Furniture

Furniture

My design experience with furniture has been contemporary, Japanese, Danish, and what I call sophisticated rustic. By sophisticated rustic I mean nicely proportioned well designed expertly crafted furniture pieces that are more organic in nature and use unusual parts of the tree such as root balls and burls, and book matched live edge elements. They are always functional pieces of furniture that are also sculptural.

Many of the pieces I do are from woods that I collect,such as Arizona Ash, Alligator Juniper and Mesquite for example, but there are many more. The Sonoran Desert environment produces some beautiful woods to work with. I use most of the tree; root ball underground, trunk for panels and slabs and the limbs become legs and other pieces for tables ,chairs and benches. this gives each piece a subtle cohesiveness and they are literally “out of the woods”.  This process also allows for more variation in design foregoing the limitations of pre-dimensioned lumber or the necessity for glue ups to achieve a desired thickness and eliminating the visual inconsistency often seen in glued up pieces.

Most all the construction techniques are simple ages old methods made easier by modern machinery. Predominately mortise and tenon but including sliding dovetails, splines and key-ways. Sometimes the joinery is accentuated but my preference usually is to give the wood center stage of a good design.