Build It Yourself--Seriously : Practical View: The chance to own elegant furniture (without spending the rest of your life in hock) is sending creative types to the workbench.

Annie Wachtel of Hancock Park was touring the historic Gamble House in Pasadena when the small fern table caught her eye. She fell in love immediately.

“It was quintessential Craftsman furniture--mahogany with a green Italianate marble top and little ebony pegs and just the size for a fern. But it was roped off, so I couldn’t even touch it.”

So Wachtel was amazed and delighted when she saw an ad in American Bungalow magazine for a kit. For $150 and some hours of assembly work, she could have an exact copy of the Gamble House table. The kit came pre-cut with all the pieces, fasteners and instructions.

“I’m not a carpenter,” says Wachtel, a garden consultant and designer, “but my sister helped me and we put it together ourselves. Now it’s sitting in my living room, next to a black leather chair. It looks so good.”

Wachtel typifies a new trend in the do-it-yourself furniture world. “Knock-down” furniture, also known as “RTA” (ready to assemble) has been around for years in the form of particle board bookcases and kitchen tables for young people in first apartments and others on tight budgets.

But today, people with their eyes on the upscale are buying kits to build reproductions of mission-style dining sets, Chippendale garden benches, Shaker writing desks, Queen Anne lowboys and Colonial grandfather clocks.

“It’s the new way to buy quality furniture,” says John Brinkman, editor of American Bungalow, published in Sierra Madre and dedicated to the Craftsman movement. The magazine went into the kit sideline after a staff member built a fern table and everyone who saw it wanted one, Brinkman says.

“I think it’s also a reaction to the electronics age,” he says. “There’s a fascination with the natural textures of real, honest wood.”

Brinkman says elegant kit furniture typifies the ‘90s interest in home and hearth with a touch of frugality thrown in. A kit saves up to half the retail price of assembled furniture.

“We make reproductions of museum pieces in kit form for customers who have an interest in Early American furniture but can’t afford antiques,” says Andrew Smith, president of Cohasset Colonials in Highham, Mass.

“It’s a small niche kind of business--our customers get a very high-quality piece of furniture and have the fun of putting it together. We encourage them to identify pieces with their name so people will remember that Uncle Wilbur built that desk.”

“I just love telling people I made it myself,” Wachtel says. “This is the period of interest in homes, and if you love your home, why not make something for it?”

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Although there are levels of complexity, depending on the piece of furniture, most kits can be assembled by any amateur with enough patience to read instructions very carefully. And the kits are tailored for people who don’t have woodworking tools but want the pride of craftsmanship. Patricia Metropolis, a New Mexico writer and editor who says, “I’ve never used my hands,” recently built a slat-backed teak chair, cocktail table and a bench for the patio of her new home.

“I needed a little help, but not much, and I really enjoyed it,” she says. “I could build another chair. And I saved a lot of money. I’m very pleased with myself.”

Her kits came from Wood Classics in Gardiner, N.Y. “Our furniture is not inexpensive,” says founder Eric Goodman. “Many people who could afford whatever they want buy kits. It’s one way to work out frustrations on the weekend--lovingly and carefully building something.”

He agrees that part of the pleasure is the wood. “Wood has character, and it’s not like stone or concrete. You don’t have to apprentice for a long time, and you don’t need strength.”

What you do need, he adds, is patience. “If the kit is $600 and the assembled furniture is $1,100, you have to do something for that $500.”

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But in most instances, patience will pay off. Today’s furniture kit manufacturers have done all the hard work, says Frank Coffee, author of a new book, “The Best Kits Catalog” (HarperCollins).

Quality kits come with all wood parts pre-cut and ready to assemble and finish, Coffee says: “Where rabbets, miters, dovetails or mortise-and-tenon joints are called for, they will have been machined at the factory.” Furthermore, most companies offer 800 numbers for technical assistance, he says.

Steven Ernst at Coppa Woodworking in San Pedro, which sells Adirondack chair kits, links the interest in building furniture with a yearning for a simpler time.

“It’s the yuppie thing--searching for nostalgia,” he says. “With everybody getting computerized, it’s nice to do something with your hands. Something that gives you personal satisfaction.”

Jose Cabanillas, 36, an aerospace engineer for Rockwell International, has built a stereo cabinet and the Craftsman fern table. “It’s possible that things are not quite as excessive as they were in the last decade,” he says. “People are looking for things today that give them more human connection.”

He treasures the childhood memories of helping his grandfather, who had a woodworking shop in his attic.

“I hope eventually to have a house with an attic and do the same thing,” Cabanillas says. “For now, I have to make do with kits.”