Moving Brands reveals kit to make furniture building more “accessible”
Brakit is a new system that will let users design furniture to suit their needs and tastes, using local timber yards to source materials.
Moving Brands has designed a new build-it-yourself furniture “hacker kit”, which aims to bridge the gap between shop-bought products and “expensive” bespoke ones.
Brakit is a furniture building package composed of: Brakits, colourful, metal brackets used to hold wood together; Brakit Builder, a digital program that allows people to design their own bespoke furniture; and Brakit Cloud, an online library allowing the community to share their designs with each other.
“At the moment, people either go to Ikea, which has custom sizes that don’t necessarily fit what you need, or they go for hand-made furniture, which is lovely but expensive,” says Guy Wolstenholme, creative director at Moving Brands.
Brakit aims to offer an alternative, which is “good quality” furniture with “design flexibility” at a “fair price”, says the studio.
The aim is for users to design their own furniture, choosing dimensions, colours and materials, then receive a list of appropriate, bespoke cuttings.
Users can then take their cuttings to a local or chain store, and order wood in pre-cut sizes. Wolstenholme says the studio “is not trying to become a furniture maker” but aims to partner with local manufacturers and timberyards instead to encourage the Brakit community to use those.
After ordering raw materials, users can then order the appropriate amount of steel brackets, which have been powder-coated in various colours. They intend to be an aesthetic element of building furniture, rather than “hidden”, as is often the case with furniture sets, says Wolstenholme.
“We’re trying to make building bespoke furniture more accessible,” Toby Milner Gulland, senior designer at Moving Brands, adds. “We’ve aimed for the brackets to look nice, so that people don’t mind exposing them.”
The design of the brackets aims to make furniture “modular” and easy to dismantle, says Gulland so that it can be remade in different ways in the future.
Brakit was revealed by Moving Brands co-founder James Bull in a talk at design festival Offf Barcelona in April.
Moving Brands is yet to unveil the price of the Brakit hacker kit. It is due to launch later this year, and the studio is currently looking for manufacturers to partner with.
You can buy brackets like these in almost any DIY store, and any timber merchant of any worth will cut to size – that’s not the problem. The problem is finishing (ie not raw wood, which is time consuming. Notably the images here don’t attempt to deal with that issue.