Home Office & Display
This piece centered around the availability of a
slab of genuine mahogany that I had carted around from shop to shop for about 15
years. I had bought it for a run of "Top 20 CD cabinets", but eventually
couldn't bear to cut it up. It was 12' long, and 21" wide, more than an inch
thick. It was free of worm holes and stains, it was flat, straight, and
basically "text book perfect". When talks started for this home office, it was
the natural choice to finally put it to use.
As the colour choice was to be less conventional
for this piece, I pulled out a bunch of samples that were more on the extreme
side as a starting point. It turned out that the purple on curly maple (#3) was
a good start, and the brown-mahogany (#6) would eventually go on the slab. Since
all individual woods (and particularly different grades of mahogany) take stains
differently, I used the back side of the slab as the biggest sample board ever.
I used top-end hardware for the heavy file
cabinets and put in an extra center slide on the bottom to further reduce any
wobble in the drawers. Load 'em up!
The 10mm glass shelves are suspended by special
supports, protruding from the "Dijon" coloured back walls, which are a light
curly maple. The glass is just 1" shorter than the glass industry can
possibly cut, based on the size of the massive sheets they start with. This
glass wasn't cheap, and I realized that all glass is usually pretty pricey when
you get up into the range of these long flexing strips, because they
can break if they're not handled carefully by the glass
cutters, and they commonly have to scrap them and they need to make
new ones for the customer, who has to wait again, and
again. (Follow?)
The top plank is mahogany too, bolted through the
back to securely cantilever it out.
Note that you can't see any connections through to
the wall. This design feature made planning the installation quite a feat of
mental gymnastics, but it worked out perfectly.
Nice piece, I could see myself doing it again, but
it might take a few phone calls and time to find a slab of anything that big
these days.
