Animal Crossing Furniture’s Surprising Designer Origins

The Animal Crossing series is one about self-expression and escapism, in which you arrive in a town, largely populated with furries, that you can reshape to your heart’s content. From the beginning, this expression has included a house which can be furnished however you like. The number of furniture items has ballooned from a paltry 436 in the series’ first release, all the way to the most recent entry, New Horizons, which after numerous updates, sits at an estimated 1900. That’s right, the number is so staggeringly high that even the most dedicated fan wiki only provides an estimate.

These furniture items aren’t just stock assets either. Each one has been designed, modeled, and textured by a dedicated team of Nintendo employees. And none of this team’s members are trained in product design! From some cursory research it appears the team primarily consists of graphic designers and a few 3D artists. Still, I find myself wishing many of these items were real, because they’re so nice on the eyes.

But as I looked through more and more items, I realized something: Many of them are real, or are at least largely derivative of existing designs, some truly iconic, others requiring a bit more searching. I saw a real opportunity here to bring some new insight both to Animal Crossing fans and product design enthusiasts. This, of course, was also an excuse for me to spend hours setting up adorable showroom vignettes in the game and excuse it as content for the blog.

The first connection I made was with the small and large Café Table items. Even average design enjoyers are familiar with Charles and Ray Eames, a husband-wife duo behind some of the most esteemed furniture designs of all time. The sturdy cast-aluminum skid legs and simple top surfaces of these tables loudly call back to classic Eames Tables produced by Herman Miller.

One of the Eames duo’s greatest achievements was their success in experimenting with molded fiberglass to make chairs like none before. This style of rounded-shell seating has become so ubiquitous that I’m unsure if the Public Bench item can be seen as an intentional reference, but it bears much resemblance to the Eames Tandem Bench.

Known fascist and mindblowingly talented architect Le Corbusier began experimenting with furniture design in 1928, after finding ready-made furniture unfit for his building interiors. This was a very opinionated man, one who condemned the very idea of decorative art. His ideas manifested in an iconic furniture series he designed in collaboration with Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret for Cassina. The Cool Sofa and Cool Chair items in Animal Crossing emulate Le Corbusier’s LC3 Grand Confort and LC7 Siège Tournant, respectively. (Don’t even ask me to pronounce that second one.)

I knew immediately upon seeing it that the Artsy Table item had a real-life counterpart, but it took a bit of research to match it with the Noguchi Table, designed by its namesake Isamu Noguchi. This thing is the modernist coffee table of modernist coffee tables, inspiring many imitations since its release in 1947.

The Artsy Chair item, meanwhile, has roots in more than one design. It clearly has traits from a mother and a father. I’d classify the mother as none other than Eero Aarnio’s alienesque Ball Chair, a coked-up brainchild of the 60s that launched the stardom of its designer.

It then follows that the Egg Chair is the father. The unique, body-hugging shape emerged from sculpted clay experiments by designer Arne Jacobsen, then was molded with foam and wrapped in leather for the final iteration.

Confidently stating a specific inspiration for such minimalist furniture isn’t easy, but I had a hunch of where a Japanese designer looking to imitate this style would go. The Simple Sofa and Simple Chair items are very reminiscent of the Hiroshima collection by king of super-normal Naoto Fukasawa for Maruni, a Japanese manufacturer specializing in the use of wood. They specifically take after for the Hiroshima Two Seater Sofa and Hiroshima Chair, much in the same way they take after every chair and sofa ever designed.

Unlike the two before, I am absolutely doubtless on these final two items. The Nordic item set has a style so widespread in Scandinavian design that the inspiration might as well have been the first page of Google Images, with two exceptions. 

The Nordic Chair item replicates every curve and texture of Naoto Fukasawa’s Hiroshima Armchair.

I was embarrassingly close to missing this next one. The Nordic Pendant Lamp item is an on-the-nose copy of Poul Henningsen’s PH5 Pendant Lamp, designed in 1958 to elegantly accommodate multiple bulb sizes and ensure accurate color reproduction without glare at any angle. 

This last item doesn’t call back to any design, but instead proves the game’s furniture designers knew exactly what they were doing. While designing a home for a villager, I placed down an item named “Unfolded Reference Sheet” and was pleasantly surprised to see that one of its customization options was a legitimately well-done product design sketch!

I’d like to thank the furniture designers for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I tried seeing if any of them could be contacted for this piece, but due to language barriers and infamously rigid NDAs, it seems impossible. Nonetheless, their names are as follows:

Ami Takai

Sachiko Ikeda

Saki Takita

Mari Shibata

Kanoko Kobayashi

Akari Mine

Tomomi Marunami

Airi Abe

Hiromi Sugimoto

Jumpei Yamashita

Kazuki Sugano

I’m grateful to these designers for going above and beyond to include references for design freaks like me. And grateful to you as well for reading. If you’d like to see more posts like this, I have many more here on my blog already, and you should be able to click the link at the bottom and put your email address in the little box to get all of my new posts in your inbox. Try it out for me, would ya? ;-]

Nate