Coffee Bench Project Started

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I'm about to cut up this incredible hunk of 1 1/2" thick bubinga. I need two pieces 15" x 50"... no problem, the slab is 26" x 132". I'll have some left over, shucks.

This is the biggest, heaviest and most expensive single piece of wood I've ever had in my shop. I got it at Exotic Woods in Burlington where it was handled with a forklift.

The black parts of the project (see model) are hard maple dyed black with printer ink.

The idea is that the four rectangular coffee tables can be carted around the client's loft and used as benches too, in various arrangements.

This will be gooooood.

 

Mount Forest Showcase

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I'm going to be showing some new work at a local show this Tuesday March 26th / 2013.

I've got a few pieces that are not so much "on the safe side". Here's one, it's made of Blistered Bubinga and Cherry with a Shaded Orange Finish.
(I need a better than standard digital camera I'm realizing, because a mid level camera just can't seem to focus properly on anything like this rich finish. Red colours are even worse, and that's a problem...)

 

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The tables I dropped off at Renann Isaacs' Gallery in Guelph a week ago are going out the door it seems. Everyone's happy with that scenario! Therefore, with this bit of excitement, a request for another three different ones came in. With a delivery date for another project already looming, I had to take a bit of time to consider if I wanted to instantly double my daily work schedule... the decision took about a second and a half actually. I deliver them tomorrow.

They look even better in the flesh.

 

Rouge

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I'm very happy to have these 3 tables at a great little art gallery in Guelph Ontario. Here's the link:

These pieces are part of the current show called "Rouge".

As usual, once I had my back drop and lighting set up, I took quite a few pictures. I picked this one because I accidently positioned the pedestal table on the right in such a way that two of its legs completely block the two end legs on the console table. Kind of curious, makes for less clutter in the picture I guess.

 

Side-To-Side TV Bookcase

It's reeeeeallly nice when another solid word-of-mouth job comes in:

Mary had seen me when I was a guest artist on a studio tour a couple years back, kept my card, and when she started talking to her interior designer (Susan Brown in Guelph Ontario), she basically said: "I met this guy and I'd like him to make this bookcase / TV unit...". So I got the call from Susan, received some quick sketches, and from that, I was able to quote for the project.

It's a great solution actually: "Now it's a bookcase, now we're watching TV!" The shaker style doors slide side-to-side to make the quick transformation possible. Also, the flat screen is mounted on a nice chunk of hardware that allows easy positioning.
And, since the piece acts as a room divider, it's finished on the back with the same style of shaker panels.

The top is 11 feet of solid maple, the cabinets are white lacquered MDF with maple shelves. The Oxford white lacquer has a final clear coat to give it a refined furniture finish.

Instead of getting "factory doors" made, I left them to the end so that I could get simple exact sizes and so everything would line up bang on. It paid off.

Nice project.

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Long Quilted Maple Console Table

This was a nice project to do when I was in the middle of hammering out cabinet sizes for an upcoming wall unit project. It gave me the opportunity to crunch some numbers and ask my current client some questions via email, then go down to the ground floor studio to fire up some machinery and get active with the mock up with this next new project.

So... not too long ago, I was happy to get my work into the Marten Gallery in Bayfield Ontario. A couple months later I got an email from someone saying they saw one of my console tables there that they liked a lot, but they needed a custom version, "a bit longer", to go under a newly acquired triptych by painter and printmaker David Blackwood. This fired me up right away; the opportunity to have one of my pieces paired in a room with a very high caliber Canadian artist like that was an honor indeed. The 3-piece artwork is mostly black and white, with some gold dashes produced by the muzzle flares of the rifles in the scene, so right away I thought that a ~gold maple would work with it.  It was perfectly framed, hanging on their wall in their living room (all of which is newly renovated to make the whole house look like an art gallery), and they were quite right in thinking, that a long table should underline it and support it visually.      ....Enter Jim Todd. Ta-da! (sorry.)

I had everything I needed to know from the beginning. I knew the size of the artwork, the wall, the room, and I got a snap shot of the art to really inspire me.  Discussions followed, and it went the right way, right away.

The table I made is 90" long (!), 16" deep and 32" high. The design follows my signature table design, but I adjusted the leg dimensions and other proportions to really make it sing. I spent about 5 minutes at my desk thinking about the fine tuning of the dimensions, and abruptly threw down the pencil and went down to grab some planks to start making a mock up. The mock up had 3 versions before I was ultimately happy. (Note to other furniture guys: sketching is great, and 3D computer modeling is nifty, but you need to see it 3D in the flesh. I do, even after 20++ years at this; proportions with the overhangs and the weight of a leg matter right down the tiniest fraction... go for the mock up, it matters, doesn't it?!)
My mock up was being made of cedar and a large pine board top, so it was going to happily hang around outside in front of my studio as a calling card.

The real magical thing about this table is that the top is made from one piece of quilted maple veneer. Let me say that it is quite rare to find a piece of this species so big without at least one distracting "birth mark".  The guys at A&M Wood Specialties in Cambridge Ontario were compelled to make sure I knew that these were the biggest sheets of "text book perfect" quilted maple they'd seen. (Since 1973.) I believed them.

All the legs come from one huge hunk of cherry, which I dissected to select 4 pieces of flawless beautiful grain. The cherry beading and edging came from another board, so it all matched in colour too, which can be tricky with cherry you'll find.

I needed to buy 2 sheets of the quilted maple veneer at ~$10 a square foot so that I could match the aprons too.  (They have a few more of those sheets lying there in the racks at A&M, and it's not going bad...)

On the 2nd pic, that's not out of focus... that's quilted maple with a thick coat of clear lacquer people, it's a natural holograph!

http://www.martenarts.com/Core.aspx      >(have received a proper referral fee.)

http://www.amwoodinc.com/default.aspx   >(continue to make me spend way more than I should when I go there because of their incredible selection of scrumptious wood.)

Cheers!

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Dual Coffee Table

Gotta love the clients that keep coming back. Sabina is one of those special people. We get along great, she trusts me and I totally admire her gumption to go for striking colours and designs.  When we get emailing ideas back and forth, it can get pretty goofy, but really, it's all fueling the piece.

The thing I really liked about this project was that the long enjoyable email discussions lead to a fabulous solution.  It was really fun to once again go through the design process with a client that knew my working method inside out and was happy to be an equal collaborator when it came to brain storming. We were happy to scrap some notions and constantly throw new ideas into the conversation. The discussions for this project started out as a need for two end tables and a regular sized coffee table I believe. It definitely evolved.

  Eventually, we came to the conclusion that one large island of a coffee table would be most appropriate, centered in the middle of the large sectional sofa she had recently had custom made. (Check out that awesome sofa!) To really hit it out of the park, a lift up mechanism was employed on half of the table top to make it extra versatile as a munching table while watching TV. When the top lifts up and over the peoples' laps, the innards of the table are exposed to show some tidy compartments for whatever cutlery, remote controls etc. The other side of the table obviously needed a huge drawer for placemats and magazines. As usual, the drawer comes out on my favorite silent full extension drawer slides.

The top is hard maple, from her family's farm, with a deep glowing burnt orange finish. The legs are also maple, with a slate black finish. The aprons are curly maple with a "Dijon" finish.

 Great solution for the space. In a smaller space, I could see just half of it with just the lift top being very usable. And as illustrated, any colour or wood is open for discussion.

 I'm currently building a nice big wall unit for her bedroom. It's blending some traditional aspects with my modern eye. Basically, the proportions will remind you of an old Euro piece, but jazzed up in a subtle way to make it more fresh.  You shall see.

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Bow Front Console Tables

I had made quite a few straight console tables (aka "Sofa Tables" or "Hall Tables"), and I was really pining for a chance to do a curved or bow front version. I finally quit waiting for a "need" and just started making a mock-up.
I knew that it was going to typically consume too much time as I would make prototypes and work out the curve. As it turned out, I nailed it on the first full size mock up.

The top has a nice subtle bow front, and maybe less noticeable, the front apron is bowed out too, by means of a bent lamination, (as well as having the usual gentle arch).
The combination of the three understated curves creates a beautiful blend that reaches out just enough, but not so much that it would be called protruding. Without the apron being bowed out too, it looks like a huge design error. (Trust me, I had to confirm my suspicion.)
Since the beading on the bottom of the front apron needs to curve two ways and stay put, it requires some steam bending, which is always an amusing process.

The first one is exactly like the second in size and type of wood, except there's the added "Molten" finish to hit it out of the park. (I had to take this picture in front of my studio really fast. There's yet another "Why did the table cross the road" joke in there somewhere.)


The third was a custom order, a shortened version, which required a new curve on the top and on the apron in order to keep it all proportional.

All three pieces are curly sycamore veneer with solid cherry. They're sanded to a near polish, so the grain of the curly sycamore has a holographic effect as you walk by. Really nice.

Oh, and on the second one... yes that's a fly on the top. Sigh.

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Cubic 3 Piece Entertainment Unit

I always had a vision to create a piece that was based on a 3D grid of carefully selected veneered panels.
There was an opportunity to see it realized during the initial chicken scratch period of this project. I jumped on it and starting snapping the design to a grid based on ~10" x 10" panels. In the end, it wasn't too hard to design a piece that was proportionally pleasing within this confine. Making the piece accurately was not as easy. It needed to be devoid of any distracting graphics in the grain, no hesitations, just a translation of the core idea using beautiful wood. Oh, and it had to be rock solid too of course. And, it had to get around a corner and down the stairs.

The square panels are curly maple. They wrap around 3 sides of each of the 3 cabinets. On the side of each cabinet are 4 panels that came from a piece of veneer ~40" long. They are arranged with every other panel being turned 90 degrees. This gives the piece a natural holographic checkerboard effect from just the rotation of the grain. Very simple in concept, and part of why it's so pleasing to walk by as the finely polished grain pulses under clear coats of lacquer. On the center section, there are 3 sets of the 4-panel grid, making a total of 11 grids coming from the same stack of veneer, all in sequence from left to right. There's a fine 1/8" shadow line separating the panels from each other and from the surrounding solid dark cherry framework and top surfaces. At the bottom of each 1/8" channel is a black surface to help define the depth of the grid.

The center unit is designed to support a flat screen TV, with a ventilated compartment underneath for surround components etc. The deep drawers are all on full extension silent sliders. The levelers imbedded into the legs turned out to be quite necessary on the wonky floor, but it all lined up perfectly.

A woodworking psychiatrist would have a good time with this one I bet; such a strict geometric design, such organic materials. I'm sure I could come up with some super artsy metaphor, some ying / yang thang maybe, but I'll leave that for the critics to conjure up. My client was also thrilled with the outcome, and we've got other fish to fry now.
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Cherry and Wenge End Tables

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Another really nice wood combo plugged into my end table design; has an Arts and Craft look just from the 2 woods. The wenge around the top edging has that chocolate brown that "the designers" are all crazy about. (Me too!)  To keep the prices for these tables consistent, I sometimes use a different wood for the legs and stain them to match the prime wood.  I did that here, and you'd have to know your woods really well to spot it.  If you do want wenge throughout, no problem, but it will affect the price.

$350 + $50 for the shelf = $400 each, or $750 for a pair. Price applies for pretty well any wood you want. I've been told repeatedly that my pricing on these tables is very reasonable and I agree.  (!)  I know all the dimensions for all the parts for these tables, so I've gotten pretty fast at them, and that's what helps the cost the most.

My typical end table size here is 15 1/2" X 23" X 24" high. I landed on these sizes because they are proportionally pleasing I find, and the parts are efficient as far as waste goes; there's virtually nothing going to landfill, and I like that. 

Intended to be paired at either end of a couch. The shelf is optional of course, but handy for magazines. Custom sizing is always possible.

I think I'm going to put this image on my next batch of business cards.