Ok, I have to start out by saying I had to be dragged into the idea of doing anything in oak. As a product of the 80's and 90's I have a visceral reaction to red oak - and not the good kind of visceral reaction. But one of our suppliers re-educated me on oak. He showed me some spectacular white oak slabs - which is a very different beast from what I was expecting. White oak dining tables can can some of the most amazing wood grain, figuring, and individual nature of any woods we work with.
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These little drum side tables where made out of tons of scraps of walnut from all of our other projects. Now in designing these pieces, I thought using scrap meant cheap and easy with a good look. Not at all the case - at least from the work standpoint. Imagine all the various widths, legths and thicknesses and conditions of all of the cutoffs, then having to mill each one down to the same size and what you initially think is going to be a nice and easy reuse design project turns into this long production line. In any case, the result is a really pretty little walnut drum side table.
This was one of the more spectacular pieces we have been comissioned to make. A client needed a large platform bed and headboard with side tables that would stay out of the way. So we inset them into the headboard to give them a floating appearance. The 12ftx5ft slab is a giant raw edge slab of claro walnut and the plaform is for a king size bed. We also made one out of monkeypod that was equally amazing.
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This oval walnut dining table is one of the cleanest designs we have done. Clean from the standpoint that it's nice and simple, small size for our client's kitchen area and a subtle knife edge to go with the client's mid century modern interior. With the small side top, we needed legs that would stay out of the way but still be quite stable for a high use everyday table. So the rectangular tube pi legs seemed to fit the ticket (the symbol for pi upside down - for those of you that don't celebrate March 14th every year with us math nerds).
This was a really nice and clean looking walnut desk with two drawers. The drawer fronts were cut out of one slab of wood so the grain is continuous from panel to panel. The top has a little concealed compartment at the back for cords and other top secret stuff the client that ordered this piece might need to hide.The top is made out of three joined walnut slabs. All in all it makes for a great walnut modern desk.
Our diving board console is one of our longest running designs. A reclaimed wood console with a floating leg is a design that can fit in with a lot of styles, and the combination of the natural raw edge, the solid wood slab and the modern clean look of the lucite leg is also appealing. WE always pay a great deal of attention to getting that mitered cut just right so the grain lines match up: a continuous grain running up the leg and across the top giving the solid wood slab a look of simply being folded over into a table.
This seemingly simple, straight forward bookshelf was a little tricky for us. The client that comissioned it wanted us to make something that is on the one hand rustic and chunky, and on the other hand still refined looking. So we opted for using walnut rather than a more rustic wood like pine or fur, kept the raw edges but sanded them really smoothly, kept the thickness of the solid wood slabs of wlanut, but hid the way it's all put toghether to make the construction look more modern.
This solid teak dining table presented some interesting design choices for us. This client wanted an outdoor table that could handle the elements, not look like it had a couple inches of varnish on it, look refined, but also look casural enough for an outdoor table. So the chrome U legs added a big element of refinement, but we went with our rectangular tubing instead of the more modern flatbar version of this leg to give it more chunkiness. The solid teak slab top also had a few choices.
These are a really nice pair of contemporary end tables. Very clean and simple in design, these reclaimed walnut end tables can wind up in a number of places: as a pair of sofa end tables, single accent chair table, bed side tables. The nice thing about them is even though they are solid wood end tables, they are very light so you can move them all over the place, carry them room to room, bring them to work, take them on vacation.... Anyway, the point here is they are versatile and good looking and of course orderable in any size.
These remind me of our drum tables: we always have a bunch of wood cutoffs all over the place and are constantly trying to come up with ways to re-use it all. Of course on paper designing something like these scrappy side tables seems easy. Get a bunch of pieces of wood, stack them all togehter, and there you have it. But that's far from the reality of making these.
