ABOUT

A five-drawer dresser made from rippled olive English ash, with ash and oak interiors. This piece was awarded the Christopher Claxton Stevens Prize by the Furniture Makers’ Company. 

Over the years, we have created a number of pieces we nominally put into the category of “Loud Bark”, loosely defined as follows: “On occasion we just cannot stop ourselves from speculatively making pieces of cabinet-making virtuosity, where we stretch our skills, run with the idea, respond to the impossible and squeeze the budget till the pips squeak. Examples of these rare animals looking for their owners can occasionally be glimpsed in the showroom and on our website”.

The pyramidalised dresser is such a beast.

I started texturing surfaces twenty years ago, mainly in response to a need to imbibe the surface of the wood with an additional preciousness, to add value and to draw attention to it in a different light. I wanted to share my sense of wonder and affection for timber and to show the beauty in its solidity by etching/carving/moulding into its surface.

The pyramidalisation of the curved surfaces of this chest of drawers needed to compete with the sensuality of the compound curves of its stack laminated front. The results have a touch of serendipity to them. The top surface is bow-fronted and the lateral valleys of the pyramids follow the arc of that front. They do so on a constant arc, one after the other until the back of the cabinet is reached.  Those valleys are then crossed perpendicularly from back to front, which creates the serried ranks of tiny pyramids. The bases of the pyramids are square at the centre of the cabinet but become progressively “parallelogrammed” the further to the edge one goes, creating a peculiar but deliciously subtle phenomenon. If the pyramidalised top surface of the cabinet is viewed from a distance to its left or right, a series of different curves down the valleys between the pyramids appear sometimes as many as four different curves. What has been discovered is the same phenomenon as viewed in the cluster of seeds in a sunflower, with its highly complex mathematical explanation, in this case stumbled across in the trial-and-error pursuit of showing off timber to its best advantage.