Triple Duty Furniture for a Bright and Sunny Room

The latest project in the shop is a set of seating units designed to flesh out a currently rather empty sun room. My client's home has a great sun room that started life as a porch across almost the entire length on the house. A previous owner had turned the porch into a room with large windows all the way around. Its a bright and airy, west-facing space, with views of agricultural fields and the Monterey Bay. It has the potential to be a great place to curl up and read or enjoy the view. But what it needed was softer surfaces to add some warmth, and storage for the owners' large book collection. It would also have to act as guest quarters for their relatives' kids during family visits. That means they have to do triple duty. First they have open shelving below, for book storage and display.

Second, by day they're window seats for lounging and nature-watching. To help with the lounging part, the potentially "dead" corners are filled with deep storage chests that double as backrests for the adjoining seats.

By night two of the seats expand to become 48" wide beds. To expand, the bed units have two-layer tops hinged at the front. The face frame of the seat slides forward to act as the outboard support, and then the top merely folds out. To facilitate a smooth transition to sleep mode, seat and cushion sizes were designed so that the cushions from non-bed seats fit exactly into the open spaces of the bed units to complete the sleeping surface.

Stay tuned for more on the construction techniques used to execute these pieces.

The Renee Taylor Gallery

Well, it was an interesting journey over mountains and through deserts, but the Gallery display cases made it to Arizona all in one piece - a minor miracle, given the state of the highway system (nothing will give you a new perspective on the state of America's road conditions like being stuck in the right lane in a giant truck with rock-hard suspension for 800 miles!).

The installation went smoothly, thanks to the excellent help of my friend Jeff Hagar - I couldn't have done it without him (stay tuned one of these days for the blog posts of the bathroom remodel he earned!).

Here are some shots of the space - if you find yourselves in Sedona, I encourage you to drop by the Vue Gallery and check out the great space, great art, and some very spiffy display cases, if I do say so myself!

The "before" shot of the space.


Cabinets everywhere!


The final result.


The front set of cabinets, as you walk in the door.


The rear set of cabinets in the interior of the gallery. Notice the great soffit design feature the owners put in that directly mirrors the foot print of the display cases. Their builders were in making templates directly from the cases the day I left.


Fifteen feet of storage cabinets behind the counter.



Another view of the cases showing the waveform accenting on the case fronts, as well as the light soffit above.

Museum Show Chiffonier

Here's the next installment on the making of the chiffonier that I'll be showing at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History show the coming summer.

Two of the most distinctive elements of this piece's design are the sculpted bonnet and base. Both are made of wenge, a dark, dense, black/brown wood, that will give weight to and ground the piece. Both are stack laminated and then shaped. This series of photos shows the steps involved in making the bonnet:

First, pieces are face-laminated to achieve the required thickness for shaping. In this case, to accommodate the width of the part, it was made in three sections and then glued together after shaping (you can see the mortises for the floating tenons that will help with both alignment and glue joint strength) ....

Next, the built up blanks are rough cut to shape on the band saw....

Finally, the subparts are glued together and the entire piece is shaped ....

The base was created in much the same way, with the pieces in each layer being bandsawn roughly to size before glue-up, then the whole part being shaped afterward ....

Stay tuned for the next installment on the making of this piece, when I'll talk about the distinctive features of it's seven drawers.

Evolution of a Design

I've just finished up the shoe/mail/etc. organizer cabinet introduced in the last post. It has pattern-matched door and case panels, an upholstered seat and a drop-front mail organization area.

The overall look of the piece provides a great insight into how a design evolves over time, and from client to client.


The lineage of this design started many years ago with a CD storage piece I made for my own home.











That design resonated with a couple who had visited me during Open Studios over a number of years. They eventually commission an A/V component cabinet based partly on the look of the CD cabinet, with bits added to fit their needs. I used that cabinet on a postcard the next year, and that second generation of the design caught the eye of a previous client.






That led to this most recent piece, which uses some of the same visual language as the second version, but tailored to the new set of functional needs. Its great to see a design take on a life of its own and head off into new directions.







I wonder which piece might spark the next new fork in the conceptual road?

Recent News

A couple of happy developments occurred this past Fall. First, my Corner Jewelry Cabinet won Third Place in Fine Woodworking Magazine's online contest titled "Cure for the Common Cabinet".

Then not long after that, my E/S Kitchen Island won First Place in Fine Homebuilding Magazine's "Creative Kitchen Islands" online contest.


Many thanks to everyone who voted for my work in the two contests.

Finally, the end of December saw the delivery of my latest commission, a desk, which turned out really well. I'll be posting some in-progress pictures, as well as the final product soon, so stay tuned.