pg 168-69, “An Autobiography” Frank Lloyd Wright

Echo Fir

     This piece is the first to be completed in my Echo Park studio.  The base is all reclaimed douglas fir studs narrowly rescued from a seemingly inevitable fate in the city dump, each sent through my planer to clean them up.  The design was inspired by the iconic front porches seen on the Craftsman style homes in this historic neighborhood, many with graceful modern touches added such as steel cable handrails.  The shelf is heart pine, nailed down to evoke the impression of an old deck floor.  The joinery is blind mortise and tenon on the rails and stiles and tensioned steel braided cable tying it all together.  The top is 1″ thick concrete set on a piece of 1/2″ fir plywood finished with penetrating sealer and beeswax coat for a soft sheen.

rafter and pavement

     This coffee table is my first piece completed in Los Angeles, Echo Park to be exact.  It was an arduous process due to my lack of an official workshop/studio at the time of its inception, which gave me plenty of time to overthink every detail.  The base is heart pine salvaged from a roof overhang I had to demo on my house in Jacksonville.  The 4X6 legs were the half timbers bearing most of the load, and measured 5′ long and weighed 50+ pounds each (1/3 my body weight-taking them down, not easy).  The horizontal supports were the rafter tails and much less cumbersome yet every bit as beautiful.  The joinery employed is mortise and tenon, and birch doweling.  The top was fashioned in my new studio and is actually brick mortar in lieu of standard concrete allowing for a thinner (1″), more manageable size.  I tried to picture a young, happy couple trying to move their new 225 pound coffee table in, and it wasn’t pretty.

Evening Mirror

     I was able to rescue three doors from a remodel of an Italian restaurant in my former hometown of Jacksonville.  This presented the unique opportunity to get a little more experimental with recovered doors (as they generally end up being table tops).  It was indeed a member of the female population in that good city who inspired me by observing the unusual absense of reflections in my house.  Thus, a mirror was born, and I then had the unforturnate possibility of seeing myself at anytime when around the house.

Occulto

     In its previous life, this table top was a furnace cover in a small bungalow built in 1923.  After narrowly escaping a trip to the scapyard where it would surely have been smelted and fashioned into another furnace cover, I stripped, sealed, and buffed it uncovering the hidden beauty of this seemingly worthless object.

     Now that I had a handsome table top on my hands, I felt obligated to put together a base for it, for a tabletop without a base is like a horse with no legs, or mabye a bike with no wheels.  In any case, I was able to rustle up some scrap heart pine flooring for the horizontal supports, and aluminum angles leftover from a shelving unit I built for the legs. 

     The piece completed I decided to test it with an actual mug of coffee.  Unfortunately I had no coffee, or mugs for that matter, so I decided to improvise and use a bottle of cold beer.  The table performed very well but, full disclosure here, it has yet to be tested with real coffee.

Door in Second Life

There is something about buildings that have survived the elements and inhabitants of decades or even centuries past that captivates me; even more arresting is the individual structural and decorative members that comprise any historic site.  At the same time, I’m drawn to the simple and clean presentation of material as seen in the art of modern furniture and architectural design.  The combination of the two is almost too much, in my opinion anyway.

To be able to retrieve raw material from the inevitable fate of a city landfill and turn it into something of beauty that can be used in another home or business for the years ahead is something special. 

This is my practice.  I believe in a simple, creative presentation of salvaged building materials with no application of unnecessary decorative ornamentation.  I believe with the correct choice and placement of salvaged items, only those that are required for the piece to function are necessary, any more is too much.  Less is more.  That’s what my mom always says anyway.