomas agreed to chat with us about the evolution of Custom Furniture Designs and how he became the preeminent craftsman that high-end San Francisco interior designers and architects turn to in the Bay Area and throughout California.

You are highly renowned in the San Francisco interior design + architecture community. Where did you start in your career and what led you to where you are today?

Needing to make my own way at an early age and enjoying working with my hands, I took a job helping to restore fine antiques on the east coast with some very talented but grumpy first generation Italians immigrants. This turned into a five year apprenticeship where I learned the craft of restoring and refinishing early American and European furniture. After my father passed away in 1978, I moved to San Francisco with $500 in my pocket and an old Toyota truck. I didn’t want to restore antiques so I called every new furniture maker in San Francisco that I could find in the yellow pages. I found a job making new chairs that were sold in designer showrooms and had my first introduction to the contemporary design marketplace.

San Francisco was more laid back than New York business-wise in the late 70’s, I decided to open up a studio and seek out new furniture commissions for designers and architects. I bought a table saw and a spray booth and over the years built up my designer clientele, bought more machinery and hired other artisans as the work volume grew.

Having made over 10,000 pieces of custom furniture since starting my studio has taught me many skills and knowledge of furniture engineering, design, and fabrication.  The talented craftspeople that work with me are the true strength of the operation, with two of my team members being with me now for over 40 years while some of the newer talent have already passed the 5 or 10 year mark. In fact, I’ve been working with some designers now for over 30 years as well.

How does your experience in antique furniture restoration inform the work that you do now?

One of a kind, made to order furniture is a very old business model – over the ages one would commission a local furniture maker to make a cabinet or table. Most antiques were created in this fashion and vary in design, scale and quality of workmanship. Restoring antiques taught me how various furniture designs were made, what worked and what didn’t, what lasted the test of time, and provided a wealth of experience for future design engineering challenges and decisions on scale and proportions.

Sustainability is becoming more and more important to clients and interior designers alike. How important is it in your work and what practices have you integrated into your business?

We fabricate a wide range of custom designs and source our materials in many locations, from FSC certified furniture lumber and veneer panels, to local artisan milled slabs of wood from fallen trees. It is very important to all of us that we source sustainable materials, take care with how we use them and respect the process.

Our design team has worked with you on quite a few custom furniture pieces over the years. What is your favorite part of the collaboration process and what do you want future collaborators to know about how to successfully design furniture with your team?

We are the interior designers ultimate workroom. The interaction of talents in the process of bringing a furniture design to life is one of the most rewarding parts of the process, from the initial design concept to the talented hands here that fabricate that design to completion. Along the way there are numerous decisions to make from selection of materials, scale and proportions – all with the goal to make the best truly custom design that we can.

How important do you feel full scale drawings are in the process of perfecting proportions?

With CAD you can make anything look good on paper, however when you prepare full scale detail drawings of the designs you’re about to make you can see and feel the proportion and scale. These scale drawings allow the designer to see in real time the volume of the design and provides an opportunity to improve upon the design as needed. It also lets the furniture maker engineer the construction of the piece, involving the designer throughout the process so they have ownership of the final outcome.

Your team is known for being able to create just about anything a designer could envision. Can you talk about how you’ve built a team of artisans skilled in multiple mediums?

Over the years I have collected together a group of craftspeople that wake up each day and want to make something, it’s their craft and their passion. Each of these talented team members bring different skill sets to the table (so to say) and each have their own approach to fabrication that has come from years of experience either here or with other studios. We try to operate as a team and learn from each other, help each other out when challenges arise and together do the best job we can on each and every piece of custom furniture. For more custom furniture inspiration head to our page dedicated to showcasing our favorite San Francisco Bay Area designs!