Recently, I had a client come to me with a couple of furniture pieces she didn’t like. They were disliked so much, they were relegated to the garage to be hidden away. The problem was, the timber was beautiful and held sentimental meaning.
There were two tables. One was a swamp Kauri slab on a badly proportioned leg frame, raising it to dining table height. For a slab like this to be a beautiful piece, I feel, it needs to be unadorned, left to give the impression it is a piece of tree, instead of juxtaposed against an ordinary, traditional leg frame.
The other was a coffee table with a beautiful piece of mottled Kauri on top. It had been heavily varnished and was starting to crack and peel away in places. This piece of timber had been in the family a long time and held a special memory of the client’s father.
The brief entailed building a Finn coffee table from the timber so I set about breaking up the large Kauri slab into pieces. It would form the leg frame for the table. In order to make the top larger and to tie it in with the leg frame, the mottled Kauri was framed with the swamp variety and joined using a breadboard technique.
I’m pleased with the result. This is a great way of reusing quality timbers from pieces that have seen their day. It is sustainable and full of meaning.
There is some timber left over so the next job will be creating an Elodie side table from what remains.
