Barbie Furniture Maker Is Sitting Pretty

When Charlie Karps made a present for his granddaughter, he didn’t realize he was also making himself a retirement income.

“She started to make a couch for her Barbie doll out of a piece of foam rubber,” he said. “I said, ‘Let’s make a real one.’ ”

Twenty-two years later, Karps still builds pint-size furniture for America’s favorite doll. An upholsterer by trade, Karps also restores chairs and sofas for grown-up customers. But these days he gets more pleasure out of making furniture for little girls and their dolls.

“I build ‘em just the way you’d build a real chair,” he said, sitting in a garage workshop filled with bolts of fabric, human-scale chairs in various stages of reassembly, and enough tiny sofas, beds and chairs to furnish a Barbie motel.

“They’re scaled down to fit Barbie,” he said, placing one of the dolls on a sofa. “As she sits here, her arm will rest on the sofa and her feet will rest on the floor.”

Karps sells furniture so tough that some young girls will probably pass theirs on to their daughters. He frames the furniture with solid wood and stuffs each piece with foam. His wife of 57 years, Margaret, chooses the fabrics he uses to cover each piece.

“Mattel makes plastic stuff,” he said. “Somebody steps on it and it’s gone. Their stuff doesn’t last two weeks.”

Karps’ doll sofas cost $19.50; a matching chair goes for $16.50. He creates beds in a variety of fabrics and for the most sophisticated Barbie, a chaise longue.

He sells the furniture at Christmas craft fairs and to customers who hear about his work through the grapevine.

“I sold 79 pieces at a two-day craft fair last Christmas,” he said. “I make a little money. It pays my taxes.”

Karps makes the furniture in batches of about a dozen, cutting all the frame pieces and then gluing them together. After adding the padding, he staples the coverings to the frames and then finishes each piece with a bottom covering that hides his earlier work.

“They’re not hard to make if you’re experienced,” he said. “I probably spend about an hour and a half on each piece.”

Karps’ experience comes from a life spent in the furniture business. He built his first chairs 60 years ago, as a teenager in Fort Smith, Ark.

“I got out of school after the eighth grade,” he said. “When I saw algebra, I quit.”

Fort Smith was a furniture-making town when Karps was young. He started building chairs with a friend and attracted enough customers that a local factory agreed to buy everything he could make.

He moved to California in the middle of the Depression, but he stayed in the upholstery business and eventually taught the trade in the Golden State.

“I don’t have a high-school education, but I can teach in colleges in California,” he said, pointing to a teaching certificate on his shop wall.

He moved to Ashland 13 years ago, after operating upholstery shops in several California towns.

“I used to have a business,” he said. “Men and women working for me. That got old. All you’re doing is working for the government.”

Although he relies heavily on word-of-mouth for customers, he recently hired two high school boys to build him a home page on the Internet to attract new customers.

“I don’t even have a computer,” he said, “but maybe with this Internet thing [customers will] get to know me better.”

His Internet address is: https://www.neodesign.com/nordic/

Karps said he has no intention of heading for the rocking chair any time soon.

“I’m not going to retire,” he said. “That’s for old people. As long as the good Lord lets me, I’m going to work.”