BFAFurniture

With deep roots in the Arts and Crafts movement, the Furniture program prepares students for versatile careers in a rapidly changing landscape. We teach craft-based methods alongside digital fabrication methods, emphasizing innovation, sustainability, and collaboration. Students work closely with celebrated faculty to make full-scale sculpture and furniture in our wide range of studios and shops. And if your interests go beyond hands-on making and into fabrication and material innovation, you can add a minor in Industrial Design to your Furniture major.

In studios and courses focused on special techniques, you’ll learn to conceptualize, prototype, and produce finished pieces of furniture. You’ll focus on both analog and digital skills, including sketching and drawing, computer drafting, woodworking, metalworking, upholstery, and manufacturing processes. Faculty work with you individually to prepare you for local and national exhibition opportunities, competitions, and a culminating thesis project. By the time you graduate, you’ll know how to set up and run your own workshops or studios.

Collaborations across disciplines

We’ll teach you about current and emerging business strategies in furniture design through collaborative studios with local museums, nonprofits, and design firms. Recent partners include Autodesk, California Academy of Sciences, Concreteworks, Exploratorium, Headlands Center for the Arts, Oakland Museum of California, SFMOMA, and Workshop Residence. Working alongside professionals in architecture, interior design, and industrial design, you’ll build the critique and teamwork skills they’ll need in your professional life.

Chair Katherine Lam is an independent designer/builder whose practice spans over 20 years engaging with furniture and the handmade object, with a focus on design and production. After graduating from CCA’s Wood/Furniture program in 1998, Lam began their career as a furniture maker, moved into the design world as a creative and administrator, and recently expanded into creative practice with land-based works in the high desert of New Mexico. As a second-generation American of Chinese and Japanese descent, Lam explores the connection between identity, craft, and the handmade object and describes their engagement with furniture and objects as a lifelong reconstruction of familial histories lost in diasporic journeys.

Our students emerge from the program with versatile, adaptable skills in furniture design. Our alumni make conceptual sculpture, teach woodworking, design custom furniture for retail spaces, create small-run production pieces, and exhibit widely. Whether they become independent shop owners or work for major architectural firms, they are thoughtful collaborators with fine-tuned design instinct.