Resource Dilemma: Unfinished Furniture

My buddy, Rachel Perls, wrote me the other day asking for help finding unfinished furniture. She’s a color expert, consultant and the creative brains behind her blog, Hue.

Anyway, Rachel recently moved from Baltimore to California and is busy pulling her new home together. Meanwhile, across the pond, Holly Becker (of Decor8 fame) is doing the same thing with her new apartment in Germany. Holly lets us in on the fun on her second (!) blog, HausMaus. It was there that Rachel came across these great chairs.

Holly bought them from Car M??bel, a German company which sells unfinished furniture. Rachel would love to order these chairs but dreads (don’t blame her) the shipping costs. What to do? Can we find something similar here? It was a little harder than I thought.

How can you beat these Too Fab designs from Car M??bel? I’d cry tears of joy if they opened a shop here in the States. (Er, well, I think I’d better add here that Holly wasn’t so happy with their customer service. But isn’t that like complaining that your high heels hurt your feet?)

On with reality. I Googled unfinished furniture which came up with a bunch of suggestions. I checked them out. Most offered the same bad chairs at widely varied prices (for the same chair). The problem? The scale is all wrong.

I found the chair, above, at Unfinished Furniture. Were these built for a doll house? The proportions are all wrong. This is what you get when you try to lower costs by saving on the price of wood. Jeez.

Whitewood Industries has some okay chairs (above). They don’t sell to the public. They do offer a link for you to find retailers in your area who do. Naked Furniture has some options, but not great. Finally, I came across Elliot’s Unfinished Furniture, located in Oxnard, California. They sell and refinish furniture from a variety of resources and their site has a helpful list of links to their furniture manufacturers. Still, I have to admit, I was fairly disappointed.

Do you have a resource?

Truth be told, I was unable to find anything that I feel would be an adequate substitute for the great styles offers at Car M??bel. Their proportions are great, and the designs have unique personality – not a cookie-cutter look. The best advice I can offer is to shop Goodwill and garage sales for a collection of chairs which Rachel can paint. They’d be more unique and probably better quality.

Can you help Rachel find some great, unfinished chairs? Let’s pool our resources and see what we can come up with.