This piece (aka: "Slabola") centered around the availability of a slab of genuine mahogany that I had carted around from shop to shop for about 15 years. I had bought it for a run of "Top 20 CD cabinets", but eventually couldn't bear to cut it up. It was 12' long, 21" wide and more than an inch thick. It was absolutely free of worm holes and stains, it was flat, straight, and basically "text book perfect". When talks started for this home office with a long wide counter, it was the natural choice to finally put it to use.
As the colour choice was to be less conventional for this piece, I pulled out a bunch of samples that were more on the extreme side as a starting point. It turned out that the purple on curly maple (#3) was a good start, and the brown-mahogany (#6) would eventually go on the slab. Since all individual woods (and particularly different grades of mahogany) take stains differently, I used the back side of the slab as the biggest sample board ever to give me an accurate demonstrator of the end colour. I used top-end hardware for the heavy file cabinets and put in an extra center slide on the bottom to further reduce any wobble in the drawers. Load 'em up! The 10mm glass shelves are suspended by special supports, protruding from the "Dijon" coloured back walls, which are a light curly maple. The glass is just 1" shorter than the glass industry can possibly cut, based on the size of the massive sheets they start with. This glass wasn't cheap, and I realized that all glass is usually pretty pricey when you get up into the range of these long flexing strips, because they can break if they're not handled carefully by the glass cutters, and they commonly have to scrap them and they need to make new ones for the customer, who has to wait again, and again, and yes, that was the case here. The top plank is mahogany too, bolted through the back to securely cantilever it out. Note that you can't see any connections through to the wall. This design feature made planning the installation quite a feat of mental gymnastics, but it worked out perfectly. Nice piece, I could see myself doing it again, but it might take a few phone calls and time to find a slab of anything that big and clear of unwanted spits, knots, checks etc., these days. But I know where to look. |