About Us

Urban 9-5 started as one person's interest in the aesthetics of industrial design. About ten years ago, our owner kept circling back to the raw feel of industrial elements: raw steel, reclaimed wood, visible construction—it’s the kind of character you'd find in a loft or a coffee shop, and almost never in a place where people actually work. Nobody was building commercial office furniture that looked like that and still held up to daily use, so he designed the Urban 9-5 line himself.

In the ten years since, we've shipped urban industrial furniture to thousands of customers across the country, from single home offices to entire commercial floors. Every piece is still designed and built in Utah, and every piece still comes back to the same idea: a workspace shouldn't have to be boring to be built well.

Urban 9-5 was designed by Alan Fox, who came to furniture via architecture. He earned a degree in Interior Architecture and spent 13 years in design roles at architectural firms and office furniture dealerships before he ever designed a desk of his own. That background is all over the line, including the proportions, the material pairings, and the habit of planning a piece around the room it's going into rather than styling it in isolation.

Sitting behind Urban 9-5 is close to 30 years in the office furniture industry, which is the part customers tend to feel rather than see. It's how we know what a work surface goes through in a decade, what gives out first on a cheap desk, and what it takes to build commercial office furniture that survives a real floor plan.

Good industrial-style furniture should look like what it's made of. We don't hide steel behind laminate or print a wood grain onto particleboard. We use reclaimed wood, real metal, and hand-applied finishes, which means no two rusted or reclaimed tops are ever identical. Those variations aren't flaws to sand out. They're the reason the furniture has presence in a room.

We also design for the way people actually work. A desk has to hold monitors, paperwork, and a decade of daily use without wobbling. Rustic industrial furniture that only looks the part isn't worth building, so ours is engineered for the demands of a real workplace first and styled second. If you're curious about materials, lead times, or how to care for a piece, our FAQ page covers the details.

Nothing sits in a warehouse waiting for you. Every piece is made to order in Utah, which is why lead times run a couple of weeks instead of same-day, and it's also why we can change a dimension, swap a finish, or rework an entire layout to fit your space. Our project managers will go through floor plans, configurations, and renderings with you, whether you're buying one desk or filling a floor with workstations.

That's the trade-off we've chosen: slower than mass production, and built to outlast it.

Whether you're outfitting one office or an entire floor, we'd love to help you find the right pieces. Browse our full collection of industrial office furniture to see what we build, or get in touch, and we'll help you spec it out, talk through finishes, or request a custom quote to design something for your space.