LOL i did actually think of you as it happens I remember your furniture the real life stuff very cool.

You can skip the marvelous designer it's just for the cloth. As to Maya 2015 for you i doubt it would be worth splashing the cash, some very cool dynamics bits have been added and some work has been done on the modeling tools but not a lot you can't duplicate with plugins for the modeling tools.

This tutorial will work just fine on Maya 2012 I do use the mesh reduce command which i don't think is in maya 2012 but this can be replicated with meshlab (which is free) or zbrush and in a pinch can be skipped altogether.