How to Commission a Piece of Furniture: A Step-by-Step Guide for Clients

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Last Updated on August 24, 2026 by Oak Moak Editorial Team

Commissioning custom furniture means working directly with a furniture maker or woodworking studio to create a piece around your dimensions, function, materials and design preferences, rather than choosing something off a showroom floor. A successful commission typically starts well before any wood is cut: defining the problem you’re actually solving, measuring the space, agreeing on priorities, and reviewing a clear scope together. You don’t need a finished design in mind, and you don’t need to know your timber species from your joinery type — that’s what the maker is there for. What you do need is a rough sense of the problem and a willingness to work through it collaboratively.

What Does It Mean to Commission Custom Furniture?

Custom furniture is built specifically for you — made for your space, your function, and your preferences, rather than manufactured to a standard size that suits as many homes as possible. Commissioning is the process of getting there: a collaboration between you and a maker, where your role is to describe how you live and how the space needs to work, and the maker’s role is to translate that into a buildable design. Commissioning doesn’t mean designing the piece yourself. A good maker will guide proportions, timber choices and detailing based on what you tell them, not hand you a blank page and ask you to sketch it. Our custom woodworking team follows exactly this collaborative process.

Step 1: Define What You Need the Furniture to Do

Start with the problem, not a finished design. What type of furniture, and for which room? What does it need to store or support, and how many people will use it day to day? A bookshelf that needs to survive kids climbing on it is a different brief to one that just needs to hold books. Note any existing architectural constraints too — low ceilings, an odd alcove, a doorway it needs to pass through. The clearer you can be about function, the less back-and-forth is needed later.

Step 2: Measure the Space and Identify Constraints

Rough measurements of width, height and depth help early conversations, but they don’t replace professional site measurement. Few walls, floors or ceilings in an existing home are perfectly square, and a few millimetres can be the difference between a piece that looks built-in and one that looks forced into place. Beyond the basic dimensions, note doorway and access widths for getting the finished piece into the room, nearby electrical outlets, windows, baseboards, and any heating or ventilation the design will need to work around.

Step 3: Collect Inspiration Without Over-Specifying the Design

Reference photos, materials, shapes and styles you like, existing furniture or architecture in the home, and just as usefully, what you dislike, all help a maker understand your taste quickly. There’s an important difference between inspiration and a request to copy another maker’s design: pointing to a photo and saying “something like this scale and warmth” is inspiration; asking for an exact replica of someone else’s original work is a different, and generally unwelcome, request. Good inspiration references communicate a feeling or proportion, not a blueprint to trace.

Step 4: Choose the Right Furniture Maker

A few things worth checking before committing: does their portfolio include work similar to what you have in mind, and what materials do they typically work with? Do they handle design themselves, or only fabrication? Who takes responsibility for installation once the piece is built? And just as important as any of that, is their communication process clear and responsive, since you’ll be working closely with them for weeks or months. There’s no universal “best” maker, only the right fit for your project and how you like to work.

Step 5: Have the Initial Consultation

Bring what you have: room photos, rough measurements, any inspiration images, a description of the functional needs, and, if you have them, a general sense of timing and budget expectations. You don’t need all of this polished — a phone photo and a sentence about how the space is used is a completely reasonable starting point. This conversation is where the maker starts asking the questions that shape everything downstream: how the space is actually lived in, not just how it looks in a photo.

Step 6: Review the Design and Scope

Once the maker has a direction, expect to see it translated into something visual — sketches or renderings, showing proportions, dimensions, key features, hardware and finish. This is the point to review carefully and ask questions, not to approve on a quick glance. It’s worth confirming explicitly what is and isn’t included in the scope; delivery and installation in particular are sometimes assumed rather than stated.

Before Approving a Custom Furniture Design, check:

• Proportions and dimensions match the space and your measurements
• Materials and finish are what you discussed and expect
• Hardware selections are confirmed, not left as a placeholder
• Installation and delivery responsibility is clearly stated
• Anything you’ve changed your mind about since the consultation has actually been updated

Step 7: Choose Wood, Materials and Finish

Timber species, grade, and finish all affect appearance, durability and price, and the right choice depends on how the piece will actually be used rather than one universally “best” wood. A dining table that will see spilled wine daily needs a different finish approach to a display cabinet that mostly gets admired. This is a genuinely collaborative decision, and a good maker will walk you through samples and trade-offs rather than simply picking for you. Our homeowner’s guide to choosing the right wood for custom furniture covers this decision in more depth.

Step 8: Understand What Drives the Quote

Custom furniture pricing depends on dimensions, wood species and material grade, joinery complexity, hardware, finish, the amount of design work involved, and delivery and installation. There’s no single number that applies across projects, which is exactly why the consultation exists — to talk through your specific piece rather than quote from a price list. Material selection tends to have the biggest single impact: premium hardwoods and hand-finished detailing cost more than simpler timber and finish combinations. Our complete guide to what affects custom wood project pricing breaks this down factor by factor.

Step 9: Approve the Final Design Before Fabrication

Once fabrication starts, changes become genuinely difficult and often costly — timber gets cut to specific dimensions, joinery is planned around the approved design, and unpicking that mid-build isn’t like editing a document. Before giving final approval, it’s worth checking off: final dimensions, material, finish, hardware, functional requirements, delivery, installation, and scope, all in one pass, rather than assuming everything discussed earlier automatically carried through.

Step 10: Fabrication and Workshop Stage

This is where the design becomes something physical. Timber is selected and milled, checked for grain, moisture content and flaws that could weaken the finished piece. Joinery — techniques like mortise-and-tenon, dovetail or float joints — is what separates a genuinely custom piece from something screwed together from a flat-pack box, spreading stress across the wood fibres rather than concentrating it on a handful of fasteners. Frames and panels are assembled and checked for square, then sanded through progressively finer grits before finishing. A finish is chosen to suit both the timber and how the piece will be used, applied in thin, even coats, each cured and lightly sanded before the next. This stage is where craftsmanship shows, but as the client, your main job here is simply staying reachable if a question comes up, not managing the workshop floor.

Step 11: Delivery and Installation

Getting a finished piece from workshop to home safely is its own skill, particularly for larger built-in work. Expect the installer to prepare the site and protect the surrounding area, and to plan access in advance if the piece is large or the route into the room is tight. Installation often involves scribing — trimming edges to follow a wall that isn’t perfectly straight — along with levelling and final trims a factory-made piece was never designed to accommodate. A final walkthrough together, checking the piece against the original brief, is the right way to close out the project rather than a piece simply being dropped off. Our overview of how a custom door is made covers a similar design-to-installation process for entry doors.

Questions to Ask Before Commissioning Custom Furniture

• Have you built something similar before?
• Who designs the piece, and who takes the final measurements?
• What materials are suitable for this specific use?
• What is included in the quote, and what isn’t?
• Does the maker handle delivery? Does the maker handle installation?
• When can design changes still be made, and when is it too late?
• What information do you actually need from me to get started?

Common Mistakes First-Time Clients Make

• Choosing a maker on appearance alone, without checking whether their portfolio matches the type of work you need
• Giving vague functional requirements and hoping the design will sort itself out
• Ignoring access or installation constraints until the piece doesn’t fit through the door
• Selecting a material before considering how the piece will actually be used
• Making significant design changes late, after fabrication has already started
• Assuming handmade automatically means any design you can imagine is structurally practical
• Comparing custom pricing directly against flat-pack furniture, a fundamentally different product and process

When Custom Furniture Makes the Most Sense

Custom work earns its cost most clearly with awkward dimensions that standard sizes don’t suit, spaces where a built-in-looking fit genuinely matters, specific storage needs a generic unit won’t solve, existing architecture the new piece needs to work around, unusual proportions, and situations where you want the piece to last for decades rather than years.

“the final result will be good for many lifetimes, indeed becoming a family heirloom”

This is from The Furniture Society’s official guide, “How to Commission Furniture,” written by furniture maker Alfred Sharp. The Furniture Society is a nonprofit organisation supporting studio furniture makers across North America and beyond, and its guide frames budget less as an upfront cost and more as an investment that avoids needing to replace the piece again in five or ten years. It’s the same reasoning behind why custom furniture, evaluated over its full lifespan rather than its purchase price alone, is often no more expensive than furniture from higher-end retail stores.— Alfred Sharp, The Furniture Society, “How to Commission a Piece of Furniture” 

It also makes sense where design continuity with existing cabinetry or millwork matters. Custom isn’t automatically the better choice for every buyer — for a straightforward space with standard dimensions and no particular functional puzzle to solve, a well-made ready-made piece can be a perfectly reasonable option. Our comparison of handcrafted custom woodworking vs mass-produced furniture covers this trade-off in more depth, and our piece on why custom wood furniture lasts longer than store-bought alternatives covers the heirloom-quality angle directly.

What Happens After You Contact OakMoak?

Reaching out starts a conversation about your space, function, and the kind of piece you have in mind, the same starting point covered in Step 5 above. From there, the process follows the same consultation, design, fabrication and installation journey outlined throughout this guide, worked out specifically for your project. If your piece involves built-in cabinetry or millwork, our overview of what custom millwork actually involves is a useful companion read, and our guide to how long custom cabinets take to build sets realistic timeline expectations. Contact OakMoak to start the conversation.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does it mean to commission a piece of furniture?
It means working with a maker to design and build a piece specifically for your space and needs, rather than buying something already made. You describe the function and preferences; the maker handles the design and construction.

How do I prepare for a custom furniture consultation?
Bring a few photos of the room, rough measurements if you have them, any inspiration images, and a clear sense of how the piece will actually be used day to day. You don’t need a finished design or technical drawings.

Do I need to know exactly what I want before contacting a furniture maker?
No. A rough idea of the problem you’re solving and how the space is used is enough to start. Design details are typically refined together during the consultation and design phase.

Can a furniture maker help choose the wood and finish?
Yes. Timber species, grade and finish are usually discussed and sampled during the design phase, weighed against how the piece will be used, your aesthetic preferences and budget.

What affects the cost of commissioned furniture?
Dimensions, wood species and material grade, joinery complexity, hardware, finish, design work, and delivery and installation all factor in. There’s no single price that applies to every project, which is why this is discussed during the consultation.

How long does custom furniture usually take?
Most projects move through consultation, design, fabrication, finishing and installation over several weeks to a few months, depending on complexity, size and timber availability. Larger built-in work generally takes longer than a single piece.

Can custom furniture be designed for awkward spaces?
Yes, this is one of the strongest reasons to choose custom over ready-made. Site measurements and design work specifically account for uneven walls, unusual proportions and other constraints a standard-sized piece can’t accommodate.