Making your life more royal (part three of a series) - Furnishing your castle

Part of the reason I set up this blog is to help people "put a little royalty into their life". To that end, I've kicked off this semi-regular series of postings about bringing the castles of Europe to you, sort of. Similar to the "Gothic Homemaking" series of videos that were put out by Aurelio Voltaire (over on YouTube), this will be a recurring series on how to make your own life, well, a bit more royal.

Part one of this series can be found here. Part two of this series can be found here.

We've already talked about thrones, but you probably need more furniture than just a throne, unless you expect all of your guests to remain standing for their entire visit. And, unless you're the king of Sweden, your furniture probably shouldn't all come from Ikea!

If you've got some money, then buying appropriate furnishings might be an option. I've seen some truly nice things on the Wayfair website, but their prices would destroy my treasury...

Search "executive desk" on Wayfair

Search "throne" on Wayfair

There are a few nice thrones over on Amazon, and the prices are a BIT lower than Wayfair.

You may get lucky and find suitable furnishings at your local charity store (Value Village, Goodwill, etc.) - I've heard that others have found thrones, etc. there, although I never have. If you're handy, you can often get beat-up furniture fairly cheaply and then refinish it at home.

If you're even handier, you might be able to build your own furniture. House Graydragon of the Society for Creative Anachronism has a webpage devoted to furniture, which includes plans for a Glastonbury chair, a simple Gothic bench, and a simple storage chest (which they use for storing bocce balls), among other things.

As further inspiration, there's a book called Constructing Medieval Furniture by Daniel Diehl (Stackpole Books, 1996) which, if you can find it, may prove inspirational for the DIY decorator. The author also co-wrote a book called Medieval & Renaissance Furniture: Plans & Instructions for Historical Reproductions with Mark P. Donnelly (Stackpole Books, 2012), but I don't know if it might overlap with the other one, or by how much. There are several other books on constructing medieval furniture available via retailers such as Amazon as well.