The Devil's Workshop

Gordon Ramsay, the chef behind Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, should write a book on how to run a business. Though I wouldn’t want to work for him in a million years (working for similar types in Hellish, nightmarish corporate settings is close enough for me), I love his shows. Running a restaurant strikes me as being similar to running a furniture making business. Both have high overhead and both are very reactive to upturns and downturns in the economy. They both require constant artistic inspiration and an extreme number of hours. They probably go out of business at a similar rate. Here are some of his concepts for running a successful restaurant that translate, in my mind, to making furniture:

First, to make money in a restaurant, you have to be able to take full advantage of your ingredients. If you’ve got a chicken, offer a chicken entrée one night but then use the carcass to make soup or chicken stock. The same concept applies to a woodworker and his or her inventory of lumber. Buy material for one project, then see what you can make of what’s left over.

Second, do the basics well. In one episode of Kitchen Nightmares, there was a guy who owned a pizza parlor. He had ambition to be as popular as Wolfgang Puck and have his pizzas in stores nationwide. The only problem was that this guy couldn’t make decent pizza to save his life. He used bad crust, bad sauce and bad cheese. For woodworkers, there are lots of basics to cover. But if you put yourself out as a handmade furniture maker, you better darn well be able to cut excellent dovetails.

Third, restaurants have to be impeccably clean. Granted, a woodworker can’t pass along salmonella to customers, but there are real advantages to keeping a shop clean. A clean shop is a safe shop. For example, sawdust on the floor is slippery and can cause surprises when you are using power tools. Also, you can’t possibly be efficient if there are tools on top of projects on top of tools.

My shop is currently a wreck. It’s time for me to get cleaning.

Furniture I Love: Stranger Furniture Edition

William Stranger makes beautiful furniture that doesn’t forget where it comes from. His designs always honor the wood both in craftsmanship and in his use of sustainable lumber. The Light Desk is a perfect example. The top is made of a single walnut board that still retains the sapwood and the live edge. For contrast, the base is a simple rectangle that houses a shelf and a drawer. The result is simple in the best possible way. This is the kind of piece that makes its presence known through balance and the beauty of the wood.


I also love his Monolith Bench and the Three Rivers Table.



Enjoy his work at www.strangerfurniture.com.

Photos by William Stranger.

Furniture I Love: Palo Samko Edition

When I was looking through Palo Samko’s work to find pieces I wanted to feature, I honestly had a very difficult time deciding.


I love the range of his work, from pieces that accentuate raw, weathered wood to highly sculpted chairs and stools. I definitely see the influence of George Nakashima and Sam Maloof at play, but Samko takes that inspiration and goes forward with it to find true innovation. One example is the round drawers of this small driftwood cabinet.

You can see multiple influences at play in this gorgeous stool (Maloof, Nakashima, even Tage Frid?), but Samko has made the style all his own.



I also love the simple, iconic birds that he incorporates into his work. They are on sale here at the Curiosity Shoppe (www.curiosityshoppeonline.com) in San Francisco.

See more of his work at www.palosamko.com.

Furniture I Love: Cindy Vargas Edition

I love when artists mix media and create astonishing effects. Cindy Vargas does this beautifully with furniture that incorporates fabric and paint. In the case of this amazing Mahogany cabinet, she uses hand-dyed silk to create what looks like marquetry at first glance. To see such a unique design executed so well is impressive on many levels – the first is the design of the chest itself, then there are the color choices, then there is the application of the silk. I love pieces that reward you every time you look at them.

Here’s another piece from Vargas’s company, Three Elements Studios. The three-dimensional, painted detail on the Flower Chest is subtle and striking.

With her partner Jochen Scherr, Cindy is also working on a new website dedicated to custom and limited edition music stands. Check out this beautiful padauk music stand for the L.A. Philharmonic in the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Their other furniture, music stands and architectural woodworking are at www.threeelementsstudio.com and www.musicstandmakers.com.

About Furnitude

I started Furnitude because, as a furniture maker myself, I believe that the more people know about handmade furniture, the more likely they are to appreciate it and buy it.

I’m not talking about the stuff you can buy at Pottery Barrel. That stuff is made in factories. I'm talking about handmade furniture that is made one piece at a time by real people who care about every little decision that goes into making something that will last.

In this blog I plan to share my thoughts about furniture making, mostly in terms of things I'm in the process of making. I also plan to spread the word about some incredible furniture makers whose work I love. Please feel free to ask questions, leave comments and suggest your favorite furniture makers.

I’m going to focus on individuals living and making now, not the great makers of the past, though their influence is surely present in what is being made today. The audience I intend to address isn’t furniture makers, though they are certainly welcome to visit and share their thoughts. The audience is the potential customer for handmade furniture. It is also my fellow bloggers in the design world and interior designers and decorators, with a thought toward giving them ideas and connecting them with excellent furniture makers.

Something in the Way Wood Moves or Nails and Screws and Dowels, Oh My!

Clients often ask me whether I use mechanical fasteners (nails, screws or dowels) to join wood. People seem amazed when a piece of furniture isn’t held together by screws. I guess it is pretty amazing. Screws have their place in fine furniture (for instance, sometimes I might use them to help align pieces of wood in a certain way), but let me be clear: fasteners such as screws or nails or dowels should not be used to join wood because they are inferior to traditional wood joints.

To explain why, I first have to explain the concept of wood movement. When I describe wood movement to civilians (non-woodworkers), they sometimes look at me like I’ve got three heads. It’s kind of complicated, but here goes.

When you don’t have to consider wood movement, such as when you join pieces of plywood together, you can use fasteners and they work just fine. But if a piece of furniture is made of wood, fasteners like screws and nails and dowels will not last over time. That’s another major point. When I talk about making something to last, I’m talking about making it last a hundred years or more.

Let’s go back to wood movement. Wood moves. All wood. Some woods move more than others, but wood expands side-to-side with the humidity of summer and contracts to the dryness of winter. Any change in length is negligible, if it happens at all. This is by far the most challenging aspect of furniture making. If you’ve got a board that is 12” wide, it might be 12 1/8” wide during the summer and 11 7/8” wide during the winter. That doesn’t sound like much, but think about a table that is 36” wide – made of three 12” wide boards. It would expand 3/8” in summer and contract 3/8” in winter. That’s ¾” of change during the year! If you were to screw those boards in place so that they couldn’t move, an enormous amount of pressure would build up. The pressure wouldn’t have anywhere to go, so it would cause the wood to split. For this reason, you can’t screw a table top firmly to a base without making the table top split.

Look at any antique table with a hardwood top (be sure that it isn’t veneered plywood). If it is old and hasn’t cracked, then I will guarantee you the top wasn’t screwed down to the base. Actually, I need to clarify something here. Screws are used to hold down table tops, but with a special trick.

Remember that wood moves side to side. If the table top were screwed down firmly to the aprons (with the screw going up through the apron into the table top), the table top would split. One way of securing the top but making sure that it won’t split over time is to make an elongated hole for the screw to pass through. This way, the screw sticks into the table top (holding it down and in place), but the elongated hole through the apron allows the screw to move side to side as the wood moves. There are other, better methods for doing this, but the main point is that wood movement is a major consideration for furniture makers.

Regarding dowels, think of a hole drilled into a piece of wood to accept a dowel. The hole starts off round. Over years and years of expanding and contracting, the hole will become oval and lose its grip on the dowel. The same thing happens to screws and nails.

If you're having someone make a custom piece of furniture, ask how he or she plans to handle wood movement. That's how you make a furniture maker's day. Nerd alert!

Furniture I Love: James Murphy Design Edition

I always love it when furniture manages to integrate essential elements of the traditional and the modern so seamlessly that you can't distinguish them from each other. That's what I love about James Murphy's work. Check out his portfolio at www.jamesmurphydesign.com.

I'm crazy about "Flight Deck," his incredible walnut cocktail table. The movement in the design is a testament to Murphy's training in sculpture. For good reason, this piece won Interior Design Magazine's "Future Furniture" award.

Murphy's work has been featured in tons of design publications and is sold in several galleries. Have a look at some of his brilliant designs:

In the interest of full disclosure, I was fortunate enough to have Jim as a teacher in New York City at the School of Visual Arts. I had been interested in woodworking for years, but that interest became an on-going obsession when I made my first hand plane in Jim's class and used it for the first time. His enthusiasm for the craft of furniture making still inspires me today.

Photos by James Murphy.

Furniture I Love: Present Time Clocks Edition

One of the things I love about Present Time Clocks is that, as clock-maker Jim Dailey explains on his website, "The designs are inspired by the past, but they are not 'antique reproductions.' They are meant to evoke the feeling of an earlier era, as well as belong in the 'present time.'"

The clocks are a perfect mix of classic Arts & Crafts style with a modern sensibility. I'm so impressed by the styles, the wood and finish options and even the different movements available. With Dailey's meticulous craftsmanship and the top-of-the-line movements he uses, I'm sure these clocks are worth every penny of their price. But I'm also amazed that the prices are so reasonable. These clocks are actually an affordable way to have an heirloom-quality piece of handmade art in your home. Here are some examples of a few clocks that I love:

As a woodworker, I love the way Dailey finishes quartersawn white oak. It has a mellow, aged feel while maintaining a sharpness to the beautiful figure of the wood. That's quite a trick!

Check out these beautiful clocks at www.present-time-clocks.com.

All photos by Jim Dailey.

What is "Handmade"?

Power tools are getting so advanced with their lasers and electronics that I wanted to talk a bit about what I mean when I say something is handmade. You could go to one extreme and say that only things like pottery that are literally made by hand are handmade. On the other extreme, there are computer-driven routers that do all of the shaping. That's not handmade, in my book anyway. There's got to be a middle ground. I think of something as being handmade when it is made by the skill of someone's hand. If a human hand maneuvers the tool, whether it be a power tool or a tool that doesn't sacrifice a single electron, then whatever it makes is handmade. There -- I said it. Now we can all sleep better.

Furniture I Love: Curtis Buchanan Edition

Curtis Buchanan has got it figured out. He's one of the best Windsor chair-makers around. I have had the pleasure of watching him demonstrate some of the techniques he uses to make his heirloom chairs.

You could tell by watching that his skill was a time-tested mix of talent, intelligence and experience.

Though I'm not particularly inclined to make Windsor chairs, I often think of Buchanan's approach to the craft and to living the craft as a model to follow. His commute can't be beat: about 20 feet. He's got a modest but efficient workshop in his backyard that he makes a point of keeping a comfortable, pleasant place to work.

He's a Windsor chair-maker, and that's all he makes, so he only stocks his shop with tools he needs for chair-making. He doesn't let a superfluous tool (mostly the noisy variety) into his shop. Chair-making is an ancient craft and the tools for it are basically the same as they've always been. He does most of his work with the adze, the spokeshave and the auger. I saw him use a froe to split a piece of wood for a chair spindle. "This, " Buchanan said, "is my table saw." Sometimes bigger isn't better. Sometimes new isn't better.

Buchanan walks the walk in his commitment to the environment. He, Brian Boggs and Scott Landis co-founded an organization called GreenWood, "a community-based sustainable forestry initiative in Latin America," through which local artisans are trained to make furniture and other products so that they "are able to earn more by managing their forest than they would make from conventional agriculture or destructive logging."

Aside from these honorable pursuits, Buchanan makes beautiful, timeless chairs and he's a really nice guy. Visit his website at www.curtisbuchananchairmaker.com and enjoy his gallery of chairs.

Photos: Sack Back Windsor Chair by Tom Pardue and Curtis Buchanan's Workshop by Matthew Teague.

"How do you scoop out the butt shape for your cherry seat?"

I'm glad you asked. I'm going to describe my current method for shaping a seat, though it is important to note that furniture makers have been shaping seats for centuries using traditional chair making tools. One of them, an adze, is sort of like an ax except the blade is parallel to the surface you are cutting instead of perpendicular. Also, the blade is curved. You can see other tools such as scorps and travishers (I love those words!) at the bottom of this page.

Either way, scooping out a chair seat is similar to scooping ice cream, though it requires a bit more work.

The current method I use to make seats involves shaping individual pieces of wood and gluing them together. I usually use three pieces. Here's how I do it:

I start with three pieces of wood that I've squared on all six sides (more about that in a future post). These three pieces will be glued together side by side.

I draw the profile of the curve of the seat on the middle piece, then cut that curve on the band saw.

For the two side pieces, I hog out most of the material using a router.

With all these steps done, I've gotten rid of most of the material that needs to go. Once I've glued the three pieces side, I'll have the very rough shape of the seat.

Next I start smoothing out the curved shape with chisels and a gouge, which is a curved chisel. I also drill the holes of the leg tenons that will go up through the seat. It's getting very close to its final shape.

Once I've installed the legs and applied the wedges (the wedges are driven into slots cut into the leg tenons to lock them in place), the part of the legs that sticks out will have to be carved down and sanded.

After lots of sanding, we've got a seat waiting for a butt.

What I'm Making: Stool Edition

OK, first, let's just dispense with the stool sample jokes right here at the get-go. They're funny and I love them, but I've got to move on.

So...

I love three-legged stools. I designed this one because I think most stools are designed all wrong. Four legs are overkill. You only need three legs to support a stool, especially a short one.

The other thing about four-legged stools that drives me crazy is that most of them have their seat oriented so that your feet hang against the legs -- in exactly the wrong place. You want to be able to rest your feet on the rungs, but you can't because the legs get in the way. A pet peeve I have about most three-legged stools is that two legs are usually in front, with one in the back. With the two legs in front, you encounter the same leg problem as you do with the four-legged stool: the stool's legs get in the way of your legs. I designed mine with one leg in front and with an integral footrest. To find the most comfortable height for the footrest, I experimented by stacking books on the floor and resting my feet on them.

For the seat, I wanted a very scooped-out, sculptural feel. While I like the seat on this stool, I'll probably always want to play around with the shape to keep improving it. The seat is made of cherry. The legs are ash and the footrest is walnut.