custard
Established Member
Andy T was in my workshop yesterday and we got talking about selecting boards for specific furniture components, it's a dimension of furniture making that often gets ignored but is actually one of the key features that separates an individually made piece from the factory made stuff from Oak Furnitureland, where any old component gets attached to any other component with no thought or care.
Here's the piece we were discussing,
It's a Shaker style cabinet on cabinet made from Curly Cherry. There's nothing special about the build, I'd like to think it's well made, but at the end of the day it's just basic, rectilinear furniture making. What justifies the premium is that it's largely hand built, from solid timber, with all the traditionally cabinet making details, and most importantly that it uses highly figured boards of Curly Cherry that will result in a piece that has an almost holographic shimmer once finished.
To my eye one of the shortcomings of much Shaker design is the usual absence of a cornice. The client insisted on it here as well so that's a given. But it still leaves the problem of how to stop the eye just drifting upwards and disappearing out from the top of the cabinet, because there's nothing there to hold their attention. One solution could be to try and turn the drawers, which are at the bottom of the upper cabinet, into the focal point?
To try and do that amidst a sea of highly figured timbers isn't easy, but one thing that might help is if the drawers featured a distinctive grain patterns that ran seamlessly across all the drawer fronts? Picking through the boards I found this,
Maybe this would help hold the eye in this particular location?
There's no right or wrong answers, it's just a small example of the furniture maker trying to squeeze every last drop out of the timber's potential. Incidentally, you can see how the panels that have been fitted also run consecutively from the same board, and all the boards came from the same tree so when finished the piece will be very integrated and harmonious in colour and tone. None of this is about cabinet making skill per se, but it's still important in producing something that's worth having.
Here's the piece we were discussing,
It's a Shaker style cabinet on cabinet made from Curly Cherry. There's nothing special about the build, I'd like to think it's well made, but at the end of the day it's just basic, rectilinear furniture making. What justifies the premium is that it's largely hand built, from solid timber, with all the traditionally cabinet making details, and most importantly that it uses highly figured boards of Curly Cherry that will result in a piece that has an almost holographic shimmer once finished.
To my eye one of the shortcomings of much Shaker design is the usual absence of a cornice. The client insisted on it here as well so that's a given. But it still leaves the problem of how to stop the eye just drifting upwards and disappearing out from the top of the cabinet, because there's nothing there to hold their attention. One solution could be to try and turn the drawers, which are at the bottom of the upper cabinet, into the focal point?
To try and do that amidst a sea of highly figured timbers isn't easy, but one thing that might help is if the drawers featured a distinctive grain patterns that ran seamlessly across all the drawer fronts? Picking through the boards I found this,
Maybe this would help hold the eye in this particular location?
There's no right or wrong answers, it's just a small example of the furniture maker trying to squeeze every last drop out of the timber's potential. Incidentally, you can see how the panels that have been fitted also run consecutively from the same board, and all the boards came from the same tree so when finished the piece will be very integrated and harmonious in colour and tone. None of this is about cabinet making skill per se, but it's still important in producing something that's worth having.
