Exploring Texture: Gail’s Cabinets

It’s good practice from a design standpoint not to throw out or discount your crazier ideas. Its very often those ideas that are the precursor to new directions in your work. I’ve also found that being unsure or a bit uncomfortable about an idea is often a sign of growth, and not necessarily a sign that your idea is bad. Now, finding clients who are willing to indulge your creative whims, especially unproven ones, is a bit of a challenge. But every once in a while we have a client who is willing to go out on a ‘creative limb’, in fact they encourage it.

Gail is just such a client. In describing her project she was very clear on two points; she wanted lots and lots of storage, and visual interest derived from texture. We were to design a grouping of cabinets for the living room/dining room that would hold books, small art objects, and some glassware and china. The main material was to be western maple, Gail liked the idea of using a readily available local wood.

The concept that we put forward was to make simple, solid maple cabinets with sliding doors. The doors were quite large, and divided asymmetrically. Every door was unique, but related to each other by using the same sizes of divisions arranged in different ways. We used the golden rectangle as a tool to arrive at pleasing proportions. The golden rectangle is derived from the golden section; the ratio of the two different side lengths in the rectangle is a factor of 1.618. In the last few years we’ve been focused on using asymmetry as a dominant theme our furniture. It seemed a natural fit in this project.

At our meeting to pitch our design, we dragged along a bunch of samples of what we wanted to use as panels in the doors. This was the crux of the design- to use interesting and varied materials in the doors that would relate to and compliment each other. Now, some people would look at you like you were a bit crazy if you showed up with a large sheet of rusty sheet metal and said ‘I want to put this is your nice living room cabinets, but it will be smaller and less dirty than this’. Luckily for us, Gail got it! We also brought along split red cedar (shakes, like for a roof), and samples of some unusual wood. We got the go ahead, and decided to completely finish the cabinets and door frames and then play with different materials to ‘compose’ the doors, with Gail’s help.

We constructed the cabinets by dovetailing them with a router jig. A couple of the cabinets were quite long, 106″ or so. I woke up on the morning I was going to start the joinery realizing that they were far, far too long to fit in the jig on the workbench. We had to come up with some way… we dragged the jig into the attic and set it up there, so the cabinet parts could hang through the attic hatch. Joe would feed them up to me and I got them clamped in and away we went.

The cabinets sat on short ‘feet’ that we made out of some yew wood that we had. Yew has an unusual color and is a great compliment to the maple. They looked so pretty after oiling them.

We made four cabinets in total, all of them different. The two larger ones are on either side of the living room, and we thought that adding some lights in the open portion of the cabinets would be a nice touch and add some accent lighting to the room. LED technology has come a long way in the past few years and we were able to purchase LED puck lights that have a nice warm colour, as opposed to that nasty blue that they all used to be. The lights operate via a touch sensor /three position dimmer. Once we installed them and secured all the wires, transformer, and other bits to the bottom of the cabinet it looked like there was a bomb strapped to it! They functioned perfectly.

About a year and a half ago I was at home sick with the flu and Joe brought me home some books from the library, including Lark Books 500 baskets from their 500 series. I was smitten; these were not just functional baskets. They were sculpture, they were art. I was drawn to the infinite varieties of form and texture, and wondered if I might be able to incorporate some of these elements into furniture. Soon after I learned about Joan Carrigan on Saltspring Island, basket maker and teacher. I’ve taken a few classes from Joan and plan to take more. I’ve learned how to prepare and work with red cedar, cherry and willow bark. This introduction has led to a bit of a bark obsession; Joe and I have spent all these years working with the inside of the tree, now we’re finding new possibilities with the outside. This summer we pulled cedar bark from some trees nearby that were slated to be taken out for road construction. I’ve wanted to do this for a very long time, since reading Hilary Stewart’s fantastic book  Cedar.

We decided two of the door panels would be woven red cedar bark. I wove a simple 2, 2 twill pattern. There is a lot of work that goes into preparing the bark before you can get weaving, including sizing all the weavers to width. I made a tool to do so, copying one that Joan had made. I felt particularly ‘crafty’ having harvested the bark, making the tools, and weaving the panels.

The bark panels had to be pushed into the door frames to dry so they would retain the proper shape. It takes about 36-48 hours for the cedar to completely dry out. We wanted to install them that afternoon so…. I made a couple of forms that were the same size as the door openings and dried them out in our new convection oven, 175 Fahrenheit for about half an hour did the trick! I knew the oven would be great for roasting veggies but did not imagine I’d use it for this.

I was hiking last spring and found a bitter cherry tree (prunus emarginata) that was standing dead in the forest. I’ve since learned that this species prefers moist forests and along streams. It’s also a pioneer in logged areas, which explains why they are so plentiful on Mt. Prevost. The woodpeckers were just starting to go at the tree, but the bugs and fungus had been working on it for some time. The cambium, the layer of the tree just below the bark was completely rotten and eaten away, leaving the bark on the outside.

We wanted to see if we could harvest some of it and use it in some way.  We made a vertical slit up the trunk (cherry bark grows in a bands around the circumference) and with a little persuasion gently peeled away the bark in sheets.

Back at the shop the bark needed a bit of scraping to remove the last bit of cambium. The front is a light grey color, but as you gently scrape the surface a beautiful rich, deep shiny red appears. We had a few narrow strips that we scraped completely to red and it looked exactly like prosciutto! It is quite strong along its length and has a slightly waxy feel to it.

We also had to figure out how to mount it. It had to be backed up, and we also had to find a way to deal with the small oblong slits (called lenticels) that are a naturally occurring feature of this kind of bark. Filling all the slits was not an option as we couldn’t sand the bark; we ended up painting the backer board black and using spray contact cement to attach the bark. Hooray for modern adhesives.

In addition to bark in the door panels we also used rusty sheet steel. We had experimented with this material in a previous project, although this time we added a clear coat that gave a nice sheen and enriched the colour. We combed through our inventory of unusual wood bits and pieces and found some spalted maple that worked perfectly. Spalting refers to a kind of coloring, sometimes spidery black lines that some woods show in the beginning stages of decay caused by fungus. When the lumber is dried the process stops, leaving interesting patterns in the wood. The other interesting wood we used was some veneer that we think is box elder, the veneer seller wasn’t entirely sure. This veneer was extremely unusual in that some borer insect had had it’s way with the tree, and where the holes remained so did really beautiful and varied streaks of color. Gail really loved it. Lastly, we used some architectural textured glass.

Here are the finished cabinets:

It occurred to Joe and I that the theme for this project could be ‘decay’ as well as texture. We had steel that was rusting, maple that was rotting, veneer with insect holes, cherry bark that the bugs had liberated… nevertheless the result was some quite lively furniture. We are most certainly going to visit this theme again, and I have my eyes on a few cherry trees that look like they might not last too many winter storms.