I can relate to the work style of a 1930’s American cabinet shop (public domain)

After over a year of design development with the architect and client, selecting logs of deodar cedar and having them custom milled and cured to outfit the interior of a new guest house down the coast, I’m regaining perspective on my original thinking behind how I approached the project: Shuffling the Tree.

As my cabinets, doors and built-in furnishings take shape, each part of the tree finds its corresponding use in built form, the planks having been painstakingly graded for grain character, color and structural integrity. The process of hand sorting thousands of board feet of air-dried, rough sawn lumber has been slower than I had anticipated, but well worth the effort, and I’m feeling less overwhelmed as I convert my neatly stickered piles into glowing wooden furnishings. I’m taking extra pains not to use any laminated sheet materials, constructing all casework in solid stock.

I’ve found that designing and building this way automatically bestows a building with a feeling of belonging-ness, as though the house stands in honor of the tree it displaced. When the material is locally sourced from the waste stream, diverted from horticultural salvage that might otherwise be burned as firewood, the building’s interior has the added benefit of reducing carbon emissions to the atmosphere. I call my approach ‘bioregional vernacular’, and I’m glad for the opportunity to test its scalability.

cabinets of deodar cedar w/face frames, stacked up while I prepare doors and drawers

To follow my progress on designing and building the guest house interior, please click here and scroll down.

Tagged: craft philosophy, deep craft, furniture design, scott Constable, slow design, sustainability, traditional craft, vernacular architecture, woodworking

the surfboard originated in Hawaii, where local woods were shaped for specific waves

I’ve body-surfed all my life and have a natural feel for wave mechanics, but I’m finally getting ready to learn to surf on a board. Being a ‘wood guy’ with access to local mills and several decent breaks within a few miles, my first step will be to shape my own board. Luckily, my first surfboard will double as an integral part of our NOMO (non-motorized transportation) exhibition we’re developing as artists in residence at Kohler Arts over the summer.

Believe it or not, Sheboygan, Wisconsin has one of the best fresh water breaks in the world. So I’ve conceived of my surfboard as a freshwater longboard indigenous to the shores of Lake Michigan, modeled on the early surfboards native to Hawaii, which were shaped of local Koa and Balsa. Because freshwater is less buoyant than saltwater, I’ve been researching the specific gravity of Lake Region woods, looking for large trees with straight, clear grain and low specific gravity for maximal flotation and easy carving. I’ve discovered that American Cottonwood (Populus freemontii) still grows prolifically in the lowlands of Wisconsin, and with a specific gravity of around 0.31, is ideal for shaping a surfboard. The tree grows equally well along the Pacific Coast of Northern California, so I’ll make a prototype and test it locally.

To follow the development of our wowhaus artist-in-residence project at the JM Kohler Arts Center, please click here and scroll down.

Tagged: california coast, california flora, deep craft, innovation, kohler arts, longboard, scott Constable, specific gravity, surfing, woodworking

the Greens management team loved my prototype Greens Chair

Like the Golden Gate Bridge that looms across the Bay from San Francisco’s historic Fort Mason Center, Greens Restaurant is a Bay Area icon. With close ties to the San Francisco Zen Center, the restaurant has embodied an ethos of attentive living and eating for over thirty years, heralding a new age of vegetarian cuisine. I recently presented my prototype Greens Chair, which I was commissioned to design by the restaurant’s management team, and was truly honored to have it pass their rigorous requirements of functionality and aesthetics. The Greens management team includes acclaimed chef Annie Somerville and at least one ordained zen Buddhist priest, and everyone took turns testing the chair with earnest focus. The team agreed that the chair encourages mindfulness for both diners and staff, which is the highest compliment to me.

Tagged: aesthetics, chair design, deep craft, furniture design, green design, greens restaurant, scott Constable, slow design, windsor chair, woodworking, zen center

My humble ESY stool can hold its own in a room full of Danish Chairs

As I begin to make small production runs of my ESY stool (pictured above) to fill an increase in demand, I’ve been enjoying sending them out into the world and seeing where they land. Last week I delivered a sample to the office suite of a commercial real estate developer, and left it in a conference room under construction, nestled amongst a cluster of elegant Danish chairs. The stool worked perfectly with the setting, which got me thinking about what makes for a kind of universal style, or a style of no style. In my experience, the style of no style is a consequence of Radical Pragmatism.

I originally developed the stool as a minimalist seating solution for the Middle School Dining Commons associated with Alice Waters’ acclaimed Edible Schoolyard project. The stools stack up to 7 high, consist of just three repeated parts, and use a bare minimum of native, California hardwoods, traditionally joined into a lightweight but durable seat. The ESY stool doubles nicely as an occasional table. Most important, I prototyped and manufactured the original batch of 120 stools myself, and designed it around my minimal production capabilities, knowing I would need to keep costs down to compete with comparable products already in production. The stool is now made in small batches by a local shop, each batch sequenced with wood from the same sustainably milled logs. Sales have increased as the stool becomes available, and I look forward to scaling production in respect of the stool’s original ethos, eventually making it available on the Goods pages of this site.

Tagged: aesthetics, alice waters, chair design, craft, deep craft, edible schoolyard, furniture design, green design, innovation, sustainability, woodworking

With enough rainfall, Estero Americano drains to the sea, becoming seasonally tidal

My favorite chair, by far, is an ocean kayak. To unwind after an intense week of new projects, I spent a quiet afternoon idly paddling down Estero Americano, my favorite local slough, now flooded to the coast. The marshy, seasonally tidal estuary is like a living almanac of coastal California birds, evidenced by my encounters with numerous cormorant, dowitcher, egret, snipe, willet, loon, night heron, bufflehead, black skimmer and, closer to the beach, a flock of white pelican.

It’s coming up on two years since I created this site, whose first post was inspired by a paddle down the same stream. This time around, my voyage taught me less about the material provenance of my chair design, and more about the simple pleasures of sitting with nature.

The white pelican takes flight over Estero Americano

Tagged: aesthetics, birding, california coast, craft philosophy, deep craft, furniture design, phenology, scott Constable, sonoma coast

1/4 scale model of my new dining chair concept for Greens Restaurant

I generally try to avoid working under pressure, but find I often do my best work with my back up against the wall. When our Wowhaus Interview was published in San Francisco magazine last month, I was just beginning to clear the decks and shift my focus to a demanding interior design project. To my surprise and delight, the article inspired a bevy of inquiries about my furniture design, leading to several new commissions, including a new dining chair for the famous Greens Restaurant in San Francisco.

Over the holidays, I’ve designed a simplified, affordable adaptation of my Elder Chair, located a manufacturer and built a 1/4 scale model (pictured above), which I will present to the Greens management team later this week. The new chair combines the open-quadrant-backrest styling of my Elder Chair, which I originally developed for Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard Dining Commons, with the structural program of the Pilot Chair I recently designed and made for Becoming Independent. To mimic the wall of rectangular window panes looking towards the Golden Gate from inside of Greens, I elongated the open quadrants and narrowed the backrest, emphasizing the chair’s verticality. I also added an upholstered seat as a concession to comfort, considering the typically fit, lean patron of Greens.

Tagged: deep craft, edible schoolyard, furniture design, green design, greens restaurant, innovation, scott Constable, slow design, woodworking

My projects always begin with sorting the pile, touching the wood

Like cooking, working with wood engages all of the senses in symphony. Touch plays a major role in the early stages of a project, especially at the scale of fitting out the interior of a new building, like the Guest House that now requires my full attention and has my workshop maxed out to capacity. The start of my New Year has me managing stacks of Deodar Cedar I’ve had custom milled and air-dried for the project, and my days have been resplendant with re-organizing and grading the raw material, which I last saw as logs about a year ago.

After delivery, I estimate I handle each piece of milled wood at least five and up to ten plus times prior to installation, and I learn a little about how best to use each stick every time it passes through my hands. In many ways, this is my favorite part of the process, the most automatic, as the material practically grades itself into distinct piles based upon my assessment of touch, which leads naturally to visual patterning. Handling each stick gives me an understanding of where it lived on the tree, its structural integrity, moisture and resin content, which all informs how the wood will age when used daily in a home. Over the years, I’ve trained my hands to be the advance guard on seeing the wood and its color and grain, and I’ve learned to trust my sense of touch over my sense of sight when grading wood.

Ultimately, the logic of grading wood by touch informs how one interacts with the finished piece. Simply put, horizontal surfaces are designed for durability and a depth of grain that gains character over time, like a familiar path; vertical surfaces are designed for daydreaming, like clouds.

Tagged: aesthetics, craft philosophy, deep craft, innovation, scott Constable, slow design, vernacular architecture, woodworking