Custom-made industrial production of cabinet furniture, focused on the needs of end-user of furniture products, imposes a number of stringent requirements on the process of designing new products. As a basic condition ensuring the fulfillment of these requirements, a modern concept of a virtual furniture design bureau (VFDB) is proposed, within which the distributed (combined) design of furniture products and ensembles is implemented. For effective development of distributed projects in a multi-agent environment of VFDB, it is necessary to use a management system that ensures coordination of the work of project participants, monitoring the current state of the project, notifying project participants about various situations in project work, etc. A feature of this control system is its invariance, i.e. independence from the design tools used in the work on the project, as well as the possibility of its dynamic adjustment to the specific structure of the design process. It is proposed to use a serial-parallel pipeline of the design as a conceptual model of the distributed design process.