woodworking

  • Building Heirlooms: A Visit With Whit McLeod

    Sharon Letts had the opportunity to meet & speak with Arcata-based furnituremaker Whit McLeod recently, and The Eureka Reporter published her story on August 8, 2006:

    Whit McLeod came to Humboldt County as many have — to attend Humboldt State University.

    He
    graduated in 1976 with a degree in biology with an emphasis on wildlife
    management. Initially, he worked at Redwood Science Lab in Arcata, but
    soon found himself building wooden boats with the likes of boatwright
    David Peterson in a shop behind another wooden boat master, Ken Bates,
    on Gunther Island.

    “I started out making boxes for bottles of wine,” McLeod laughed. “Then I made the folding chair.”

    The
    folding chair is now as well known as the boxes the wine comes in, and
    is a common sight around town. Built from wine barrels, it’s a little
    folding chair for patio or beach use and it now makes up anywhere from
    40-50 percent of sales for McLeod.

    Since the chair, McLeod and
    his team of four — which includes his wife Kristy McLeod — have created
    beautiful craftsman-style furniture using the same wine barrels, as
    well as other types of reclaimed and salvaged wood. The furniture is
    made the old-fashioned way, using the mortise and tenon joint method.

    the full article is available online from The Eureka Reporter

  • Wooden Shutters by Copper Moon Woodworks

    Add to the list of things I never really thought about but now, after seeing them, desire or even need: very attractive handcrafted exterior window shutters, in a wide variety of designs and many different sizes and grades of stain. See the whole range of products on Allentown, PA-based Copper Moon Woodworks’ website.

  • Berkeley Mills in the News

    Berkeleymillsmaderakitchen

    The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran an article on one of my favorite furnituremakers, Berkeley Mills. Their Japan meets Craftsman style is instantly recognizeable and really enunciates many of the best features of each aesthetic. As seen in the photograph above, they do architectural millwork and cabinetry as well, not just furniture.

    A good friend just completed a Craftsman-style house for his family, and
    he was looking for furniture that would match its authentic style. On a
    recommendation from the Craftsman Home in Berkeley, we headed for Berkeley
    Mills, one of a small handful     of Craftsman-inspired furniture-makers in the
    United States.

    When we wandered into the showroom, I did not announce that I was a
    Chronicle contributor, or that I was a wood butcher who’d fashioned a variety     of cabinetry projects (along with dozens of houses) over the past 30 years. The
    guy on the floor approached us, discovered our interest, and promptly led us to
    a sideboard, stating in an offhand way, "This is one I built."

  • James Plachek & Berkeley

    PlacheklibrarygreenOne of the houses I grew up in is a 1917 wood-shingle quasi-bungalow at the base of the Berkeley Hills, near the Solano tunnel. The house was designed by James Plachek, who was responsible for the art-moderne Berkeley Library, Berkeley’s Heywood Building, Epworth Hall, the Grace Congregational,  and a number of other structures throughout the state, including the now-closed UC Theater (also 1917), where I worked on weekends and in the evenings after school in the late 1980s. Plachek built and remodeled a number of theaters between 1915 and 1930, including the Chimes in Oakland and the Lorin (now the Phillips Temple Church) at 3332 Adeline in Berkeley. In the mid 1930s, Plachek was focused primarily on large-scale WPA projects like the immense Moderne Alameda County Courthouse on the shore of Lake Merrit, shown here in Michele Manning‘s beautiful plein air pastel drawing.

    Before my father bought the house, the previous owners hired woodworker and light fixture designer Kip Mesirow, who made a number of alterations and improvements to Chez Panisse (in the same building where, coincidentally, my father lived as a student at UC Berkeley, before it was a restaurant) in the 1970s, and a collaborator of printmaker and illustrator David Lance Goines‘
    – to finish the attic and turn it into a beautiful, raw-redwood-wall
    master suite, a sort of mixture of rustic cathedral, nordic cabin and Japanese country house.

    Mesirow’s improvements to both my father’s house and Chez Panisse
    are a bit more Rennie Mackintosh and Wright  than Maybeck, embracing the austere
    and geometrical forms that Mackintosh loved and Wright emulated; these shapes
    repeat in much of the Chez Panisse style both in and out of the restaurant itself, most notably Goines’ many poster and cookbook designs for the restaurant and the lettering over the restaurant’s entrance. Goines even uses the Mackintosh rosette in a few of his own illustrations.

  • Sonoma Woodworks


    This is one version (vertical queen) of a neat Craftsman faux-armoire murphy bed made by Sonoma Woodworks in Sebastopol. Click on the image to see a larger picture and read the full product description.

  • Taimi Barty, furnituremaker

    Taimi3
    Swedish-born Taimi Barty‘s style is spare, a sort of modernist and Asian- and Nordic-inflused Shaker. A recent desk and chair set (here’s another similar desk by Barty, with interesting inlay) of hers has elements of classic Swedish design in the organic and slightly bowed legs and arms of the chair, and the flare in the legs of the desk – as well as an asymmetrical shape to the desk that is both Victorian and modern at the same time. Her Pillar of Drawers is as much sculpture as it is a well-designed use of vertical space, and items such as her deceptively simple wine rack show that her mind is as much on practicality as it is on aesthetic. She is part of the Mendocino Coast Furnituremakers guild/organization, and with woodworker Robert Sanderson, owner of Fort Bragg’s Sanderson Hardware, produces furniture as Wood Joint Studio.

    Taimi studied engineering at Harcard and Radcliffe, and after a few years "cleaning up petroleum hydrocarbons" in San Francisco, she began a course of study in the Fine Woodworking Program at the College of the Redwoods. She and Sanderson both studied there under the great James Krenov.

  • Free Woodworking Plans

    The web may be the antithesis of the Craftsman ideal – chaotic, full of junk, hard to navigate, inconsistent, and hardly workmanlike – it does contain endless excellent references for woodworkers engaging in their own attempts at craftsmanship. Using the collaborative social bookmarking experiment Delicious, I’ve found plenty of plans and other useful resources – some for beginners and other for more advanced woodworkers – that will be helpful to people contemplating Arts & Crafts-style furniturebuilding. While there are plenty of plans for sale out there, I’m focusing here only on those that are available for free: