Mail Cabinet

I like building cabinets because in most cases their destiny is a fairly modest one. A chair can be a throne and a dining table is the center of your home, but a cabinet is really just a place for you to dump your stuff. It’s significance comes directly from its intended use. I know a lot of people who have uncomfortable chairs that you can’t really sit in, but I don’t know a single person who owns a cabinet that doesn’t hold anything. Even James Krenov put silverware and little figurines in his.

Part of that is human nature. Generally speaking, we adapt to whatever size fish bowl we live in. Every apartment or house I’ve moved into in the last 10 years has been a little bit bigger than the place before, and every time I start out wondering how we’re ever going to fill the new place up. Fast forward 6 months and it feels like it’s bursting at the seams. I’ve accepted this and no longer torture myself with fantasies of getting rid of everything we own. Instead I now fantasize about storage.

This cabinet was commissioned by my sister, who was in desperate need of a place to hide all of the packages that come and go from her house each week. I love a straightforward prompt like this because in my experience, clarity of purpose leads to efficient design. In this case, when I say efficient, what I mean is good. It needed two drawers for mail, a removable shelf, and a big empty space for boxes.

Once we finalized the specs (60” x 14” x 32”), I immediately started to dig through my little wood shed in search of a wide piece of oak that I knew had been sitting around for a long time. I implemented a policy a couple of years ago that whenever I come across a clear piece of oak or cherry that’s wider than 12”, I buy it. Even if I don’t need it at that moment. This policy has yet to fail me.

To be able to build a big cabinet from a single piece of timber rather than a bunch of boards laminated together is a tremendous luxury, but there are certain drawbacks and considerations. The first is that I would need to dimension the pieces by hand because they were too wide for my planer. Laborious but straightforward with a handplane. The second is that I would need to cut the joinery with some expediency, because wide boards have a tendency to move on you. The less time between when you cut and fit the dovetails on a wide case piece, and assemble it, the better chance you’ll have of it all going smoothly.

Once I figured out a body position that would work for me to saw such a long piece of timber - me squatting with my saw held vertically and the board lying flat on my bench for those wondering - it was a relatively smooth operation. Getting the joinery to fit on thicker boards is always a little bit of a pain but I took it slow and steady and eventually got it halfway decent.

I try to be careful when it comes to any self-mythologizing of the lone craftsman, building furniture by hand instead of throwing it on the CNC. For the most part I consider it a method of work, just like any other. I have nothing against using a router to cut your pins and tails, I just prefer the look of the hand cut ones. But from a marketing standpoint, it’s important for me to differentiate, because I charge quite a bit more than the 3-D modeler does. So I try to be tasteful about it.

In this case, I purposely found a cracked piece of oak to use for the internal shelf, just so I could butterfly it. The crisp corners are proof I used a chisel and not a bearing guided bit. I know it’s stupid, but my ego demands a little showiness and sometimes I acquiesce.

Ultimately, if the cabinet lives it’s intended life, this detail will be buried under a pile of mail, and that is the beautiful part about building cabinets.

Designing and Doing

I think a lot about the nature of the work that I do. Namely, the rather large gap between the aspects of my work that produce income and the much larger proportion of tasks that don’t. What it comes down to in my mind is designing vs doing. As a designer, I’m prolific and most of the time the ideas come freely. Not all of them are good and even the good ones require refinement, but the process of designing furniture for me is a bountiful one. As a craftsperson, I’m often tedious and miserable. I spend long hours learning skills and techniques that I will probably never be able to do as well as I want to when it counts. I am haunted by the fear that at any moment I’ll realize a terrible mistake I made days ago and it’ll be too late to correct. And the real kicker is, I’m fairly certain almost none of it will be noticed by the client.

Much of the aforementioned thinking is done while I’m building, particularly when I’m working on something that I thought would take 2 hours but ends up taking 2 days. If someone asks me what I do at a dinner or something, I usually say that I’m a designer, but the reality is that I spend a much greater amount of my time as a furniture builder than designer. And yet, I publicly identify as a designer because I know that design is what pays the bills. Which brings me back to that initial question of what is the nature of my work. Is it what I’m paid to do or is it what I spend my time doing?

Unfortunately for me, I don’t think one can exist without the other. Despite knowing better, I’m drawn to craft in a seemingly inescapable way. In my other career as a fashion designer, I began by learning to sew and assemble garments. I don’t know why but it felt strange to me to design something without knowing how to put it together. I know there are a lot of designers who have gone their entire careers without sitting at a sewing machine or picking up a chisel, and I’m fairly certain they’re all the better for it. But it’s never been my path. I need to suffer through the doing in order to feel that I’ve earned the end result.

On my good days, I can conjure a noble image out of that relationship. I can tell myself that furniture that comes from the hands of the person who designed it has a distinct resonance. And that the labor of building something by hand, especially in an increasingly automated and optimized world, is intimate, and beautiful, and deeply human. And I can believe that - I do believe that actually, deep down. But I also know that this is a romantic lens to view one’s own work through, and furthermore, is only true if everyone believes it’s true. This feels obvious to say but the work is only meaningful if you find meaning in it.

On the days where I’ve blown past the deadline fiddling with a tiny detail, or remaking a chair leg because at the last minute I cut it too short, I long for the disconnect between designing and doing. “Doing” in the world of furniture is known as fabrication — a word that to me is most significant for its lack of evocation. It’s cold, and precise, and unromantic, but accurately conveys the building portion as something separate from the design process. First you design, then you have someone else fabricate.

The path I’ve chosen has no such distinction. Designing and fabricating are largely simultaneous acts. I rarely begin a project with a full plan mapped out (much to the dismay of some clients I’m sure), choosing instead to give myself a little space to find the piece. Of course, there are specs to hit and an aesthetic standard to meet, but in my experience the truly ecstatic design moments happen spontaneously. My best ideas occur at the tips of my fingers and not at my desk— a fact I view as a defect and not a feature of my brain.

The limitations of this way of working are easy to spot. The bottleneck is me, both mentally and physically. I can draw 10 coffee tables in a couple of hours but to build one will take me a week or two. This is not an efficient use of one’s time if they make their money as a designer. But for me it’s a necessity. Every one of those 10 coffee tables I choose to build will be better for having my hands on them, and I know that’s true. The physical act is critical to the design.

So we return at last to the question about the nature of my work. I’m a designer. I build furniture in service to the design, but everything about the way I design is influenced by my experience building furniture. Nothing is abstract. The result of which, I hope, is an incredibly direct line from me to the piece, and then eventually to its owner. It’s an honest reflection of all of my abilities and limitations, and to create that and send it out into the world is a frightening and beautiful experience, but that’s the nature of the work.