'Repurposing' your furniture

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Dresser, television unit, sofa table . . . don't let the labels tie you down. Robin Stansbury, of The Hartford Courant, looks at "repurposing" furniture.

Janice Perkins bought a bedroom dresser more than a decade ago, but it never made it into her bedroom. Instead, the versatile dresser has been used in three places in three houses.

Once it held a television set; another time it served as an entry table coupled with a mirror. And, its three wide drawers now comfortably store Ms Perkins' table linens, napkins, candlesticks and napkin rings in an area near her dining room.

"It's just a nice piece of furniture. It comes with me wherever I move. I always seem to find a place for it," Ms Perkins says.

"It's a classic piece. It will stay around forever."

Even if it never makes it into the bedroom. Furniture can have a second life, serving an entirely new function. Experts call this "repurposing" furniture, and designers say they use this trick often, to add surprise and uniqueness to a room.

Amateur decorators, though, are less likely to make use of furniture in this way, afraid of breaking an unspoken design rule or unable to remove the name of the furniture from its purpose.

But just because it's called a dining-room sideboard doesn't mean it needs to be in a dining room. The same is true for sofa tables, which don't need to be near a sofa.

And as Perkins proves, bedroom dressers don't need to be in the bedroom.

"Most of us already have furniture, so it's wonderful to use it in a new application," says Kirsten Floyd, owner of an interior design company. And a dresser is one of the best examples, because it is one of the most universal pieces of furniture and one of the most reusable."

Ms Floyd has used dressers in entryways with a tray on top to gather keys and mail, and drawers to capture hats, gloves, scarfs and mittens.

She also has used them in a workroom to store art supplies, and in a kitchen for pots and pans.

"A small dresser with drawers can be used just about anywhere," she says.

Adding a granite or butcher-block top can make a dresser feel more as if it belongs in the kitchen. Changing knobs and hinges helps furniture feel different. And you can transform furniture completely by staining the wood a different colour or sanding and painting it.

Perhaps the latest furniture piece being given a second life is the giant television unit, used to store a big TV behind closed doors. Modern flat-screen and plasma televisions are turning them into relics, but they don't have to be, designers say.

"Everybody has them, and you can try to sell them, but you can't get much money for them because no-one needs them anymore," another designer, Sharon McCormick, says.

"So the best thing is to turn them into something else."

With some adjustments - removing the doors, replacing wood shelves with glass and adding a mirror as a backdrop - an old TV unit can become a wine cabinet.

Or it can be a home-office cabinet, with storage for a computer and drawer space for paper and a printer.

Ms McCormick transformed her own large armoire, originally designed to store clothes, into a linen closet for her bathroom.

The shelves hold towels and toiletry items, and the bottom doors were rehinged so that two hampers now tilt outward to collect dirty clothes.

Nearby in the bathroom, Ms McCormick placed an upholstered chair, and a floor lamp for soft lighting.

"It was an empty corner, and I had the chair but I never knew what I was going to do with it," she says.

Placing an upholstered chair in a bathroom is "unusual but so handy" to sit down and dry your hair, put on makeup, or keep an eye on children in the bath, she says.