Bow Front Armoire

This is the piece that spawned the creation of some of my other work with elliptical ("pod") feet and bowed fronts. The inspiration came from the generous couple who commissioned me to make it. He is a Toronto firefighter who was at the time building a two-seater airplane in a garage, and she is a confident, gentle woman with a fabulous French accent. There were enough adjectives formed from their two characters to quickly brainstorm design elements and attributes...  strength, lift, subtle but assertive, refined, accurate, flowing, positive, animated yet eloquent... 

It is a 7' high armoire for their clothes.  It has 9 drawers and 2 compartments above with shelving.

The bowed front is slightly accented by the sides angling in five degrees. The top curve is also slightly accented, by a minute arch in the back which is just noticeable enough when it's up against a wall, about 1 1/4" inches over the whole height. The solid feet are 20 degree ellipses tilting up slightly to align with the tangent to the bottom curve. The same ellipse is used for the handle recesses, which have a comfy groove on the inside to reward fingers used to explore the inner spaces.

The whole piece is bookmatch-veneered with Australian lacewood from one log for complete continuity, from left side to front, to right side.

No decoration -- it's all in the selected wood grain on a carefully calculated and flowing design. This was a benchmark piece.

Shortly after completing it (late '90's), I was approached by James Strecker, asking me if I would be willing to be featured in a book about the School of Crafts and Design at Sheridan College. I was honored to be selected as one of ten people to represent the array of graduates from the furniture studio. It is called Sheridan -- The Cutting Edge in Crafts. I chose this Armoire to represent my work and provided a write up to go with this picture. There was also a series of questions James asked me on the phone... I was mistakenly under the impression that he was going to use my responses as guidelines with which to make his own summations... my actual responses were scattered through chapters in the book, and in the end it was probably accurate of the times since I was a wacko furniture guy living in an industrial unit.  Oh well,  it's only a book, it's not like it could float around forever, like on the net... there's another topic all together.

Peter Hogan assisted me in photographing it in my Oakville studio.

I was 27. Proud, and tired at the end of another significant piece.