I'm a furniture maker. I come to the field with a lot of privilege having worked software for some years previously (but not earning FAANG retire early money), and having a spouse whose job provides considerable stability and health insurance.
You don't need high end vacuum forming equipment to make beautiful, high-end furniture. There are certainly styles for which that would be required, but through human history, people built furniture not only without that equipment, but also wholly without power tools.
You can built modern-looking work using very traditional techniques. I would go out on a limb and claim that stuff that requires truly modern equipment looks "weird", even to a modern eye because we have thousands of years of a furniture record of stuff put together using the same basic techniques.
A joined chair looks like a joined chair whether it's some frilly French thing or some staid and severe English thing. A staked chair looks like a staked chair whether it's some high-style Windsor or a milking stool. A Thonet rocking chair looks f*cking wild because it departs from thousands of years of practice of how people make chairs. It still looks wild, over 150 years after its introduction.
Even a Maloof rocker is made with fairly well-established techniques. I don't say that to take anything away from his design, but to illustrate that you can build very contemporary furniture without making a wild departure from the practice and tools that have served furniture makers for a very long time.
Edited to add: I think I could have become a very good carpenter, but I went into furniture because you find older people still working as furniture makers, and damn few working as carpenters.
I understand, but at the time I was extremely interested in those sorts of vac-formed items. In the same way, I was fascinated with the free-form houses that consisted of metal mesh being covered with concrete. I was simply a kid who wanted to live in a future I designed.
My 7x great grandfather was a french master carpenter by way of Germany built the first iteration of the modern St Louis Cathedral and Ursuline Convents in New Orleans and once found pirate treasure stuffed into the wall of a man's house while attempting to remodel, lol.
You don't need high end vacuum forming equipment to make beautiful, high-end furniture. There are certainly styles for which that would be required, but through human history, people built furniture not only without that equipment, but also wholly without power tools.
You can built modern-looking work using very traditional techniques. I would go out on a limb and claim that stuff that requires truly modern equipment looks "weird", even to a modern eye because we have thousands of years of a furniture record of stuff put together using the same basic techniques.
A joined chair looks like a joined chair whether it's some frilly French thing or some staid and severe English thing. A staked chair looks like a staked chair whether it's some high-style Windsor or a milking stool. A Thonet rocking chair looks f*cking wild because it departs from thousands of years of practice of how people make chairs. It still looks wild, over 150 years after its introduction.
Even a Maloof rocker is made with fairly well-established techniques. I don't say that to take anything away from his design, but to illustrate that you can build very contemporary furniture without making a wild departure from the practice and tools that have served furniture makers for a very long time.
Edited to add: I think I could have become a very good carpenter, but I went into furniture because you find older people still working as furniture makers, and damn few working as carpenters.