Pug Coffee Table

Name: Kevin

Shop Name: Flat Patterns, LLC

Blog/Website: Etsy

Location: St. Paul, Minnesota

A little bit about Costello:
Furniture became my focus after I began reupholstering trashed chairs and couches to decorate my home the low budget way. Five years of Detroit dumpster diving for upholstery projects eventually bagged me a 1950s Heywood-Wakefield Pull-Up Chair. My blond birch find got me looking to past furniture designs and the Modernist philosophy that I would eventually embrace.

At the time I was designing seats for the automotive industry. I spent my days developing car seats, modeling all the various CAD (computer aided design) parts that defined the seat structure. At night I tore apart easy chairs, studying their wooden structures, wondering if current car seat technology might make better furniture.

A Philosophy degree from the University of Wisconsin in Madison provided me conceptual tools. I learned design process at The College of Creative Studies in Detroit. A restless nature kept me pursuing varied designer jobs. It also provided me a global perspective, as I traveled overseas while doing design work for Opel in Germany, Isuzu/GM in Japan and GM in Brazil.

The car seat program I’d been working on went to production. My house was stuffed full of reupholstered couches and chairs. It was time to move on and give fuller expression to the skills I’d acquired. I moved to Minnesota to take advantage of the tremendous woodworking resources in the Twin Cities area, hooked my computer up to a CNC router and opened my studio.

As to why flat packed furniture – how are you going to get it home if you can’t fit it in your car?

Exploded Long with Inlay

What do you sell that would appeal to the guys?
My stuff, though fretted over, is simple and without much decorative elements so it tends to be more masculine. That being said I think customer split is about fifty/fifty.

Where do you sell your stuff?
Just Etsy for now.

How long have you been in business?
About three years.

How did you get started?
I just wanted to do something that was mine and I had gotten tired of sitting in a cube all day. I’ve always been interested in furniture and spent many hours in House of Denmark and IKEA just wandering. It all came together, the big bang theory, when I quit my job. I had to do something so this is what it made sense for me to do.

Arch Coffe Table in White

How do you get the word out about your shop?
I don’t get the word out much. It’s all Etsy.

What’s your creative process?
I see things, designs and objects that provoke me. For instance I saw an interesting design in the legs of an industrial clothes basket. I thought it was clever so I’m working it into a table design.

What’s unique about your items?
Probably the unique thing is the use of metal brackets. I’ve spent years designing brackets for cars, planes, etc. so I am using that “expertise” (if you can call it that) to make furniture.

Mushroom Side Table

Anything else you’d like us to know?
I do make commissioned pieces but I warn everyone, they take forever.