Have you ever fallen in love with a designer chair and NEEDED it in your life, but it was just so far out of your budget? Because I have. The Pierre Jeanneret Rattan Chair has a place in my heart! But rather than accepting my fate of never owning this beautiful chair, I decided to make it… from SCRATCH!

It’s usually $1500, but I did it for a maximum of $80… Wanna know how I did it? Let’s go!

What do you need?

• A bunch of wood
• A drill and screws
• A jigsaw
• wood stain
• Rattan

How to make your own chair:

1. The first step is to take your wood and cut it into size! You need six planks of 50cm, two of 46cm, and two of 25cm (5cm width for each).

2. Take two of the 50cm and two of the 46cm and put them together to make a rectangle. The do the same with two more of the 50cm and the two 25cm. The bigger one will be the seat and the smaller will be the back of the chair.

3. When you screw them together, use a tool to make the screws completely flush with the wood - it looks waaaay better!

4. The last two planks of 50cm are to go under the seat as reinforcements.

5. Now for the legs! For these, we want to use planks of wood that are double the width of the pieces we used for the seat and back (10cm). Cut your thicker plank into 50cm pieces!

6. After that, we need to add a diagonal cut onto these pieces so it matches the original.

7. Once that’s done, we have to tackle the most awkward part of this build: the weird angle where the legs come together at the seat… it’s gonna be tricky. I took waaay too long figuring out how to do this! But lucky for you, I got it sorted. SO, what you need to do is take your legs one on top of the other and put a loose screw in the middle about a fifth of the way down. Then you can open the legs, put a 47cm stick in between and work out where to cut the angles that way… who needs math!

8. Now that’s done, you can cut out the freaky angles! And remember you need to do one for each side!

9. And we can now start the assembling! Screw all the pieces of each of the sides together - so that’s the legs and the arms.

10. We don’t want to put the seat in yet, but we do want to add the reinforcements, so line up the seat - remember the seat needs to be 45cm from the ground - and mark up where the reinforcements need to be. Screw them into place.

11. Now go around and add wood filler to everywhere you’ve put a screw in.

12. Get your piece of sandpaper and go over the whole chair, and then paint it! It’s getting so close to being done now!

13. Put the rattan in some water for 30 minutes and then let it dry.

14. Now you can staple the rattan to the inside of the seat and back area! If you want you can add reinforcements via small planks of wood that you can screw on top of the rattan to make it extra secure.

15. And FINALLY! You can put the whole chair together and see how amazing it looks!

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I hope you love it!

full video tutorial:

For all of the plans for my designs, check out my Patreon!