Be it dining room chairs, lounge seats, storage benches, when we are asked to make chairs or design seats, clients are often surprised by the amount of work involved to create a good seat. As a lot of the time in the construction is taken up by pattern and jig forming, the initial chair is the most complicated and after that depending on how much hand detailing or carving etc additional chairs are relatively easy to produce.
The proportions and angles are the key element to a good comfortable seat. Get these wrong and if the eye doesn’t see it, then the body will feel it
A recent creation was to make a storage seat to be, essentially a daytime bench seat to hide away toys, but be styled to sit well in a lounge used by the adults of the household when the children are in bed. Playing around with proportions I designed the seat section to be large enough to sit 2x children or double as a great story seat.
I used a blend of Oak and Walnut as this complimented the Dark timber flooring of the room, but the lighter Oak kept the design from being too dark.
These chairs are a design classic from North America, called Adirondack chairs. Named after the mountain range on the East coast, apparently designed in a way that used native Cedar that would sustain the environment and were a simple construction that allowed component replacements or multiples to be made. Although a simple construction project, these are a very well
designed chair that is a perfect garden chair or porch lounger.
Not all seats are freestanding, this project was for a storage window bench that would again hide toys, games etc, but be in keeping to the period home and interior features. Simple mouldings and panelling link the seat to the window shutters.
The lift up seat is concealed beneath the seat cushion. The client choose a great fabric and I upholstered a cushion with light fabric buttons to link the style to a sofa seat within the room.
On a few occasions we have been asked to replicate chairs for part dining room sets. i.e additional carvers chairs or the range they have are an odd number to the household.
Replica furniture work is always best done with the actual chair to measure from, if for some reason this is not available, then an extensive survey and templates are required.
The seat on the left is pre finish to the original.
On this project the chair was to simple increase the number in the set for a growing household and avoid the mismatch of emergency chairs at Christmas!