Create sultry sophistication with Art Deco details. Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann (1879-1933) is considered by craftspeople, collectors and designers to be the premier Art Deco furniture maker; he was [...]
This stool builds your skills with eight different joints and bent laminations. Competition is the whetstone of talent; this was in full effect when I built this Wharton Esherick-inspired stool [...]
Design without compromise: An exercise in high-end handwork. Sometimes a cup of tea is more than a cup of tea. Its surface may be still, its color translucent and its container unadorned. But in [...]
The road to enlightenment is paved with lots of little strips of wood. I am not by nature organized or detail-oriented. When I was young, I was the guy with the punk rock blaring and the [...]
An embellished lid is your woodworking calling card. Embellished tool chests are perhaps the quintessential calling card of the cabinetmaker. From Benjamin Seaton’s mahogany and tulipwood [...]
Milk Paint is one of my most favorite paints. I like it for the fact that it is a water-based medium, that it dries to a hard and chalky-like surface, that it is easy to sand, and that it is …
Historic proportions and details are still the best. Since I started woodworking in about 1993, I’ve stored my tools in almost every way imaginable – from plastic buckets to wall cabinets, racks [...]
This handsome piece is simple to build and easily adapted to fit your stock. A friend asked me to design and build a table using a special piece of walnut. I was given approximate measurements, [...]
This early form – an aumbry – spawned many different types of furniture. It is easy to forget that many of our favorite pieces of furniture are recent innovations. Forms such as coffee tables, [...]
Great shop storage isn’t always built using plywood. As I look around my shop, or most woodworking shops, I see cabinets built with plywood and screws. But there are other options. I decided to [...]
After I finished shaping the hull of the USNS Comfort (read about it in Part 1 and Part 2) I turned to make all the elements that construct the superstructure. Below (Sketch #1) are a few of my [...]
Mortise-and-tenon joinery and side-hung drawers make for a simple but impressive build. Early in my career I met an avid antiques collector whose focus was objects from the William & Mary [...]