How do you make money for your design?  

Vincy
What you're trying to do is closer to art than to commercial design... And everyone knows that most artists starve.
So your choices basically boil down to either doing what artists do or becoming more of a real-world commercial designer. Personally, I think the latter idea's the most likely to lead to financial success, but here are a few things of both types that you can try:
1. Find a rich patron who loves your work and is willing to spend a fortune for it. If a joke like Bobby Trendy can do this, so can you.
2. Learn to make the pieces yourself. Look at how fashion designers start: Very few begin their careers just sketching designs and sending them off to contract manufacturers to be produced; they all start out sewing their stuff themselves.
3. Make a name for yourself with pieces that are simpler or cheaper to produce than furniture, and work your way up.
4. Build your reputation in a different medium -- sculpture, or architecture or interior design or something.
5. Design mass-market pieces the sales of which can subsidize your high-end pieces.
6. Go to work for one of those $3K/chair manufacturers as a welder or a carpenter or whatever, so you can learn more about the manufacturing process and design for it.
7. Get employed by another furniture designer. If you're good, you'll eventually rise out of design-staff anonymity, and along the way you'll make valuable contacts, learn a whole lot about the constraints under which real-world design happens, and make a decent living.
8. Get quotes from lower-priced offshore manufacturers. They advertise, they exhibit at trade shows... They need you as much as you need them, so they're not hard to find.
9. Forget about those "galleries, showrooms, and dealers" that take 50%. This is the 21st century; sell your work directly, on that internet thing.
10. Oh, and if you don't already live in a place where people buy high-end limited-edition furniture -- i.e., New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, or maybe Dallas -- move there.
Good luck...

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Good luck indeed! I like and agree with the second suggestion the most, though they are all good. There is no point spinning a design out of air, being a fantasist on the computer or paper might improve your drawing skills and will delight you and your friends but thats about it.
When you can make something yourself you learn the value of materials, modesty and simplicity and will understand why the design could come to 3k to produce and the prototype could all too easily be a failure anyway.
Reduce, refine and rationalise the design and its production, you'll learn more and be a better designer.
If thats impossible (workshop space and equipment can very quickly add up) try and find a more reclusive one man or small team outfit that you can work with and that have a real passion for doing good work, there aren't so many about anymore but if you can work collaboratively with them on the design rather than trying to butt your head against the wall of a large manufacturer who may well not be really that interested you might have some success.
Its a shame you couldn't post any images here becuase I'm sure you would get some very good suggestions from all the regular posters.