Todd Woodesign - since 1987 http://toddwoodesign.posterous.com Home of Furniture Designer / Maker Jim Todd, PAGE 1... (*you can access more page selections at the bottom*) posterous.com Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:00 -0700 Bow Front Armoire http://toddwoodesign.posterous.com/bow-front-armoire http://toddwoodesign.posterous.com/bow-front-armoire

Bow_front_armoire

This is the piece that spawned the creation of some of my other work with elliptical ("pod") feet and bowed fronts. The inspiration came from the generous couple who commissioned me to make it. He is a Toronto firefighter who was at the time building a two-seater airplane in a garage, and she is a confident, gentle woman with a fabulous French accent. There were enough adjectives formed from their two characters to quickly brainstorm design elements and attributes...  strength, lift, subtle but assertive, refined, accurate, flowing, positive, animated yet eloquent... 

It is a 7' high armoire for their clothes.  It has 9 drawers and 2 compartments above with shelving.
The bowed front is slightly accented by the sides angling in five degrees. The top curve is also slightly accented, by a minute curve in the back which is just noticeable enough when it's up against a wall, about 1 1/4" inches over the whole height. The solid feet are 20 degree ellipses tilting up slightly to align with the tangent to the bottom curve. The same ellipse is used for the handle recesses, which have a comfy groove on the inside to reward fingers used to explore the inner spaces.
The whole piece is bookmatch-veneered with Australian lacewood from one log for complete continuity, from left side to front, to right side.

No decoration -- it's all in the selected wood grain on a carefully calculated and flowing design. This was a benchmark piece.

Shortly after completing it (late '90's), I was approached by James Strecker, asking me if I would be willing to be featured in a book about the School of Crafts and Design at Sheridan College. I was honored to be selected as one of ten people to represent the array of graduates from the furniture studio. It is called Sheridan -- The Cutting Edge in Crafts. I chose this Armoire to represent my work and provided a write up to go with this picture. There was also a series of questions James asked me on the phone... I was mistakenly under the impression that he was going to use my responses as guidelines with which to make his own summations... my responses were scattered through chapters in the book, and in the end it was probably accurate of the times since I was a wacko furniture guy living in an industrial unit.  Oh well,  it's only a book, it's not like it could  float around forever, like on the net... there's another topic all together.

Peter Hogan assisted me in photographing it in my Oakville studio.

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Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:45:00 -0700 French Cherry - part 1 http://toddwoodesign.posterous.com/french-cherry-part-1 http://toddwoodesign.posterous.com/french-cherry-part-1
 
Putting a title on this house full of furniture didn't seem necessary when I was designing it, but as I sit typing now, coming up with a title forces me to recall where all the design elements came from.
It was so much fun receiving snap shots of ideas from my client along with scanned rough sketches. We would discuss on the phone what we both thought were interesting details, and I might show an interest in something in a corner of the photo, and the next thing I knew, she was off to get a different angle shot or a close up on some other "French Country" armoire.  It really was fun. (The only frustration on my part was that I was still on dial-up, and the 5MB uncompressed pictures would tie up my phone line for hours. Now, with higher  speed out here in the country, I'm finally able to send links back and forth while chatting on the phone with clients, what a difference.)
Eventually, I had pages printed out with lines drawn on top, rescanned, redrawn, resent, and on it went till my desk was covered with sketches and pictures taped together with notes and dimensions scribbled all about. Luckily, since she and I knew that I was completely absorbed by all these details and was obviously keeping track, further cleaned up drawings were deemed unnecessary, as we both just wanted to get the wood into my studio and get to it.
I got the message early on that this was going to be "heirloom furniture" for her boys (to fight over). This was all that was needed to trigger a woodworker's desire to finally build a full bedroom set with all solid wood and all traditional joinery, but with today's stronger adhesives, hardware and better finishes. This personal mission was a secret bonus for her, and an excuse for me to use my accumulated skills once again.

The first "Mother" (and I'm using that in the respectful way) of the bedroom set was a triple armoire. Oh boy.  It had to house a medium TV in the upper center, and then have clothes hanging below the TV, and 2 levels of hanging in each side wing, all with a 90" ceiling. The kicker was that they are both taller people, and so the hanging room had to be carefully accounted for. The hanging space inside on the 2 side compartments actually extends up into the crown area, and down below into the base, both of which are lined with aromatic cedar. As space requirements were worked out, I had to work overtime to make sure the proportions were still going to sing. They did. Once again, I put the extra time into going through every single board of air dried lumber to select the positioning of critical pieces. Most importantly were the panels in the doors. The Furniture Gods came through once again and gave me enough boards to make all the front panels with single pieces. Amazing. Only another woodworker can appreciate this satisfaction I'd have to say, unless you are the deserving person leaning back in bed every night staring at a carefully chosen grain selection of solid cherry across a whole wall.

Finally, I should point out the rounded corners.  This is something I saw in one of Dianne's shots of some dilapidated European armoire sitting in the corner of a crowded antique barn.  It hadn't been made with enough consideration of seasonal changes, so it was severely buckled, but it had some beautifully thought out curves. In order to get the more elegant French Country look, I was determined to incorporate these graceful curves instead of a standard sharp corner. This means that the radius increases as it gets bigger up at the large crown, so the crown had to be extra thick to allow for the corner getting chopped off and rounded. I still have a pile of templates from this job. The machining was all done with a series of router set-ups, the table saw and finished by hand. Needing bun feet gave me an opportunity to pull out my lathe and make a copying jig to make them consistent.

Pulling off the triple armoire made the single armoire seem easier.
All pieces were first oiled to bring out the depth of the grain in the cherry, and then sprayed with lacquer.
Fabulous pieces I must say. I hope they don't get scratched when the boys start to fight.

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