Lawyer Emily Boutard quit corporate firm to make tiny furniture

Emily Boutard has swapped 12-hour workdays as a corporate lawyer to establish a career as a miniature furniture maker.

Discontented by the long hours and consuming lifestyle required of corporate law, Boutard resigned from her job two years ago to spend more time making handmade pieces of tiny furniture.

Since the career change, Boutard has managed her tiny furniture project “Little Architecture” alongside studying a Bachelor of Architecture, teaching property law at a university, and working casually for a law startup from her North Melbourne home.

Boutard is one of a small cohort of Australian “miniaturists” who produce their tiny pieces of furniture and doll houses entirely by hand.

“I have a range of surgical grade scalpels and Stanley knifes, really fine sandpaper and tiny files … basic PVA wood glue. It’s nothing you can’t just get at your local art shop – it’s not anything specialised,” Boutard says.

Boutard works to 1:24 scale, meaning each piece is 24 times smaller than the original.

The recent launch of the Little Architecture website (which gets around 20,000 hits a day) and Instagram page has allowed Boutard to start selling her work, but the main reason she produces tiny furniture is for her own enjoyment.

“I concentrate so hard on miniature things that I literally forget everything else. I can sit there making something tiny and the entire day will pass,” Boutard says.

“For me, making tiny furniture is just as therapeutic as playing music or going to yoga might be for other people … I really do it because it makes me happier and more relaxed, so it’s more something that serves me.”

Some pieces require several days of work and multiple failed attempts before the finished product is carved.

“The violin I’m particularly proud of – I spent four days straight making it. For the bridge, I made about seven of those before I got one where the wood didn’t split,” Boutard says.

“I think that’s something I learnt in law school. I don’t think you have to be genius to be a lawyer, you just have to be persistent – just work through everything and have an end point in mind.”

Boutard’s technique differs form miniature “purists” in that her pieces are not made from the same materials as the original, but instead use materials that look the most realistic.

“For me, the important thing is the illusion of reality. As long it looks real, I don’t really care what material it’s made out of,” she says.

“Some things don’t translate into miniature – marble is the perfect example. When you look at the miniature thing, it doesn’t look like marble; it looks like soap. Because marble doesn’t scale, the grain is incorrect.”

The styles of architecture explored in Boutard’s work are ever-changing. Previous works have been based on mid-century and Scandinavian styles.

“I spent a bit of time in Tasmania over the holidays and there’s a lot of colonial architecture there. So I’m in my colonial niche at the moment, and when I’ve finished furnishing that house I’ll move onto something else,” Boutard says.

“I haven’t made anything really modern in miniature, and that’s mainly because the materials are different in modern furniture – they’re mainly plastics and metals – and that’s quite difficult. Wood is just a really fun material to work with.”

Many of her most recent pieces are based on illustrations in an encyclopedia of cottage, farm and village architecture, and are made using basswood.

To find out more about Boutard’s most recent work, visit her Instagram.