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Ask A Craftsman

Ask A Craftsman

Di: Brian Benham
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Join Brian Benham in his art studio. Brian is a mixed media artist, who uses wood, stone, glass, and metals to create unique pieces of bespoke furniture and architectural elements that resemble art. You can find more about Brian at Benham Design Concepts.© 2026 Benham Design Concepts Arte
Episodi
  • Furniture That Fits the Room

    Furniture That Fits the Room
    Oct 14 2026
    Photo from Speas Interior Design I’ve walked into a lot of houses over the years, and I can usually tell within a few seconds if the furniture fits the room well or if it was an afterthought. A dresser that’s two inches too wide for the wall it sits against and encroaches on the door trim around the closet. A sofa that blocks a window seat nobody uses anymore. A dining table that leaves no room to walk around without having to push the chairs all the way in while you scooch along the wall. None of that is really anyone’s fault. Most furniture is built to standard sizes or sizes that are trendy for the new McMansions. Because that’s how trends and large-scale manufacturing work. Furniture manufacturers have forgotten about all the homes built before the McMansion days, and a factory somewhere doesn’t know what your entryway looks like. It builds one size, ships it everywhere, and hopes it fits close enough. When I take on a project, I’m not starting from a standard size chart. I’m starting with your actual room, its actual angles, its actual ceiling height, and whatever quirks come with it. A room that has items that are collected is a room that feels welcoming. That’s a big part of what I mean by design flexibility in my post about the Denver Design Center. The Problem With Standard Sizes Most houses aren’t perfectly square, and most rooms weren’t designed around a specific piece of furniture. You end up with a wall that’s nine inches shorter than the sideboard you had your eye on, a stair landing that could hold a bench if the bench were the right depth, or a bedroom with a sloped ceiling that eats into where a headboard would normally sit. Off-the-shelf furniture can’t account for any of that. You’re stuck either forcing something into a space it wasn’t made for, or giving up on the idea altogether. That’s the whole reason we have a size discussion before I start designing a custom piece of furniture. Why I Start With the Space, Not the Furniture I look at the room itself, the light, the wood tones already in play, and how you actually move through the space day to day. We can do this over a video call or with room photos you send me. Either way, the piece gets designed around the room, the architecture of the house, and the treasures you have collected for your home, not the other way around. From there, I draw a detailed 3D model so you can see exactly how the piece will sit in your space. You can look at it from every angle, check the clearances, and tell me if something needs to move half an inch one way or the other. That back and forth is how problems get caught on a screen, not after delivery. What This Looks Like in Real Projects A lot of my entry and side tables get designed this way. A narrow foyer with a door that swings a certain direction has limits on depth and placement, and a table that looks perfectly reasonable in a showroom can still block that door by an inch. I design around the actual swing, the actual sightline from the front door, and the actual traffic pattern people use every day. The same goes for sideboards. I’ve sized pieces down to a fraction of an inch to fit exactly between two doorways, and I’ve stretched a design a few extra inches so it fills a wall properly instead of looking stranded in the middle of it. Beds are another good example. A custom bed has to work with a room’s ceiling height, window placement, and sometimes a sloped wall or dormer that a standard headboard height would run straight into. I design the footboard and headboard height around the room you actually have, not a catalog spec. Sometimes the constraint isn’t the room at all; it’s something the client wants to keep in the room. I built a bench around a piece of local granite a client wanted incorporated into the design instead of hidden away. The mahogany top was hand-carved to fit around the stone, and the whole piece was engineered around that one fixed object. That’s design flexibility in its purest form. It’s not only about odd dimensions, but it’s also about building around whatever is already there, whether that’s architecture or a rock somebody fell in love with. Built-Ins Take This a Step Further Built-in pieces push this idea even further, since there’s no room for a “close enough” fit at all. That’s a big enough topic that it deserves its own post, so I’ll save it for another day. Why This Matters for You If you’ve ever measured a room, gone shopping, and come home realizing nothing actually works, you already understand the problem. Standard furniture was never designed with your specific space in mind. It was designed to fit a lot of spaces reasonably well, which usually means it fits none of them perfectly. Working directly with a maker means the room comes first. I’m not flipping through a catalog trying to find the closest match. I’m designing something that belongs in your space because it was built for that space...
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    5 min
  • Working With the Maker is Not the Same as a Sales Rep

    Working With the Maker is Not the Same as a Sales Rep
    Oct 7 2026
    The Person Selling You Furniture Has Never Touched It If you walk into most high-end furniture showrooms, most likely the person helping you has never once picked up a chisel, selected the perfect board for its grain quality, or sanded a finish by hand to be sure it is just right. They’re a sales rep. A good one, probably. They know the product lines, they know the lead times, and they can talk to you about fabric types all day. But they didn’t build anything you’re looking at, and if something goes wrong, they are at the mercy of the manufacturer to do anything about it. That’s not a knock on sales reps. It’s just how the showroom model works. You’re buying from a manufacturer somewhere else, through a person standing between you and that manufacturer. If your piece comes in scratched, or the stain doesn’t match the sample, or it’s backordered for four months, that rep has to advocate for you with a company they don’t control. Sometimes that works out fine. Sometimes you’re stuck waiting on an answer nobody seems to have. I’ve been doing this for 17 years, and I can tell you the alternative is pretty simple. When you commission a piece from me, you’re talking to the person who is going to build it. Not a representative of the person who builds it. Me. If you mention a detail you want changed, I’m the one adjusting the design, and I’m the one at the bench making sure it happens. Nothing gets lost in translation because there’s no translation happening. There’s just a conversation between you and the guy crafting your piece. If that sounds like a small difference, it isn’t. It changes what the whole process feels like, and I think it’s worth walking through exactly what that process looks like so it’s not a mystery. What Actually Happens When You Commission a Piece We start with a conversation. Not a form, not a catalog. Tell me what you’re picturing, what the space needs to do, and what’s not working with what you have now. This can happen over email, a phone call, or a Zoom, whatever’s easiest for you. I put together a budget. Once I understand the project, I’ll give you a number. From there, you decide if you want to move forward or adjust the scope to fit what you’re comfortable spending. There’s no pressure to commit before you know what you’re getting into. A design deposit gets us into the design phase. This covers me sitting down and actually drawing your piece: sketches, stain samples, and the start of a 3D model. Then we collaborate on the design. I build a detailed 3D rendering so you can see the piece before I cut a single board. Two to three rounds of revisions are normal here. Maybe the legs need to be heavier, maybe you want to see it in walnut instead of white oak. This is the stage where we nail down materials, finish, and hardware too, so there aren’t surprises later. I’ll give you an example. I’m working on a trestle dining table design study right now where the whole point of the design is that the base is the star of the show. No skirt hiding the joinery, exposed through tenons at the stretcher, a chamfered foot that pulls your eye down to the floor. Decisions like that with straight grain on the top so it doesn’t compete with the base, and how to treat the knots in the wood, those come out of exactly this kind of back and forth. A showroom can’t offer you that conversation because there’s no one on the other end who actually shapes the wood. A second deposit gets the build started. Once the design is locked in, I move into the shop and build your piece, paying attention to all the details we talked about. This is where decades of trades experience comes to life in the final product. Delivery and installation, done personally. I place and install the piece myself. If you’re outside my Colorado delivery area, I’ll crate it, blanket wrap it, or arrange white-glove delivery depending on what makes sense for you. Most projects run 8 to 12 weeks from design approval to delivery, depending on complexity and what’s already in the shop queue. If you’ve got a hard deadline, tell me up front, and I’ll plan around it. Why This Matters More Than People Think None of this is complicated, but it’s a completely different relationship than the one you get at a design center. You’re not hoping a sales rep can get someone else to fix a problem. You’re working with the one person who has full control over your piece from the first sketch to the final delivery. I laid out the bigger picture for why that matters in my post on the alternative to the Denver Design Center, but this is really what it comes down to on a day-to-day level. If you want to see the full process in more detail, including pricing ranges and answers to the questions I get asked most, I’ve got that laid out on my custom furniture page. And if you’re ready to start talking through an idea, that conversation starts here.
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    4 min
  • Mixed Media Furniture: What Happens When You Combine Wood, Steel, and Stone

    Mixed Media Furniture: What Happens When You Combine Wood, Steel, and Stone
    Oct 1 2026
    People ask me a version of the same question almost every time they see a piece that mixes materials. Something like, “How did you even think to put those two things together?” Wood, steel, and stone don’t have much in common on the surface. They come from different worlds, they behave differently when fabricated, and they don’t always want to cooperate with each other. But that’s exactly why I like working this way. I call myself a mixed media artist for a reason. Most of my pieces start with wood, since that’s where I built my foundation as a craftsman, but I rarely stop there. Once you start bringing in steel, stone, or glass, you open up a much bigger design space. You’re no longer limited to what one material can do on its own. Why Bother Mixing Materials at All It makes the piece more interesting, both to look at and to build. Every material has its own personality. Wood has grain, warmth, and movement. Steel can be sharp and industrial, or it can be treated to look aged and organic. Stone brings something raw and organic into a piece that’s otherwise very deliberate. When you put them together well, none of them fight for attention. They set each other off. The steel makes the wood grain look richer. The stone makes the joinery look more precise by comparison. That contrast is part of what I love about the combination. This is part of what I mean when I talk about furniture as art rather than just furniture. It’s one of the ideas I get into in my post on why Benham Design Concepts is worth considering as an alternative to the Denver Design Center, where I talk about pieces that combine materials in ways you won’t find on a showroom floor. A manufacturer working from a standard product line isn’t set up to do this kind of thing. It takes a level of custom fabrication that just doesn’t exist in that world. Wood and Steel: The Porthole Entry Table A good example of this is a hall table I built with a steel disc suspended between two wenge wood trestles. I treated the steel with a blend of chemicals to give it a patina, so instead of looking flat and modern, it develops these warm, coppery, aged tones. That disc sits inside a segmented ring made of wenge and padauk, and the whole thing is topped with a live-edge mahogany slab with hand-cut bowtie inlays. None of that happens by accident. The dark espresso tone of the wenge needed something to play off of, and the warm copper in the steel gave it that. You can see the full piece and read more about how it came together on the Porthole Entry Table page. I’ve done something similar with a bar-height wine tasting table, where a copper-plated and patinated steel base supports a wenge top. Same idea, different application. The steel does the structural work and adds visual weight at the base, while the wood carries the warmth up top. You can see that one on the Bar-Height Wine Tasting Table page. Wood and Stone: The Stone Meditation Bench Stone is a different animal entirely, mostly because you can’t shape it the way you can shape wood or steel. You have to design around it instead of forcing it into your plan. The clearest example of this in my portfolio is a meditation bench where one leg is a hollowed piece of local Colorado granite, ground down by hand to make it manageable. I hand-carved the mahogany seat so it fits around the stone instead of covering it up, which lets you actually see the granite from above. A walnut arch spans from the stone leg to the underside of the seat, all joined with hand-cut mortises and no nails or screws. The idea for that piece actually came from a conversation with an architect friend about craning a boulder through a roof to build a fireplace around it. That got me thinking about how to bring something that raw and unshaped into a piece of furniture without losing the craftsmanship side of things. You can read the full story and see the detail shots on the Stone Meditation Bench page. What Actually Goes Into Combining Materials Like This If you’re curious about the practical side, here’s what I’m usually thinking about when I plan a mixed media piece: Weight and structure. Stone and steel are heavy, and they need to be supported correctly. A lot of the engineering happens before I ever pick up a tool, figuring out how the wood will carry that weight without stressing the joinery. Color and tone. I’m always looking at how the natural color of a stone or the patina on a piece of metal will sit next to the wood tone I’ve chosen. Sometimes they need to contrast, and sometimes they need to blend. Finish compatibility. Wood finishes, metal patinas, and stone sealers all behave differently over time. I have to plan for how each material will age so the whole piece stays balanced years down the road, not just on delivery day. Letting each material do what it does best. I don’t try to make steel look like wood or wood look like stone. Each one gets to keep its own character. Furniture ...
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    5 min
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