Sumo Seat

13″x13″x18″ walnut and nautical rope

A seat with thick handcut dovetails, hand-gouged tattoos, and a whimsical sumo belt.

Ballerina Stool

18″x13″x19″ mahogany, cherry, and vinyl leather

A comfortable stool with vinyl leather upholstery and “ballerina” feet.

Curves and joinery where cherry and luscious mahogany come together.

Dining Benches

38″x13″x19″ mahogany and vinyl leather

These mahogany benches – with floating cushions, sculpted curves, and playful latticework – seat two comfortably for dinner.

Upholstery by my friend Molly Whittaker.

Delicate curves and exposed joinery.

“Dining Benches”

Reader Lounge

70″x29″x39″ mahogany and vinyl leather

A large chaise lounge with an exposed mahogany frame and upholstery by my friend Molly Whittaker.

Besides seating one happy reader, the long flat cushion can also seat two or three comfortably.

A view from the back shows some exposed tenons, drawbores, and generally lovely woodgrain.

Bronner Dining Table and Bench

90″x42″x30″ walnut and wenge

A large Nakashima-inspired table with gorgeous bookmatched claro walnut slabs and wenge butterfly keys accompanied by a hand-dovetailed bench.

Dovetailed Shoe Bench

38″x14″x21″  walnut

A bench, two shelves for shoes, and drawer for whatever’s in your pocket when you come in the door.  All from scrap walnut lying around the shop.

Detail of the extra-giant dovetails on the sides of the bench.

I experimented with a natural edge and a band-aid-like butterfly key.

Ingo’s Bench

44″x44″x17″, cherry ply

L-shaped seating and storage for a small kitchen nook.

Quarter-sawn cherry ply was hard to find, but necessary to match the client’s kitchen cabinetry.

Special tensioned hinges hold the lids open and keep them from slamming.

Acacia Chair

22″x21″x36″, black acacia and faux leather.

This arm-less modern chair is the twin of my Mahogany Chair.  A light, practical chair, it was very much inspired by the design of Hans Wegner.

Probably the most difficult part of this chair to make is the sculpted joint that connects the back legs to the top. It’s worth the work though: that curvy yummy part is definitely my favorite element.

The curvy back rest is “coopered” – which means it is a number of thick wooden pieces whose edges are mitered and then glued to create a wide curve the way coopers used to make barrels. The “racing stripe” effect comes from coopering two sapwood edges so that it looks as though the sapwood – which is white – grew straight up through the center of the tree, and not only along the outside.

In this close-up, you can see how the cross-pieces under the seat fit into the structure. The circles are dowels that increase the strength of the joints. The leg joints are drawbored mortise-and-tenons: surely the most bombproof joint in the arsenal.

Mahogany Chair

22″x21″x36″, mahogany and faux leather

This arm-less modern chair is the twin of my Acacia Chair.  A light, practical chair, it was very much inspired by the design of Hans Wegner.

A sculpted back and buttery mahogany gleam really set this chair apart.

Quality faux leather is stretched over bent layers of oval plywood to make the seat.

The hidden mortise-and-tenon joint in the knee is drawbored with dowels for extra strength.

“Desk and Cabinet”, “Mahogany Chair”, and “Beehive”