I'm one man making general domestic furniture. The workshop's about 80 square metres split between a concrete floored machine room and a sprung wooden floored bench room. In addition there are two single garages as timber sheds, but I carry far higher timber stocks than most furniture makers need. There's a combination machine in the centre of the machine room, a bandsaw, disc sander, drum sander, drill press, lathe, morticing machine, the extraction system, and a router table. In the bench room there's a sharpening station, a Morso mitre cutter, an MFT table with extension, a bench, a component table, an assembly/veneering table, sash cramp stand, and a log burner.
It works okay, at a pinch I could squeeze in another maker. If I was doing joinery packages it'd be too small, for fitted/kitchen work it'd be way too small if you needed to finish and store multiple completed jobs. I made a conscious decision not to offer sprayed finishes, a couple of times that's caught me out so that might have been a mistake.
A combination machine works okay for a single maker who can schedule all his work in advance. It'd be more difficult with two makers on a permanent basis. Relevant if you ever were to rent out bench space, although the demand for bench space seems to grow exponentially as you get closer to conurbations.
A few makers I know are offering training for paying pupils, if you go that route that's more benches and probably a stricter approach to safety.
Thirty or forty years ago you could comfortably marry furniture making with antique restoration, but antique furniture prices have dropped steadily for about fifteen years now so that's not so easy any more.
It's the same old story, furniture making is a financially marginal occupation. Few people can make it fly on a pure designer/maker basis. If you accept that from the get go (and you've been there so you already know the reality) you'll build in enough flexibility into a workshop design to accommodate a plan B!
One last point, I'm surprised about your comment regarding humidity. I'm on the coast but I don't see RH change all that much during the year. The workshop is double glazed and insulated, but I doubt that makes all that much difference. Certainly the timber sheds are just garages, I'll pull timber into the workshop a few weeks in advance and let it settle, then often machine down in two or three stages. But timber movement after client delivery or during a build is more of an occasional irritant than a major problem.
Good luck!
