Kyle Carter is a New York-based furniture designer who believes honesty and practicality to be the guiding rails of good design.
While studying Multi-Disciplinary Design at the University of Utah, Kyle began working as a furniture designer for MTRL, a Park City-based furniture studio. Designing pieces for the likes of Apple and Google, he quickly learned to apply design research and thinking to the creation of furniture. In 2019, he spent the Summer studying Scandinavian furniture design in Copenhagen, where he designed and built his ‘Tension Stools’.
Inspired by the likes of Hans Wegner and other craftsperson-designers, Kyle realized that in order to most improve his design abilities needed more hands-on experience with the materials he would be designing with. Pointed by an affinity for the natural, sophisticated beauty of wood he left his design role at MTRL and turned carpenter. Vertical Solutions proved an excellent place to learn carpentry and furniture-building at a variety of scales, from drawers to tables to climbing walls.
After some time building to the designs of others, Kyle found that his hands-on education was taking effect. Eventually, he was able to provide feedback on what parts of a design worked and what parts required adjusting. In 2021, seeing the need for a role in the company between “aesthetic design” and carpentry, Kyle proposed moving into a “Custom Projects & Manufacturing Design”. In this role, he was able to bring his design thinking together with his carpentry experience to design pieces and their manufacturing methods in unison.
Looking forward, Kyle is hopes to establish himself as a furniture designer with a focus on making the pragmatic beautiful.