Early on in my career, before I knew what I was doing I sketched up a design for a small writing desk. I built a little foam model that sat on a shelf and that’s where the idea ended. A few years later I apprenticed at a custom furniture shop and after about a year I started to have a grasp on the whole furniture making thing. I got my little foam model out and drew up a full scale. Then another one. I finally arrived at something that looked and felt good. From there I made some patterns and started building the base.

For nearly two years the project floated around my bench as I kept working on client projects. Under a blanket, I wouldn’t touch it for months at a time. But here and there I’d come in on a weekend and take one more little step. For the legs I wanted to play with the relationship between angularity and arc so I used a series of round over bits to fade the leg from a cylinder at the foot up to a hard angle at the top. I knew the desktop was going to be devoid of curves save for the pulls.

A couple years later I had everything built, with the base and top two independent pieces.  I envisioned the desk to be used for analog writing with pen and paper, but also for contemporary use so I designed the long drawer to have drop hinges for a keyboard. I embedded magnets in the drawer face so you’d hardly notice the drop function if you didn’t want to.  For the pulls I looked for a nice set but wasn’t finding anything that felt right. I went to visit a metal worker associate and he had this big cylinder of solid brass. I said, can we cut slices off that? Yes we could. We cut and tapped the brass cylinders and put smaller ones behind so the pulls would float.

At this point I had made about fifty client projects and decided to go off on my own. I moved home to Portland, Oregon and brought the desk, still unfinished with me. After a few months of setting up shop and getting some work flowing I got the desk out and gave it one more once over. It had been such a long process that I was terrified to finish it. I had grown attached to the idea of finishing it someday, and someday was now. Using a satin varnish I wiped it down and that was that.

All in all the entire thing could be done again in about 40 hours. But for me it began before I knew what I was doing and ended years later when I had started my own furniture business. So I suppose for me it’s a piece that’s speaks more about experience than just knowing how to do something. 

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