chair challenge

5/13 ... we delivered this challenging rosewood chair last weekend ... this project was a real wrestling match for everyone involved. the upholsterer had a long backlog and then, a long struggle with the edelman 'rattlesnake' leather ... i have to agree, it was an unusual material, and, for him, a real bear to work with. looks great though; sits great; glad it's done ... cool object ...
the challenge ... make a chair from a photo .... if you've never tried it, it's not easy ... we had a photo that the client took from a french website of a "Lady Vanity Chair by Christian Krass (Design of JE Ruhlmann) france, 1930, 'very elegant and slender vanity chair by Christian Krass after design of J.E. Ruhlmann' ". .. since my client didn't want to order the chair from france and also wanted it to match the other furniture we made for her dressing room a few years ago, she called on us to do the job ... we had no measurements or details but we went at it in the only way we know how ... make a full size mock up; sit in it; walk around it and make changes mentally before building the real thing ... click the photos to enlarge them ...
mock up on the left ... the real thing, (in morado), on the right ... in this photo, we have made a cardboard template for fitting the real back piece, which is actually a section of a cone and tough to fit. we glued it up on a curved form already on hand from a previous project ...
at this point, we realized that the back seat rail also had to curve out to match so we had to make a new one of those ... details, details ...
next we fitted the real backsplat (two wacky wood layers and two and 2 1/8" birch ply layers) and made up the bookmatched/slip matched veneered piece that would finish it off. next we glued that to the fitted backsplat and flushed it up ...
viola' ...
one thing i kick myself for not noticing was that the back legs of the original chair are vertical and parallell, and i did mine in my typical, 'turned out' fashion that gives the chair a little more style. but, it also makes the legs flare out at the top which made making the back piece removable for upholstering a real challenge ... i fooled around with it for a long time, moving the tapered connectors, filling bad screw holes etc, but i finally got it. it will take two people and a clamp to install the upholstered back splat, but hey, what are friends for?
you can see the connectors here ... photo of the matching splat hardware later ...
it's in the finishing process now .... it will be dark and shiny and luscious and will be upholstered in edelman 'rattle snake skin' leather (be sure to check out that link for some serious style) ... it should be a knockout ... can't wait ...

The Search Feature on My Blog ...

Well, OK, I guess Google really is my friend. One of my human friends pointed out a feature on my blog that I was (after almost a year of writing it) totally unaware of. Up in the top left hand corner of the first page is a search box..... I never paid much attention to it. But while I was clicking through July and August unsuccessfully looking for the post we were talking about, he says "just put the title in the box up there and hit 'search Blog' ". Well, imagine that. So, if you're looking for posts related to "Greene and Greene" enter that in the box and all of those come up, or "Art Deco", or "Inlays", or 'Guitars', or whatever. I will never be lost on my own blog again. So, if the current post isn't interesting to you but you've got some other subject in mind ... Try the box ... Leave a comment and let me know if it works for you .... Thanks ... dan
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Blog Table of Contents

I've been writing this blog now for about six months and some of the early stuff is buried so deep you'll never go back there to see it ... Soooooo, to give it some second life, I've decided to create this "map" of the blog with some photos and archive locations. Click on the pictures and see if there's something there for you ....

New custom metal project,Lotus bed,Fix the pics, (a photoshop tip), Custom cnc projects

February and March .. Bubinga Art Deco pieces .. A crotch mahogany console.. An expanding table with inlay start to finish, A mango wood desk with inlays, A fancy Art Deco bench with a CNC video

April And May ...Some Arts and Crafts stuff, A Greene and Greene Sideboard, A Resonator Guitar (Open Studio) and How to make Greene and Greene Hardware

November and December 2007 More Art Deco Pieces, Foam core mockups and other visualization tools

May ... Arts and Crafts mantle and hinge fabrication, December more Art Deco

Custom Metalwork ... Custom snowboard contest trophies, Custom stairway railings, A giant single slab of walnut table, Wood and metal potrack ... Old metal A 1970 Cutlass Supreme

Scroll down for newer unindexed posts .... More to come .... Enjoy

Wenge, Hickory and Steel Art Deco Style Pieces

These pieces all had their seperate design and execution complications, but in the end, they all came out well and all the complications were resolved. One of the nicest details is the angled tops of the wenge cases that are complemented by the recessed, round hickory moldings that set off the recessed again hickory doors and drawers. That stepping in feature led us on quite a hunt to find the proper hinges when we remembered that the client wanted mirrors on the insides of the doors.
The low piece is two sided and only 32" deep so the drawers had to be fairly shallow. We ended up making the door cabinet shallow which allowed half of the drawers on one side to be deeper. The top is faux painted mdf for the photo and the piece will have an onyx top when it gets to NYC.
The tall chest was the most straight forward of the three, but selecting the veneers for a pleasing light/dark pattern involved some trial and error.
The armoire was just like the others, only bigger, heavier, and hair raising to get the two big veneered doors to lie in a plane and close correctly given the lack of case frame structure. Most of the work on these pieecs was done by Mark Granfors before he moved South. Finishing by Jeremy Russell, steel bases by Sam Mosheim and Jim Parsons. Teamwork, teamwork.

Five (not so) Easy Pieces

This week we finished up five pieces that have been in the works for quite a while. Four of them are for one client, and they will be delivered to New York City this week. The desk was for other clients on Long Island and it will be delivered the week of the 17th. All were complex and challenging pieces involving veneers, custom fabricated metal work, both steel and brass, and complicated design details. They are all, coincidentally, heavily influenced by the historic Art Deco Design Style. Three are fabricated from wenge, hickory and steel and will reside in the same room, the zebrawood table is for the same clients but will be in a different room and the curly maple desk is for a completely different, but also, long time client. The desk is a design collaboration with the interior designer Judith Stutt of Weston, VT.

This zebrawood table posed all kinds of challenges, from resawing the veneers and selecting which ones to use where, the order of steps in the veneering process, fabricating and attaching the brass feet and little 3/8" moldings on the legs, the double curving veneered aprons, and matching the 'waterfall' veneers as they wrapped around the corners. That last step invovlved cutting and labeling the veneers as they came off the flitch. Nicely executed by Jeremy Russell.

This desk had numerous challenges including working with thin curly maple veneer, multiple forms for the drawer boxes and fronts, jigs for cutting the ebony lines on the top and drawer face edges, the diamond shaped side inlays, the curved drawer box joinery, etc., etc.

For the drawers, because the fronts were curved on a smallish raidus , we had to create a new joinery system as the short grain of the dovetails on the curved wood did not have enough integrity. Mark came up with an angled dowel joint that was relatively easy to execute using a jig he made on the drill press. This joint proved to be very strong on our test pieces and while it's not our usual crispy dovetails, it's an attractive joint and in the long run, certainly as strong.