Each chair takes about 80 hours over roughly four weeks. Here's a look at the process from raw board to finished piece. Browse all galleries.
For this chair I found some 20-year-old, air-dried cherry, one of my favorite furniture woods for the patina it develops over time. I laid out the cuts to keep color and grain consistent across the piece, until I discovered the board was riddled with old worm holes that nearly made the whole thing unusable. The headrest pieces have to come from the same board and are coopered together to create the curved shape.
The backslats and rockers take the longest to prepare, since each one is built from several thin laminations clamped in a form and left to cure for 24 hours. Grain-matching matters everywhere: in the back legs, the arms, and especially the seat, where a mismatched glue joint would be the first thing anyone noticed.
Once the blanks are cut, it's time to start fitting the chair together. The seat is dished out with an angle grinder and progressively finer sanding discs, and the leg-to-seat joints are mortise-and-tenon joints based on a design by Sam Maloof: strong, and, done right, nearly invisible. The coopered headrest gets shaped at the bandsaw and fitted before the rest of the chair is sanded and shaped, which is easiest to do before the backslats and rockers go on.
Unlike the flexible backslats, the rockers can't give at all. They're laminated with more layers and a different glue, then attached to the legs with a combination of epoxy and screws for a joint built to last generations. From there it's a final pass with a grinder, rasps, and sanders to soften every transition until the whole chair reads as one continuous shape.
Every piece is made to order in my Colorado shop. Reach out to talk wood, size, and timeline.
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