Electronics Fashion Pushing Furniture Design

Everyone who makes furniture has at one time or another been asked to make something that holds electronic equipment. When I was growing up in the sixties, electronics came with their own very cool cabinets -- like the MagnaVox stereo system in my parents' house: a record player and speakers housed in a dark, ornate case the size of a minivan.

But sometime in the eighties people decided that they wanted to hide their electronics in furniture that didn't look like it had any electronics in it. So in that decade I designed and built a lot of pieces that held electronics, including the relatively small TV's then in fashion. Here's a television hiding in Shaker garb:

But as we Americans grew larger, so too our televisions. In the nineties large picture-tube TV's became the electronic rage, so we furniture makers responded with armoires that were big enough to shoehorn in these increasingly massive units. Here's an armoire I made in 1996, with a 250-pound television hiding demurely behind the center doors:

But as furniture people like to say, the tables have turned. With the advent of sleek flat screen TV's, people are no longer ashamed to have their televisions in plain sight with its tacit admission that you actually watch it. But you can't just plop these elegant glass and plastic sculptures on the floor -- you need something to support them at the proper elevation. And thus we have the birth of a new kind of low console, that not only puts your TV at a comfortable height for viewing, but holds all the associated paraphernalia: cable boxes, DVD players, remote controls, discs, etc. Here's one I made last month:

So I suppose we'll be building these for twenty years or so until people think having a flat screen in open view is declasse. I foresee the advent of very wide, and very thin, cabinets.

Designing a Companion Piece

A few blogs back I described a buffet I built for my second cousin Kathy and her family ("History Repeating"), and how meaningful that work was. Here's that piece:

A year later -- this fall -- she asked if I would build a matching mirror to hang above it "because the wall looks lonely." Designing a companion piece is not an unusual request, since most of my customers have had me build something for them already. I thought this might be a good way to show how a simple piece of furniture goes from concept to completion.

After Kathy's email, I sat with my sketch pad and, unsurprisingly, did some sketching. The only specific Kathy requested was that the mirror be about two feet by three feet, so my drawing focused on translating the buffet's design metaphors to a smaller and basically two dimensional object. Here's an example of one of those early sketches:

I liked the basic concept so I drew a more polished concept and emailed it to Kathy. Here's what she saw:

Kathy liked the design so I sent her a proposal; that lists all the important parts of of project, like price, completion schedule, materials, finish, and construction techniques. After Kathy signed off on the proposal, work began -- and lasted about two days. This is a pretty simple piece. Here it is, hanging on the wall off my showroom, about to be crated and delivered to North Carolina:

The wall above Kathy's buffet shouldn't be quite as lonely now.

It's a Brave New World

It may be my age -- I'm 53 -- or that I've been on crutches the past two months, but I'd begun to wonder if I was getting too set in my ways to keep up with the march of technology. I don't have a cell phone; I don't have an iPod; I believe that portable devices that take photographs and play games should not be called telephones. I do, however, have a clock radio. Maybe it's time, I thought, to learn something really new and different. As soon as I master walking to the bathroom under my own power, I'm going to do something really out there.

So while most self-respecting men my age are buying red convertibles, I decided to learn a CAD program.

My friend Luis is a little Mexican guy who's a very stylish tennis player. He's also spent most of his professional life using a CAD program called Vectorworks, and after he showed me what it can do, I knew I had to have it; no matter that it costs as much as a decent table saw or that my computer skills have been unfavorably compared to our cat's.

There were a few problems right away: my operating system was too old, and I needed more memory. My computer had the same problems. My issues can't be fixed, sadly, but I can update the computer: just needed to throw a few hundred more bucks at it. Of course, all the other software I'd been running on my ancient system had to be updated, or purchased anew. My real beef with technology is that anything purchased in 2002, which seems like yesterday to me, is now laughably out of date, a relic. We live in a time when the elders no longer have currency -- kind of like furniture makers.

But now I have Vectorworks up and running. Yesterday I spent four hours drafting a section of a molding that might have taken me a minute-a-half -- tops -- at the drafting table. I think with another month of practice I can get it down to three hours. But I'm determined to learn this, if for no other reason than to prove I'm not to old to learn and to change.

Next time I'm going to buy the convertible.

Being Screwed: Reflections

"Good work leaves the world enriched and not diminished" -- Scott Russell Sanders, The Force of Spirit

One of the perils of being an independent craftsman is that you're a slave to the vagaries of your own aging body. When your body works, you work. When your body doesn't -- well, you can spend a lot more time blogging.

This x-ray shows my new, improved left foot. Four weeks ago, as I lay on the operating table in a very pleasant narcotic-induced fog, far away I heard someone drilling. I wasn't entirely sure, because I was singing to myself at the time; I think it was Knights in White Satin. But then I heard the unmistakable squeal of a screw snugging up in something hard: though the neurons weren't firing at peak efficiency, slowly the realization formed exactly what was being drilled and screwed. "Hey, that's my foot!" I giddily announced. Everyone in the green outfits seemed surprised by this information, I assumed because they'd been wondering where the noise was coming from, too. Then I noticed some movement behind my right shoulder where Mr. Anesthesiologist was standing, and I woke up with a cast on my foot

To move from feet to furniture: Although even in the orthopedic world there are joints fancier than screws, for my toe, screws were the best choice. As a furniture maker I often make the mistake of trying to build everything more perfectly than the integrity of the work demands. It costs money and the work's no better for it. Dovetails are perfect for drawers, but a waste of time on my feet and sometimes on a piece of furniture when a simpler, faster joint is better. Anyone with a little patience and unlimited time can eventually master the craft; the real challenge of being professional is knowing where to spend time, and where not. In my own professional life I constantly evaluate what makes work good, and what will make it valuable in the long run.

Finishing

Thanks to the benevolent insistence of the Vermont Department of Public Safety, I have a spray booth in my shop. While I certainly whined about the cost -- I sprayed finishes for over twenty years without one -- now that I have it I really like it. It makes it a lot easier to get a wide variety of quality finishes, and hopefully I'll stay a little healthier to boot.

Because I have this facility, some of the other local furniture guys have asked me to do finishing for them when they need something special. My friend Dan Mosheim built this beautiful Macassar ebony cabinet; it needed a really deep, lustrous finish to set off the elegant abalone inlaid rosette and sumptuous materials. Dan wanted a finish with enough warmth (amber) to highlight the ebony, but one that wouldn't drastically change the color of the shell. We decided on precatalyzed lacquer.

I applied three coats and sanded it flat to be sure the pores of the ebony were filled, then sprayed three more coats on top. Normally I would smooth the finish with fine steel wool and wax, but it looked and felt so good right from the gun that we were afraid to do anything else.

The piece has a lovely depth of finish without being garish; I think it's the platonic ideal of elegance.

Sig's Eagle

I don't get to do a lot of carving, and when I do it's often a simple decorative surface treatment on a new piece of work. This particular job was different. Sig brought me an antique carved eagle that had been in his family for several generations; it had large parts of its wings and feathers missing, and the arrows clutched in its powerful talons were broken. It looked to have been gessoed and gilded in an earlier life, but most of that was gone now, as were several coats of paint, revealing old, dark, oiled pine underneath. Sig's directive: replace the missing sections and fix the broken spots so they look like they've never been missing or broken. Simple enough.

When I work on anything I think might be valuable, I like to get an opinion as to what I can do to it without affecting that value. My friend Barbara, who has an antiques appraisal business, told me as long as what I did was reversible, I could do what I pleased. With that as my stepping off point, I used hide glue to attach sugar pine blocks to the missing sections, and I got out my carving tools.

The carving was fun: as long as the tools were sharp, the pine carved easily and crisply. Matching the old finish took a bit of doing: multiple coats of dyes and acrylic colors built up in glazes, combined with a bit of orange shellac. The good news is you really can't tell what's old and what's new, and I'm not going to tell either.

History Repeating

My great-great grandfather was a Pennsylvania Dutch furnituremaker. I have two pieces he made; I like them because I can see the evidence of his hands in the work, and that work connects me more deeply to a part of my family history. I also love the fact that even though the pieces are well over a hundred years old, I'm still using them every day.

This same old German-American had two Keller grandaughters, Kay and Edna. Kay is my grandmother. Among Edna's grandchildren is Kathy, who is a chemistry professor and also my second cousin. About four months ago Kathy sent me an email and asked if I would design and build a buffet for her and her husband Tom.

It's always great to build something for your own family. This commission was particularly meaningful because I felt I could give Kathy -- and her heirs -- the same opportunity to connect with a part of their history as I had. As I built the buffet, I was very careful to use methods I knew would ensure the piece's longevity; I've fixed enough furniture in the past 27 years to have a pretty good idea what lasts and what doesn't. And so I dovetailed the case and the drawers, used mortise and tenon joints on the frames and doors, and used the matching, highly figured mahogany veneer on top of solid poplar rather than plywood, since I've seen a lot of delaminated plywood over the years.

When it was done, I felt like I'd done what I set out to do: With just a bit of good fortune, one of Kathy's great-grandchildren will be connected with a tiny bit of her past, just as I am today.