the spaces we make

we make furniture, one piece at a time, it's true, but, we also sometime make spaces, often intimate and personal spaces, that can have a deep meaning for us and for the clients we work with.  i visited the space in the photo above yesterday, to discuss some new work in an upstairs office, and was struck by the peacefulness and beauty of it.  the client was the designer and she has an impeccable eye.  we applaud her taste in custom furniture.  the two pieces we made in the photo, the large kas tv cabinet in the background, (back when big tvs were still big), and the custom pool table in the foreground, both look great over 10 years later.  both were challenges on a lot of levels, but looking at them now i remember the challenges as both fun and considerable.  click the photos to enlarge them ...

this piece was for another special client who was, to say the least, a collector.  he pointed me to set of random shelves with items arranged lineally and told us to, as i recall'  'make them make sense'.  the individual shelves are lit, the objects are all in original finishes, and while almost all were antiques, there were some most arresting, contemporary, maria martinez pieces in the mix.  the duck decoys are all 'top shelf' and represent just a tiny part of his 100 plus piece collection displayed throughout other areas of the house.  it was also my first experience of seeing diebenkorns, milton averys, stuart davises, and georgia o'keefe paintings in a private home.

and in preparation for a recovery from a hip transplant, we created this round and tapered tv stand in a corner of the bedroom.  this was one of the first flat screen tvs i had ever seen and he encouraged me to stretch a little outside the box on the design.

 

the next four images, including the greene and greene style desk and chair above, are for a husband and wife who are long time (25 years) clients, and for whom we have done many, many pieces.  there's generally a discussion or two, a sketch or two, and then a negotiation or two, and than we do it .. in the end, the pieces always seem to feel just right for their spaces.

table and chairs, 1987 

coffee table, 1989 ... the challenge here was to not obscure the amazing carpet.  i saw it this holiday season and the rug is as vibrant and arresting as ever.  we took our main design cue from the 'ram's head' detail in the carpet design ..

 

loyal readers have seen this one before, but it's from the same house as the three photos above.

in this kitchen we took our cue for the stools from the verticals on the island face, using a frank lloyd wright inspired stool design and a cherry counter top with a walnut and curly maple stripe down the center.

and in the next room, we built an entire greene and green inspired dining room with a custom sideboard and mirror, some wall sconces, an expanding table with 8 chairs, a hanging lantern and a corner cupboard that you can see reflected in the mirror.  this work was all done in 2003, and the client liked it so much, we did another very similar version of this room in 2008,  for another house he built in greenwich, ct.  the detailing of the sideboard construction for that dining room was our most popular blog post ever.

 

in 2003, we also created this double chest in quartered sycamore, along with a bed , side tables and a reclaimed chestnut tv piece.

this cherry and burl dining room set was another commission that created an intimate dining room on long island.

and, working with the manager at the equinox hotel in manchester a few years back, we designed and fabricated this lighted corner display case where the hotel features its events. sometimes a little used, awkward corner space can become highlight of the area.

 

and this piece was another 'ambiance piece' for a local hotel, the dorset inn, where it lived for almost 20 years until the inn changed hands recently and it went off to the former owner's home, one of, i believe, the only pieces she retained when the inn was sold.

     and sometimes, folks just want to have fun .... why not have your own custom home bar.  we would have liked to make the stools too, but i think that would have been a stretch after the bar project.  one of the most rewarding things we get to do in our work is to work with clients to produce their visions, and then visit those spaces later, after the fact, to see how they use and enjoy them ...

are we interior designers?  not really, and certainly not all the time, but occasionally we get to start from nothing and create a warm and personal space for our clients with our designs, and that is a most rewarding experience.

below is an intimate dining table in a park avenue apartment that the clients helped me to design and they tell me still that they use it 'every day'  ..

more on interior design and a brief discussion of the influential book 'a pattern language' by christopher alexander at this link


"At the core... is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets and communities. This idea... comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people". —Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, front bookflap

another good one i'm reading right now is 'at home..a short history of private life' by bill bryson.

my own office at work

a custom home office, danby, vt

entry hall, manchester, vt

interior design ... dining rooms

one of our favorite projects is creating a custom dining room ... we have a project coming up where we'll be doing an expanding dining table with a hard curly maple inlay, 8 chairs, and a cherry and curly maple sideboard. we get to make the pieces relate, in essence, determine the style of the room ... the designs for this new project are loosely based on the furniture in my own dining room above, with of course, the clients' unique input which is based on their own experience with a table i made for the client's brother in 1990 or so ... round and round it goes. click the photos to enlarge them ...
this is part of the proposal for that project ..
meanwhile, for a potential client who is coming to visit this week to discuss furniture for her dining room, i rounded up photos of different projects of different styles, most of which consisted of at least a table, some chairs and a sideboard ...
while in the natural cherry photo above this one, we were going for a more contemporary look, here we're shooting for the traditional, with the dark, carved mahogany legs and stained mahogany and walnut chairs with burl backsplats ...
here, we've clearly taken a contemporary slant on the traditional, dark, arts and crafts style, taking our cues from the designs of greene and greene and stickley, but by using natural cherry we have (hopefully) brought it up into the present.
hanging fir and burl table lantern ... inlays in the top and 0n the aprons of the table
here we have the 'one board' bubinga dining room ... plain and simple design, the table top and face of the sideboard was made from one 46" wide, 19' board of bubinga ...
here, the view from the other end ...
another take on what we refer to on our website as our 'studio style', a mix of natural or stained woods with painted details and accents. (love the milton avery boxers over the mantle) we used to make quite a few windsors, but, not so many any more ... i'm encouraging the padded seats ...
the sideboard for that table ..
and another ... for more, check out the 'dining table', 'seating', and 'sideboard' sections of our website for other styles and designs ...

a walnut desk ... the bethlehem steel series

what is a desk? really? a personal space. a place to write. a place to keep stuff. a place to work. a place to contemplate ... a desk is all of those things and they come in many forms ... this one i designed with a client back in oh, december? has it been that long? i can see by the date on the drawing below that we were at least talking about it then .. i don't think we finalized things until january sometime, about the same time that a bunch of other projects rolled in. anyway, this project is with one of my favorite clients, famous for her support of our art and for her patience ... and now we have finished it up and delivered it to its new home ... click the photos to enlarge them .
this one's now in a room between the kitchen and is actually part of the family room i'd call it, overlooking the deck and pond and facing the bird feeders ... a great, sunny spot for writing and contemplating. there was a new lamp and income tax stuff on it last time i saw a picture ... i was glad my taxes were already done ...
as far as the design went, our friend had seen a number of our wood and steel pieces, including the bureau, so metal legs were part of the early discussions. at first, in the drawing above, i was trying on sort of 'planar' legs, sort of a two dimensional, flattish, 'stuck on' leg, but in the end, we could tell from the small mockup we made that that concept wasn't going to work ... back to the 'table leg' concept, but we all felt something 'new' was in order. an adaptation of our 'egypt leg' seemed like it might work and we made a prototype ... it looked good, and we were off. sort of ... next to find a one piece top 26" wide and long enough to 'fold' the sides over to become the dovetailed case ends with continuous grain ...
hard to believe, but myron at irion lumber had a piece of 5/4 about 28" wide that we milled on our cnc to flatten it ...
and sanded it with our friend steve holman's 37" wide belt sander ... nice and flat ...
we cut and marked the ends and made the half width sample with the last little cracked end of the board ... we spent sometime on the layout/design of the dovetails as it was an important part of the design .... for inspiration we did a 'google image' search of dovetails and found some we liked that seemed interesting ...
these are sometimes known in the trade as 'houndstooth dovetails', pins of varying depths and spacing ... attractive; challenging; decorative ... they seemed a perfect way to break the monotony of 26" of hand cut dovetails ... elegant too, i think ..
the fitting of the thick tails and pins was tricky, the cutting and laying out trickier because of the thickness of the sides and the tight points of the pins ... will had to stand on a stool to cut them ... and, we had to build a temporary 'wall' that we attached to a workbench face and braced so that the 62" x 26" top and bottom didn't flex during the handsawing process.
'the wall', in action .. you can see how it would hold the top and bottom boards steady for the hand saw cuts. the wall later became part of the tv cabinet mockup in one of my previous posts ...
once they were cut, it was a (sort of) simple matter to rig up the multirouter to waste the pin to pin stock ... we took off the air clamps and screwed a piece of 50" long plywood to the table and then moved it along as needed. we set up the router table to carry the outboard end ... that concept made short work of that process ... check the short video below to see how it goes.
we use this technique on all our handcut dovetails ... cut the pins on end on the table saw with a thin kerf blade, clear the waste; trace, saw, rout and cut out the corners ... a person can get really fast at it ... there's a short youtube video here of this operation.
our second initial leg concept, we also were not 100% thrilled with when we first assembled the desk, but we were able modify the tops of the legs to make them look more like 'legs' than sort of abstract appliques. this is part of our krenovian tendency to sometimes 'design on the fly', a useful process for extricating yourself from 'not quite right' design visualizations.

for the hardware, we choose an image of a brook trout and had the 3/16ths inch stock waterjetted to shape ...
sam did some shaping and chiseling to add the details and then welded 7/16ths tapped square stock to the center of the backs ... we then chiseled a 3/16ths deep mortise for the ends of the square stock into the drawer face to keep them from turning ... and we were good to go ...

in the end, we added a secret compartment, but if i told you about that, it wouldn't be a secret anymore ... anyway, it would be tough to find if you don't know where it is and involves the use of a tool to open it that will made and hid in the case of the desk ... double hidden compartment, actually. we try to get them in wherever we can... case pieces are easier ....
the back of the desk we used three shop made crotch veneered panels, similar to the drawer faces as you will be able to see the backside of the case from outside on the desk .... we always finish the backs of our desks anyway, so they can be used in the center of the room ...
as they say, 'all in, all done' ... next! ....

interior design 2

second post in a planned series ...

it's hard to believe because snow now covers the bench seats in the photo above, but we're only about two and a half months from this opening photo. at our house, it's all about the sunshine, all the time .... this side faces due southeast, which lets the morning sun come into the bedroom and bathroom below on the right end, and the afternoon light shine in the left end living room, and opposite side of the house. our previous house, from 1974-1996 was on red mountain road, about 15 miles from where we live now... that house was in a beautiful spot with a nice valley view, but was tucked up fairly tightly against a sizable bump in the landscape called, fittingly, red mountain. we were on the wrong side of the mountain .... in the winter, the sun was gone by 2:30 or so.

this time, either by luck or a dogged persistence, or both, we ended up with a house and shop that get very early morning sun and some of the last sun in town ... in designing both the house and the shop, attention was paid to maximizing that sunlight .... it is vermont, and winters are long and in general, tend to cloudiness. so, when you, have some sun, you want to get as much of it as you can .... our garage, for instance, is close, but detached, so as to get that morning light into the bedroom and bathroom below .... personal, (but imho, worthy), obsession ... click the photos to enlarge them ...
but, at all times of a sunny day, it's a delight ... lighting the spaces and the furniture ... yeah ... the cherry bureau was for our own house ... the first piece of real furniture i have made for us, intentionally, (not a prototype or mockup), in a long time. talk about a special spot ...
morning sun in all of these photos ... kitchen, dining and living room here ... like the shop, which we built and lived in first, we designed this house to be, wherever possible, 'one room deep', meaning you can look in the front window from outside in front, and out the back window on the other side ... a principal i think i picked up from a book i get from the library every once in a while, called 'a pattern language' by christopher alexander. one of my favorite quotes from that book goes like this:

"At the core... is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets and communities. This idea... comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people".

—Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, front bookflap

he also goes on to say inside that 'the patterns are regarded by the authors not as infallible, but as hypotheses.' meaning to me ... read em, but do what you want with them as ideas ... we did ... great book, but expensive last time i looked ... and mirrors ... you can't say enough about them .... this one was born of a need to squeeze a full length mirror in somewhere handy. it's tapered, and angled, slightly, so the out of verticalness of it lends interest but yet doesn't distort the reflection.... we have another of these in a small half bath by the front door ... they infallibly make the room seem bigger ..
'amaryllis with prayer flags' ... and for a really nice interior design effect, you can't beat a good houseplant .... this one kit picked up cheap at the local shaw's grocery and this is its second four flower effort ... $5., well spent for about 3 weeks of flowering so far ...