PHILOSOPHY
IT ISN'T A SKILL PROBLEM. IT'S A DOCUMENTATION PROBLEM.
Most outdoor furniture plans hand you a shape and leave the rest to you. No cut list in the board lengths the store actually stocks. No fastener schedule. No answer for what cushions go on the thing once the frame is standing.
So the build stalls halfway, or it gets finished and something about it reads wrong — and you notice it every time you walk past. That gap almost never comes down to woodworking. It comes down to what was specified before the first cut.
WHY DOMUS.
Domus is Latin for a household — the structure and the people inside it, not just the building.
We picked it because the work isn't really about furniture. It's about whether the space behind your house is somewhere people end up, or somewhere you walk through on the way to the garage. A set you built yourself, that looks designed rather than assembled, is what changes that.
WHAT EVERY PLAN SPECIFIES.
Material. Standard dimensional lumber — 1×2, 1×4 and 2×4, off the rack at any big-box store. Cedar is what we'd use outdoors, because it resists rot and insects without treatment. The plans hold in pine or pressure-treated if that's what you can get.
Proportions. Seat heights, depths and back angles are drawn for sitting in all evening, not for ease of assembly. Every piece in a set shares the same proportions, so the arrangement reads as one thing rather than several.
Cushions. Every seating piece in a set links to cushions from the same line — same brand, same colour, in stock and easy to source. You order once, and the set matches instead of almost matching.
Joinery. Pocket-hole construction, with the fasteners kept off the faces you look at. Every joint is specified: fastener, spacing, and why it's there.
THE WORK HAPPENS BEFORE THE FIRST CUT.
“The first set was for my own patio. I didn't want to build something guests would politely not mention.
What I found is that the difference between furniture that looks built and furniture that looks bought is almost never skill. It's whether somebody did the measuring, the sourcing and the specifying before you started cutting. Nobody had. So I did it, one piece at a time, and wrote it all down.
That's what these are. The measuring, the sourcing and the specifying, already done.”
— Ryan, Founder