The Tansu Stairs are Done

Well, I was redoing the jobs list on my office bulletin board this morning and the little clipping above was pasted onto the corner of it. I put it there a while back and forgot about it but today, it caught my eye again. So true .... Most every big project takes 'a little longer' than expected and this one was no exception. But, now we're pretty much done. Shipping to Palo Alto has been arranged and all that's left is the shaping of the wall mounted handrail and a little welding on the mounting brackets for it. We had a few 'last details; to work out this week and they are detailed below. There are two other posts to this project .... here ... and here... Great project ....

The finished cabinet ... Click the photos to enlarge them ..

The boys got a little happy as they were about to put together the back cabinets ...

Tricky post moounting details and

tread to riser joinery

Shows the breakdown for shipping

and the skids with wheels we put under the base cabinets

Assembling the back cabinets ... More info on this project here ... and here ...

Tansu Stairs Update

3/20/09 Trevor made some progress this week on the tansu stair cabinet described in the post on 3/9. It's pretty much his baby, with the rest of us brainstorming with him as needed. He's doing a great and careful job on a complex project. The main cabinet is complete now with the face frames and cabinet backs glued on. Yesterday and today he's been working on the templates for the three steel railing sections that Sam is making parts for. He cut some cardboard railing outlines and mdf post prototypes on the cnc to discover minor corrections that need to be made before cutting the real templates and posts on Monday. He also took a little time out this afternoon to do the butterfly inlays on the walnut plank in the foreground of the end of day shot above .... (click to enlarge it) ... On the face frame. rather than do the half laps the old fashioned way with a manual layout and tablesaw dados, he convinced me he could cut them as fast using a combination of the cnc for marking and layout and the tablesaw for halflapping. I think it took him a little longer than usual as it was his first time, but I want to tell you ... that face frame is perfectly square with not one drawer front off 90 degrees. I'm coming around to his way of thinking ....

Checking the rail to wall and mocked up ceiling fit

Checking the post notch and rail taper angles

Some of the drawer parts with some of the risers and treads stickered in thebackground ... Lots o pieces.

Small two man brainstorm session

The Tansu Stair Project

3/9 ... Had it all together around 1:00 today. It's all disassembled now and the cabinet interiors are being shellacked and waxed ....

Proposed railing design including second floor landing

The case taking shape today 3/6/09

The cad drawing showing the three subcases seperated by color

About 20 years ago I made the tansu style stair cabinet above for clients who were remodeling a house up the road in Danby, Vermont. Last spring, I made another tansu style cabinet for a New York City entryway and one way or another, last summer a gentleman from California found my pictures on the internet and contacted me regarding a stairway project he had in mind. We went back and forth for a while, and now, they're underway on construction of the addition to his house and we have started the stair cabinet. Unfortunately, my contract doesn't call for me to install so I'll just wave goodbye to it, and, maybe, by then, it will be spring here and I won't be wishing I was in sunny CA.. It killed me back in January to get pictures of carpenters in shorts and sunscreen while it was zero or so here. Anyway .... More to follow .... This'll be a long one ... Click the pictures to enlarge them ...

Last summer's tansu cabinet in walnut

A sketch for the cabinet we're working on made by laying trace over the photo in the top left corner in the collage below

Photos from the client (sent in January) with my photoshopped sketching of the railings etc.

there are several other blog posts about these stairs. here is a link to the final one and you can work back to this post from that one ... great project !!!

a few case pieces

i'm on a quest to salvage some digital images from my many 4 x 5 transparencies that i had professionally captured by my friend cook neilson over the first 20 years of my business.  i'm currently at the beginning of the process and it will take a while to get them all up here, but it's certainly a nostalgic process.  click the photos to enlarge them ...

 

i'm using a crude device of my own design along with a sunny day and my nikon d90 camera on a tripod to digitize these things.  i have tried scanning (expensive and not hat good in the past) and scanning prints, also not that good.  these images aren't certainly as good as the transparencies, but unless i want to spend a ton of dough with a real professional scanner, i think, for now, they are 'good enough'.

 here we have a piece of our greene and greene influenced work. it is from the same era as the tapered piece above, the late 80s, early 90s.  cherry and cherry, greene and greeney, without being a reproduction.  'in the style of', so to speak.
 

this design was influenced by a client supplied photo of a tall piece by c.r. ashbee ... an english architect.  also in my interpretation of the 'arts and crafts' style.

this piece, tapered on all four sides, in curly redwood and curly hard maple was part of a bedroom for a pennsylvania client.  i am currently looking for an on site, high resolution photo of the bed that went with these two pieces.  it was one of our more powerful and unusual beds.

the double bureau, in the same pallete

a variant of the above, for a different client.  mother of pearl snowflake inlays

one of our early bureaus.  the design was a collaboration with a client and actually, the others above are derivatives of this same structure.  'take an object; do something to it'.

ok, i know these aren't 'case pieces', but i had to build these two tables, strict reproductions of a federal card table in the clark art museum in williamstown, massachusetts, before i could get to the two case pieces below.  these tables were, i would have to say, pretty challenging. 

so, we strip the style down, use the same stained mahogany and light wood palette, and add a bunch of those little string inlays on the case frame.  'modern federal'

  mahogany, curly maple, rosewood, ebony, the works, in a traditional arrangement.

ok, crazy time ... this one could be with the sideboards, but, it was for the client's bedroom, to hold a tv and the related electronic stuff and display a few 'objects d'arte'.  what you can't see in this photo are the tapered turned legs that are covered with hammered sheet copper that match the shop made hammered copper door pulls.  love the curly redwood veneer and the rosewood combined with the birdseye.  where are those adventurous clients who are not afraid to commission a challenging piece these days.  there were certainly a LOT more of them in the late 80's and 90s than there have been in the last 5 years.  people in general, imho, are not taking the same chances that they were 'back in the old days'.

and i marvel at this one.  1983.  how did we do that ????  first, your friends at mother myrick's have to trust you, and trust that you can pull it off, and pay you to figure it all out.  as i recall, we had a snapshot of a candy store in the airport in chicago, a very rough section drawing by a local architect, and a couple days of air sketching that led to a full size mockup of the section drawing and some plywood templates.  it was 46' around it, with 3 pairs of matching sections, a long straight section, the piece with the angled glass with a straight section attached to that, and the rounded ends with the step backed shelves.  curves, brass, lights, glass, wires, mirrors, plumbing....  i wish i could find the progress photos, if there even ever were any. 

mother myrick's moved a few years ago and we cut 'the island' as it was affectionately known, apart, changed the angles, and reassembled it in it's new home.  wow, is about all i can say.

going back through this old stuff is kind of interesting.  more below ...

  

a pennsylvania dutch style kas cabinet, whose design was strongly influenced by a photo on the cover of a sotheby's auction catalog.  as i recall, it was about 60" wide and 7' tall, and knocked down in the traditional manner: base with feet, two side panels, back,two doors, and top cornice piece.

on site

  

stained cherry, reclaimed wavy glass, in the lobby of the dorset inn for about 15 years.

a very fun corner tv cabinet with lots of inlays and fine rosewood details

 

a quartered sycamore double dresser with hand forged hardware and paint

these pieces were all made at the same time for a new york apartment.  hickory, wenge veneer plywood, and shop made steel bases.

there is a very early blog post with more photos at this link

 an art deco style macassar ebony and mother of pearl cabinet by will (case) and trevor (inlay)

 click the photos to enlarge them ... more images and process photos about this piece here.