The Questions I Ask First
I remember sitting in a drafty studio in 2004, staring at a client who wanted a chair that “felt like a cloud” but cost less than a decent slab of…
Read more
A Quote With a Contingency in It
I was staring at a stack of rejected walnut joinery prototypes last Tuesday—the ones where the tenon was just a hair too proud—when it hit me how much we lie…
Read more
The Lesson Inside a Ruined Board
I have a shelf in my studio that most designers would call a graveyard. It’s filled with bent plywood, misaligned joinery, and chair legs that are three millimeters too short.…
Read more
Practice Changes What You Can See
I was staring at a stack of rejected walnut joinery in the corner of my studio—each piece tagged with a handwritten note about a failed angle or a miscalculated tolerance—when…
Read more
Skill Is Mostly Judgement
I spent most of yesterday afternoon digging through a cardboard box in the corner of my studio, pulling out a series of failed chair joints that I’ve kept for nearly…
Read more
The Eleven Stages of a Commission
I have a shelf in the corner of my studio dedicated to the “almosts”—the joinery that was too ambitious, the wood species that turned out to be a mistake, and…
Read more
Mortice and Tenon by Hand
I was staring at a pile of expensive walnut scraps in my studio last Tuesday, wondering why the joint I’d just spent forty minutes perfecting felt so uncomfortably tight. Most…
Read more
Seat Angle and Why Chairs Fail
I spent three weeks in 2004 obsessing over the lumbar sweep of a walnut lounge chair, only to realize I had built a beautiful, expensive torture device. I still have…
Read more
Designing a Chair Around a Person
I was staring at a prototype of a lounge chair last Tuesday—one of the many “failures” currently occupying a corner of my studio—realizing that the industry’s obsession with ergonomic data…
Read more
Pricing Work Without Underpaying Yourself
I was standing in my studio last Tuesday, staring at a prototype chair that had cost me three weeks of sleep and a significant amount of walnut, trying to figure…
Read more