Staley Lumber, as I remember it from my boyhood, was located just outside of town flanked on one side by railroad tracks and Illinois cornfields and on the other side by old Route 10 and more cornfields. Staley's sold everything from barbed wire to hip boots to cattle feed, coal, miscellaneous hardware, lumber for the local builders, like my father, and hardwoods. These hardwoods are what brought my grandfather, a furnituremaker, into Staley's and, unlike my father, he would sometimes linger for half the morning before finally leaving with only a half dozen boards in the back of the truck. What they offered at Staley's was a basic inventory of oak, maple, birch, mahogany, a little walnut, and, for my grandfather, a longtime preferred customer, a standing preserve of American black cherry that arrived every few months by special order and was kept bound and tagged in its own particular bin. I don't suppose that even if they had offered the widest selection imaginable of both native and exotic hardwoods that it would have made any difference to my grandfather. The look of his work fell somewhere between a Shaker and Mission style, and seemed to demand the use of certain elements in a way that Kentucky railed fences demanded white paint. Today, however, when furniture design is seemingly without limits or restrictions, the decision of which woods to use is never so simple. It becomes a process for the non-production furnituremaker that must recur with each new piece. In this article I'll explore how this process of matching materials with designs occurred with my trestle table, a process that can be as ambiguous and indeterminate as matching a tie to a suit. With the preliminary drawings of any piece of original furniture, and particularly my trestle table, the beginnings of a design come almost simultaneously with the decision of what materials to use. This piece began with only a vague notion of a trestle-type legwork that would, at first glance, appear bottom-heavy with the accumulation of visible details in the base. The top surface slab would appear simple, without much detail, but by its sheer expanse demand the same attention as the supporting base. So whatever wood the top was made of, it should not be too eye-catching in itself so as not to upset the balance between top and base. I needed an absence of color, an extremely light, or dark, wood, and possibly both. The lines of a basic trestle design are simple and a stark contrast might help prevent the details from being lost in their surroundings. I decided on through mortises for the legs, along with exposed tenons. To highlight these details, the decision to go with contrasting woods was firmly made.At this point, (Text continued below)

Photo by Robert Bruce Duncan.

Woodwork --------Winter 1989 ----------------------------pg 39

KADELL DRESSER & MIRROR: Analined maple and padouk. This dresser was the sixth piece in a seven-piece commissioned bedroom set, in which I discovered the advantages and limitations of water-based analine dye. The drawer pulls were fashioned from a pattern and template guide on the router, carrying over a similar detail used on the headboard of the bed. On completion, the dresser seemed somehow unfinished, and with the client's approval, I designed an accompanying mirror.

CHERRY WRITING DESK: American black cherry and wenge. I anticipated a sandwiched carcass with a slight, almost brittle look to the legwork--an inconsequentially simple piece whose defining features rested entirely on the success or failure of the drawer face.

only a few sketches along, it seemed clear that any earth-tone woods would be ruled out. I had deveoped a rolled, sandwiched edge to the top's perimeter and although the basic trestle design was rooted in the past, this new detail quickly set a contemporary precedent. Any woods that might be associated with the original trestle look (oak, cherry, pine) would only generate comparison and what we'll call a "conflict of generations." In other words, plant the design in its origins but move it far enough away so that it stands aone.

I considered the dark, straight grain of peruvian walnut for the wedges and inlay details, onto first maple, then birch, then satinwood, then discarded them all turned to the walnut as the primary wood for the table with the lighter woods for the details. It worked, and, for the first time, I was able to envision the piece in my mind, an asset that allowed me to begin filling in the gaps with the legwork. This is the part of any design which I enjoy the most; the basic framework has been laid, the structural needs have been met, and all that remained was the fine tuning, the missing links that would compliment what already existed. Oddly enough, this is normally done away from the drawing board, in the early morning before the workday begins, or evenings, under the guise of walking the dog, or even, alas, in the midst of a conversation with my wife.

Meanwhile there was a problem with the walnut, namely its availability. I could find little, and ordering stock could take months, an inconvenience at best. By this time I was considering adding my own color the wood, a viable alternative that had me suddenly considering a range of colors offerred by analine dyes. It was intoxicating (I could have Fire Truck Red with Lemon Yellow highlights). My experience with analines in the past had been favorable, and there were certain advantages. I could go with a less expensive and more easily obtainable wood such as maple, and produce the near black pigment I had in mind. It also had its disadvatages; the flakes themselves were expensive; the application was time-consuming; and it would be impossible to lay in my lighter highlights over an already dyed surface, for to sand them flush would discolor the surrounding wood (the idea of touching up with a fine brush seemed a little ridiculous). I had by this time completed the surface design, calling for an eighth-inch spline along the breadboard joint. This detail, along with the pattern of laid-in splines for each exposed tenon on the legs, worked to overrule any notion of the dyes. And yet by this time a new candidate had surfaced, a wood of ineffable beauty that would cause me more trouble than I could have imagined, because its working properties were somewhere between white oak and granite.

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