Repurposing furniture requires finding surprising uses for it in different rooms

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 useful for Perkins 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, although it was built to hold clothes, its three wide drawers now comfortably store 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," says Perkins, who recently moved herself and her bedroom dresser into a new condominium in Farmington, Conn. "It's a classic piece. It will stay around forever."

Even if it never makes it into the bedroom.

Furniture can get 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, have a harder time and 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 hutch doesn't mean it needs to reside 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 Kirsten Floyd Interior Design in Hartford, Conn. "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."

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 repurposed 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.

If you still have trouble picturing a dresser anywhere but in the bedroom -- or a desk other than in an office, or a dining room chair matched with something other than its table -- then try transforming the piece, designers say.

Adding a granite or butcher-block top can make a dresser feel more like it belongs in the kitchen. Changing knobs and hinges helps furniture feel different. And if you want a bigger challenge, you can transform furniture by staining the wood a different color or sanding and painting it.

"Changing it in some way is a good idea, so it doesn't feel like the same piece of furniture," Floyd says.

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

"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," says designer Sharon McCormick of Durham, Conn. "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 armoire can become a wine cabinet. Or it can be repurposed into a home-office cabinet, with storage for a computer and drawer space for paper and a printer.

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, McCormick tucked an upholstered chair and a floor lamp for soft lighting. Placing a chair in a bathroom makes it easy to sit down and dry your hair, put on makeup, or keep an eye on children in the bathtub, she says.

McCormick has embraced the practice of repurposing furniture, and all around her historic home in Durham are examples of her own twists on classic pieces of furniture serving new functions.

"Some people are not confident enough to put something in an unusual place. . . . But the more unusual and unexpected it is, the more exciting a room can be," she says.

In McCormick's mudroom is a six-drawer filing cabinet she originally bought for her office. It now stores hats, shoes and gloves. On her sun porch is a small desk she repainted white and uses as a side table. On the other side of the room is a painted dresser that functions as a decorative table.

McCormick says that even if you don't reuse your own furniture, it's easy to find someone else's item to repurpose at a tag sale.

"Keep an open mind about what it could be. If there's something about it that appeals to you, you can always find a new use for it, even if it was not what it was intended to be. It's always nice when someone walks into a room and says, 'Wow. That's cool. I never would have thought of that.'"