Suzanne Ellison knows I have a chair problem. So she destroyed my Sunday morning by passing me this link to Norimitsu Takahashi’s web site: Nori Art Handicrafts.
The builder makes lots of miniatures, which is amazing in and of itself. But many of the miniatures are chairs. Very, very nice chairs – many of which I have been studying myself.
Check out this amazing Klismos. One of the many chairs on my short list. Or, this Borge Morgensen Hunting Chair, which I am resisting all efforts to build so I can edit books. I have Morgensen’s scale drawing of the chair and enough leather. Grrr.
All of the chairs are on this page. Clicking through on each chair will show you some detail photos of the objects. Beautiful work.
— Christopher Schwarz
The Klismos chair is certainly beautiful. I question if a full size useable chair like this would be able to take the normal loads a chair must take without significant structural modification like laminating and beefing up the legs. Would be an interesting project to experiment with.
Seems like the Klismos is almost a required candidate for Furniture of Necessity, being that it looks like the Greeks made pretty good use of it.
Yep. That is an awesome little site. The Japanese are crazy for mid century and Wegner stuff.
>
At $4.6k to $16k (for the Hunting Chair), if my wife liked them, I’d be making one too! Looking at it though, I just can’t envision that as a house – or lodge – chair, without it being able to fold/collapse on itself, per BM’s mentor, Kaare Klint, and the Roorkee it descends from.
Neat chairs, though!
Nori’s website is just unfair.
Great, nothing productive will be done today!
Chris! Where did you get scale drawings of Morgensen’s work? I’ve been planning to build both the hunting and Spanish chairs, but have only been cobbling together info (very little of it sadly)… and I haven’t been able to see the chairs in-the-wood as yet either.
To be clear, the scale drawings are not construction drawings. No hidden joinery is drawn.
Both chairs are shown in 1:10 scale in “Furniture Designed by Borge Mogensen” (Möbler tegnet af Börge Mogensen) by Arne Karlsen. (Danish Architectural Press, 1968). I got my copy at Abebooks.com, but it was expensive. Your best bet will be inter-library loan unless you were born with three kidneys.
Do you think these could be built in two sides with the spindles connecting them built like the Roorkee chair? By this I mean unglued conical mortices/tenons so the chair is held together by the tension on the back and seat? They look like they could and then be broken down into two half, but the images on the production models look to have wedged tenons leading me to believe those are permanent.
You are correct that the chairs are not knockdown pieces.
The primary challenge with the scheme you propose is that side frames aren’t very thick. So you won’t have the deep conical mortise of a Roorkee. But this is just a hunch. You don’t know unless you try.
I may have to try then. I would plan to make the sides a little thicker and (gasp) may make a sample out of laminated sheet goods and just cut out the side shapes out of an 1 1/2 in piece and then make the spindles. If that holds up, could try with 6/4 stock and try and make the real thing.