The "Male Furniture Shopping" Obstacle Course
The difficult reality of looking for a good place to buy furniture for your space is that the industry has decided that interior design style and sophistication is for women. Adding "men" or "male" to your searches shifts the results to a dumpster of clunky black garbage. And the thoughtful catalogs from the best stores are tinted with pink, brass and light-blue combinations that you know will draw the wrong reactions if you buy them for yourself.
This article helps you navigate what can only be described as a minefield and find the best furniture stores for men. Just look at the difference in Google results:
The Good
The best furniture stores for men have catalog themes that aren't too feminine but also don't devolve into caveman black furniture. Here are the best options:
CB2 — from Crate & Barrel
Pros: Very stylish pieces in cool masculine colors and textures such as carbon, crystal, leather and cement. CB2 tends to offer the black tones that appeal to men in an elevated way with different materials and combinations other than simple wooden blocks. Plenty of space in the catalog is reserved for vignettes that could be copied exactly as a sophisticated male living space without feeling like a one-dimensional cigar lounge. The quality and construction is also good and most pieces last for many years.
This is a great place to buy those one or two expensive cornerstone items that anchor your place and are surrounded by less expensive side pieces.
Cons: Expensive (couches are ~$3,000+, small pieces are $500+), store locations are only in select cities and they don't carry much inventory so most orders must be placed online.
Favorite products: Lawson Glass Top Night Stand, Matter Grey Cement Rectangular Coffee Table
Amazon Rivet — by Amazon
Pros: Great value at low prices with lookalike alternatives to bigger brand names like Crate & Barrel or West Elm that will help you fill out your furniture collection if you can't afford to buy a lot of expensive items. In particular, they have a strong selection of saddle-brown leather couches and accent chairs with solid frame construction that will save you a few thousand dollars off of brand name options and free up your budget.
Cons: There is a heavy dose of ugly midcentury-wannabe pieces and cheap knockoffs from the Rivet catalog that need to be avoided because they will drag down the overall feeling of cutting edge design in your home.
Favorite products: Aiden Mid-century Sofa, Rivet Modern Arm Chair, Swope Curved Swivel Office Chair
Article — online store
Pros: Very cool modern and Scandinavian pieces such as their line of modular sectionals, the popular Sven couch (which comes in great stock colors), and some great dining chairs and benches. Article curates design-minded pieces that will feel unique and fresh and are what IKEA should be producing.
Cons: Can only be seen and ordered online and there are some quality issues. Pricing can be high.
Favorite products: Sven Sofa in Grass, Level Bench
Your Local Nursery
Pros: A tall plant in an oversized, one-of-a-kind pot is a timeless addition to any living room and is best purchased from your local nursery. Home improvement stores like Home Depot, Menard's and Lowe's only sell mass-produced pots and the most common plant varieties.
Google your local nursery and you can find a 10-foot fig, a giant bird of paradise, some really interesting palms, and a collection of large cement or asphalt or hand-painted ceramic pots to choose from. This "store" will only be useful for one or two of your major pieces but is solidly worth the effort.
Target
Pros: Perfect for cheap accessories like lighting, small decor objects, and kitchen essentials. Don't come here for your main furniture — use Target to fill in the affordable gaps between your bigger investments from places like CB2 or Article.
The Bad
West Elm — from Williams Sonoma
West Elm is a controversial selection for "bad furniture store for men" because you can find one or two good pieces there if you are careful. However, the point of this article is to focus on stores where men have a good chance of success and West Elm has too many traps.
The first issue is that an overwhelming proportion of the furniture and decor is marked by feminine design elements that will not fit well with most male living space setups. Two major culprits are light brass accents on everything and a general boho theme driven by Instagram popularity. This look goes well with mainly femininely-styled setups and also simply will not age well.
The second issue is how overdone their trendy midcentury lines are, including all of their acorn lineup, some of their beds, and many of their lamps.
Finally, West Elm pricing is very high and the company uses deceptive practices like charging an extra $250 fee for each order that is added during checkout and cannot be waived or removed, called a "white glove" fee.
IKEA
Have you ever dreamed of living in a kindergarten classroom, or some other institution where style is deprioritized in favor of sterility, cost and modularity? Welcome to IKEA.
IKEA is responsible for some of the worst blunders in male living spaces today. The foremost blunder is their promotion of the clunky black wood look. The average young man is walking out of their first major IKEA shopping trip with a cart full of cubic black furniture and will never recover, because from then on every new piece they buy needs to fit into that awful, overly-simple color palette.
A store should set their customers up for success, but IKEA chooses to market these black pieces heavily in the store because they know men will foolishly gravitate towards them even though the IKEA designers themselves are aware that these customers are being sent down a blind alley.
It's easy to get caught up in the psychological storm IKEA employs in the store (show 50 terrible items to make the merely bad ones look like good finds, make shopping take two hours so that it would feel wasteful to leave without buying anything, etc.) but back at home the pieces are cartoonish, easily recognizable as IKEA, and are better suited to dorm rooms than mature spaces.
The Ugly
Living Spaces & American Furniture Warehouse
These twin warehouse furniture brands advertise as having knockoffs of all major brands at outlet prices. This is partially true — they have bad knockoffs of some major brands, but in recent years they have increased to full brand name pricing as they realized customers don't know these aren't top-shelf products.
The problem with the style of knockoffs these stores produce is that there is something "off" with each piece. Usually for couches and accent pieces this means the feet will be chunky wooden screw-on blocks instead of sleek metal designs. This could be mitigated by getting custom feet and attaching them after the fact, but (1) who is really going to do this? and (2) what's the point of buying and fixing knockoffs when you're already paying full price?
Another note of caution: avoid the beds. Each bed frame is designed to require an escalating mountain of accessories so that an "affordable" $800 frame becomes a frame + box spring + mattress for $2,500 while you are at the register, and the mattresses are the highest margin (worst deal) items in the store.
Ashley Home Furniture & Other Whole-Room Stores
Full-room sets are way more popular than you might realize. In fact, Ashley Home Furniture is the #1 furniture store in America by sales every year. This fact is an opportunity to say that there is more to interior design than having matching pieces and you should NEVER buy a full-room matching set of anything.
Other stores in this category include The RoomStore, Rooms to Go, La-Z-Boy, and more. A nice space should be balanced with a series of different colors and materials that create visually interesting combinations, and these stores offer heavy, outdated (traditional or transitional), expensive mistakes.
Where to Go From Here
Now that you know where to shop — and where to run away from — check out these guides to put your knowledge into action:
- Starter Packs from $500 to $5,000 — complete room setups using the stores above
- Worst Design Mistakes — avoid the traps before you buy
- What Furniture Style Is Best for Men? — find your aesthetic before you commit