I was clearing out a corner of the studio last Tuesday when I tripped over a stack of discarded walnut offcuts, each one accompanied by a scrap of paper taped…

I spent three hours yesterday scrubbing a brass inlay on a prototype chair, trying to chase a specific shade of oxidation that I thought looked “authentic.” It was a waste…

I spent most of yesterday digging through a cardboard box in the corner of my studio, pulling out a stack of rejected chair prototypes. One particular mahogany stool, which I’d…

I was clearing out a corner of the studio last Tuesday—one of those corners where the “failures” live—when I bumped into a prototype for a walnut chair I designed in…

I was clearing out a corner of my workshop last Tuesday—the graveyard of “almosts”—when I found the prototype for the walnut sideboard I finished three years ago. It’s a heavy,…

I was clearing out a corner of my studio last Tuesday when I tripped over a stack of birch plywood scraps—remnants of a chair that failed because the joinery was…

I was clearing out a corner of my studio last Tuesday when I tripped over a discarded prototype of a side table from 2008—a spindly thing made of particle board…

I was clearing out a corner of my studio last Tuesday when I tripped over a prototype chair from 2008—a heavy, oak-veneer mess that I’d rejected because the joints were…

I was clearing out a corner of the studio last Tuesday when I tripped over a prototype chair from 2004—a failed experiment in bentwood that I’d kept simply because the…

I remember sitting in a dusty workshop in my early twenties, watching a master joiner spend forty minutes adjusting a single tenon that looked, to my untrained eye, perfectly fine.…