Two curved-back armchairs in bog oak, by Andy Brownell.
Over the last year, Christopher Schwarz and I have been making our way through the last of the bog oak boule we split between us. To date, it’s been used for tables, sculpture and a bunch of chairs. As I wrap up my final two chairs from this ancient and preserved tree, Chris has been kind enough to help let the world know these two pieces are for sale.
The price is $2,800 a piece, or $5,000 for the pair, plus shipping for anyone living outside of a 150-mile radius of Cincinnati. Here’s a quick run-down on these two chairs:
They’re both made from the darkest parts of a bog oak tree sourced from M. Bohlke Lumber, originally imported from Poland. We had a sample of the tree sent to a lab for radiocarbon dating; it’s 2,175 years old. One of the chairs is exceptionally dark, almost charcoal-like in some areas.
The design is modified from the curved-back armchair from Chris’s “The Stick Chair Book” (Lost Art Press).
The most obvious design change is the addition of a medial stretcher to the leg assembly. I think this addition not only gives the chairs additional strength, it also makes them feel more grounded and balanced with the upper part of the chair. All the undercrriage parts are joined with through-tenons.
The legs are hexagons, rather than octagons, and gradually taper to round at the top.
The seat has curved sides, rather than straight ones in the original plan. I find this to be a nice visual complement to the curves in the arms.
The underside of the seat has a curved bevel with a recessed edge to make the seat appear thinner.
I’ve pinned the back ends of the arm supports to their supporting sticks for extra strength.
The backrest is made from sequential bent lamination to create a consistency in grain and color across the entire part. The curved profile is intentionally heavier towards the top.
All of the edges have a heavy roundover for maximum comfort.
For the last year I’ve been building chairs using slabs of bog oak that are 2,000 years old (according to a carbon dating test) and was harvested in Poland.
Furniture maker Andy Brownell is responsible for starting me down this path. He offered me some scraps of bog oak from one of his commission pieces. After experimenting with it and building a chair using the scraps, I was sold.
Together we bought a large chunk of a bog oak tree. It was the most I have ever spent on a single load of wood. However, don’t be freaked by that statement. Because I work almost entirely with common domestic woods that aren’t highly figured, my lumber bill has always been minimal.
This entry is about my experiences with the wood – good and bad. I’ve worked before with some older bog oak from Denmark, so I have a little perspective. But I am not an expert. Trees, like people, are individuals and are weird.
The hammer test I perform with chair parts.
Strength
My biggest concern with the bog oak was that it wasn’t strong enough to use for a chair. This is oak that has been in a peat bog for 2,000 years and is on its way to becoming petrified. After wallowing in an anaerobic environment filled with turtle poop, is it too weak?
The good news is that the tree we bought was fast-grown oak. Some of the annular rings are 3/8” apart. Fast-grown oak is typically stronger than slow-grown oak. Also, the grain was incredibly straight, except at the butt of the tree. I have never worked with wood that is this rod-straight.
I made some sample chair-sized parts – legs, stretchers, sticks and arms. Then I propped the test pieces up on 4×4 blocks and smacked them with our lump hammer. Hard. They all survived just fine. No cracking, though they dented a little more easily than modern European oak.
Because the parts passed the test, I made some chairs using the bog oak.
Working Properties
The bog oak feels a bit like plowing dirt at times, instead of slicing wood. The wood requires more effort to saw, chisel and shape than modern European oak (which I have a lot of experience with). I also feel like it is more difficult to get a finished surface, but it’s not because of tear-out. It’s because the stuff is dense and resists you.
It smells quite a bit when you cut it with electric machines. And the smell it makes is: bottomland. Mud, dirt and cod poo. But it’s not awful. The worst-smelling wood I ever used was mahogany that had been sunk in the Amazon for 200 years. When you cut it, it smelled like rotten, burning fish that had been injected right into your nose.
The smell goes away quickly. And the finished pieces have zero smell (just like normal wood).
A slab of bog oak that shows the color variation.
Color
Bog oak gets darker as it percolates in the bog. I’ve worked with 4,000-year-old stuff that is almost black. This 2,000-year-old stuff has lots of variation. The wood by the bark is nearly black. The majority of the heartwood is a chocolate brown. And some parts are tan or khaki. And you see that variation all in one board from one tree.
So you have to think about color the entire time, even though the wood comes from the same damn tree. A stick from the bark part of the tree can look radically different from a stick 3″ away.
Downsides and Defects
Wood that has been under ground/water for a long time can have some faults. I find far more structural faults with bog oak than standard European oak. Some of these splits and cracks look like the result of the wood being dried. Other cracks look much older (something killed this tree and sent it into the bog).
When ripping up the stuff, you absolutely have to pay close attention to the end grain and look for splits. Most of the splits I have found are near the pith of the tree, but I have also found some out by the bark.
I reject anything with a split for structural parts (basically all my chair parts). These pieces are fine for boxes or stuff that doesn’t support a human body, but shakes and chair parts don’t go together.
The other odd quality of the wood is that it’s not good for making wedges. I made many bog oak wedges to secure the legs and sticks of the chair. It was poor wedge material. When struck on its end grain, the bog oak was mushy and split easily. (Even though it was strong when struck 90° to the end grain – weird.)
Here you can see the color variation.
The Upside
The stuff is beautiful, even with simple finishes. I use linseed oil and beeswax, and the range of color is extraordinary, from coal black to an olive green. Plus, after five or six chairs, I have found ways to use this color shift to my advantage in the design.
All in all, the stuff is worth working with. The prices I fetch for bog oak chairs make it worth the effort. However, I wouldn’t want to work with it exclusively. It is recalcitrant. And I am always happy to start saddling a chair in modern red oak or white oak after working the boggy stuff for a couple weeks.
Where to get it? There are vendors who specialize in the stuff. I don’t have experience buying from them, so do your research. Andy and I bought our bog oak from M. Bohlke, a long-time local supplier of amazing woods.
I am almost out of bog oak. If I’m lucky, I’ll get two more chairs after this one from the stock I purchased with my friend Andy Brownell.
This seven-stick-comb-back is set up as an armchair – perfect for relaxing by the fire.
Here are some statistics: The seat tilts back 4°, and the back tilts 12° back from the seat. The seat is 17” off the floor and is 16” deep. There is 19” between the arms. The chair’s overall height is 40”. My chairs are compact but strong. If you can fit between the arms, the chair will hold you just fine.
Like all my chairs, the joints are assembled with hide glue and oak wedges, so the joints are strong but can be easily repaired by future generations. The bog oak is finished with a home-cooked linseed oil/wax finish with a small amount of natural solvent. The finish offers low protection, but it is easy to repair by the owner with no special skills or tools.
The bog oak was harvested in Poland. We paid to have it dated by radio-carbon dating and it is more than 2,000 years old. The wood in this chair varies from a dark nutty brown to a coal black.
Purchasing the Chair
This chair is being sold by silent auction. (I’m sorry but the chair cannot be shipped outside the U.S.) If you wish to buy the chair, send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Tuesday, June 20. In the email please use the subject line “Bog Oak Chair” and include your:
Bid
First name and last name
U.S. shipping address
Daytime phone number (this is for the trucking quote only)
Shipping options: You are welcome to pick up the chair here in Covington, Ky., and also get a pencil. I am happy to deliver the chair personally for free within 100 miles of Cincinnati, Ohio. Or we can ship it to you via LTL. The cost varies (especially these days), but it is usually between $300 and $550.
As a part-time furniture maker, I’ve been lucky enough to have two good things come my way by living in Cincinnati. I’m a 20-minute drive in one direction from Lost Art Press and in the other from M. Bohlke Corp., a Greater Cincinnati lumber and veneer business with just about every possible option for wood under one roof. This post is a mash-up of those two forces coming together and some furniture projects using a rare and very special boule of bog oak.
Introduction: Tree History & Terroir It’s 153 B.C. and somewhere in the region of modern-day Poland, you’re standing in a mixed decidious forest. The population of the area is a mix, and possibly has some interaction with the far reaches of the Roman Empire and the Celtic people through trade, war, sex – or some combination of all three – for hundreds of years. Signs of human occupation are everywhere: agriculture; timber-framed buildings; metalwork; ceramics; woodworking; even the forest clearcutting that comes with human occupation throughout the world. As a result, wood remains a coveted resource, whether you’re a Celt or Roman. Small, unprotected villages of a few dozen people dot the landscape, and there are signs of trade.
The iron age Przeworsk culture from this region of Poland was a material-rich society of organized farmers, and was probably an amalgam of people from other parts of Europe and beyond. The oak tree (European oak) throughout the forests was as formidable then as it is now. In Celtic culture across this region it was considered sacred, being endowed with strength, endurance and longevity.
For one European oak somewhere in the range of 150-175 years old, it’s time had come. Whether through an act of human intervention, mother nature, or from an axe blow by the Gaulish god Esus, the tree came down and was soon engulfed within a bog. It then sat ensconced within a dark, wet and silty coffin. This unique set of factors resulted in the creation of an anaerobic (low oxygen) environment, so rather than rotting and decomposing, most of its main trunk (the “first cut”) sat undisturbed in the bog for millennia.
A thumb-sized sample sent to a radiocarbon dating lab came back with an approximate age of 2,175 +/-25 years.
To make the story more interesting, I wanted to know how old this particular oak – identified as European Oak, aka Quercus robur, by M. Bohlke Corp. – was. So I sent off a small sample to a radiocarbon dating facility in Georgia. Three weeks, and $350 later, the results were in: 2,175 +/-25 years. You can see the lab facility’s report here if you want to go down the rabbit hole.
Over two millennia, the tree slowly absorbed the black ooze of the bog’s organic and inorganic matter. It filtered past the outer bark, cambium and sapwood, all the way into the heartwood of the tree. This is something akin to the process of “permineralization,” an early stage of petrification, where silicates from the soil begin to replace the organic matter of the wood. The soil’s chemistry interacts with the tannins in the oak much like they would on modern oak. But as this iron salt-rich ooze permeates the complex grain and cell structure of the European oak, the wood takes on a spectrum of color that only time can produce.
The full boule sitting at the warehouse of M. Bohlke.
Color & Material Properties The sediment absorption and the color it leaves behind is like if you were to over-filter the same coffee beans for a shot of espresso, over and over. Each cup would get subsequently weaker and weaker in both color and taste. The log is darkest on the outside and gets lighter as you go in. Going a step further with the coffee reference to describe the color of the wood, it starts out as a charcoal-black burned espresso, has hues of an olive green matcha, then into golden crema and latte. At the heart it ends up as a weak cup of Sanka with lots of creamer served up in a flimsy foam cup. The Sanka-grade material of this boule was where much of the waste came from – and it resembled flimsy foam. It also had some white fungal-/spore-looking rot in the heartwood and in some splits that caused an allergic reaction in at least one woodworker I know. Hmm…ancient white spores released into the air causing a reaction in humans: sounds like the back story to “The Last of Us.” Mask up.
The spongy, moldy, ancient spore-riddled heart of the tree.
This color spectrum appearing on the highly figured, quarter-cut pieces of the boule produced the best-looking stuff (think tabletops and seats). Other bog oak logs can take on a charcoal/burned espresso color through most of the log. There are plenty of examples online where you can see that the really dark ones are dated up to 10,000 years old. Only the outer cant of the boule I purchased has this color throughout. I presume this is based on the total amount of time the log stews in the bog, as well as the physical environment, etc. As far as color goes, I’d place this bog oak log in a class all by itself. There really is no comparison to any extant wood species out there.
Flaked grain and a full color spectrum of bog oak shown finished here on the best quartered boards.
But don’t get too caught up on those coffee metaphors, because bog oak has a few extra surprises in store for the woodworker. The bog’s organic material carries a rich mix of methane and sulfur-rich compounds. So cutting with any high-speed tool releases the funk from 153 B.C.E. A bit of rotten egg, perhaps? Chris and Megan claim a hint of turtle poop, but I wouldn’t know that scent. The piquant odor takes me back to when I was a kid living in Rhode Island, mucking through the salt flats with my brother at low tide for little necks and quahogs. The smell sticks to your nose hairs and brain, like burning hair or toast.
Of the dozens of domestic and imported wood species that I’ve worked with over the years, I’d place bog oak’s scent just below fumed eucalyptus and bubinga, but riper than teak.
In the words of Vincent Price at the end of Thriller: “And rot inside a corpse’s shell/The foulest stench is in the air/The funk of forty thousand years….”
The grain and its associated workability is in most cases similar to modern-day European Oak. This is based on my experience with this log as well as some European oak from the present that I have also used for a few projects in the last few years. For my hand and power tools, including turning, I didn’t notice anything dramatically different with this bog oak compared to other oak. I did have a few pieces that when ripped to around ¼” or less were almost malleable, like Compwood, or that foam cup I mentioned earlier.
Handplane shavings of many colors.
Right Project, Right Log Back in early 2022, I met with a prospective client, their interior decorator and the Bohlke team to look through their log inventory. The client was looking for something unique to fill the dining space of their new home, and loved the beauty and story that came along with bog oak.
The boule was about 14’ long, 35” at the base, and tapered to about 22’ at the top. Most of the 412 total board feet was cut to a generous 8/4 thick, with a few of the outer boards cut to around 5/4. This was one of a few bog oak boules available from Bohlke. While the project didn’t require the full boule, it was sold as a full boule, and I wanted to use the rest of the log for a kitchen table and chairs project later in the year.
Board selection and break-down required my full two car garage, and losing my space during the winter.
The first project I tackled was for a client’s new 116”-long dining table (extended with two “company board” leafs). I set aside about half the boule, and cherry-picked the best quartered boards with plenty of straight grain and lots of flake.
As luck would have it, I was fortunate enough to have this entire table project filmed by a local production crew, Seven/Seventy-Nine, over the course of several months. If you’re interested, you can see the entire process here in a short video called “Small Shop.” It’s worth noting that this project, particularly the grain orientation and color selection from the tabletop, served as a proof of concept for how I would lay out a second tabletop for our kitchen.
The first project I tackled with the bog oak was this 116″ long dining table.
It’s this part of the bog oak story with which most of you might be familiar. Anything this big, old and rare often comes at a premium, so I was thrilled (as was my wife) to split up part of this boule with Christopher Schwarz. Chris has spent the last year working through his portion, making a number of different chairs. Like many followers of Lost Art Press, I became envious of how amazing those chairs looked when made from such a unique material, especially the deceptively comfortable low-backs. Seeing one in person, it was love at first sight. You want to both sit in the chair and stand up and touch the shape and details.
Learning the Basics: Two Comb Back Chairs in Maple As a part-time furniture maker since 1996, I haven’t built many chairs – perhaps a dozen total. In the last few years, however, and with some encouragement from Chris and my friend and mentor Jeff Miller, I’ve really tried to get into the act. Over the last year, I’ve been learning how to make stick chairs between some of the other commission projects I’ve taken on. Like other students of the stick chair genre, this has been through a combination of LAP’s books, The Stick Chair Journal, blog posts, and some extremely helpful, in-person instruction and second opinions with Chris. My 20-minute drive to the LAP shop was particularly helpful while making my first two comb-backs out of maple. Chris talked me off the ledge and helped bail me out with a repair on an arm I split pretty badly during glue-up and assembly. It went back together with plenty of clamps and some Miller Dowels for additional mechanical bonding. I had always planned to paint the two comb backs black, so the repair is virtually invisible.
A broken arm occurred during glue up. Plenty of clamps, and reshaping, solved the problem.
Social media trolls aside, every furniture maker is their own worst critic. Looking at the two comb backs side by side, I can definitely see some of the inconsistencies and small mistakes, mainly on the rake and splay of the legs. Even with a laser to help guide my eye, I found that the most difficult part of this project was drilling straight and even holes and tapers in the seat bottoms. I found that the long shaft of the drill bit would bend and wobble slightly under pressure, and take me off track as the spade bit hogged through the maple. I’m glad I practiced on the maple before cutting into the bog oak. In the end, I applied the skills and techniques picked up while working on these two chairs, then used what I learned on four lowbacks.
My first attempt at stick chair building – far from perfect, but perfectly suitable for our home office. Plus, paint makes it all look better.
Four Low Backs I’m a perfectionist when it comes to color and grain matching of furniture parts. But making chairs from two-millennia-old wood forces you to make some compromises in the interest of using as much of the material as possible. However, even with the noble intention of not wasting any, I’ve already sent 60+ gallons of offcuts to my neighbor’s burn pile.
The lowback seats and backrests are the two primary areas that the eye goes to on these chairs, so my type-A tendencies really kicked in during this phase of the project. On the seats it was relatively easy to get a good match of grain and color, even with the high contrasts in the bog oak. These were all cut from sequential pieces of 8/4, and gave me some really smoky edges that showed off the dark rich grain from front to back, especially after being carved out.
The challenging part of grain selection with a highly contrasting wood like bog oak is most evident in creating the parts for the back rest.
I also made a three-piece arm, modeled after the version in The Stick Chair Journal No. 1, rather than a two-piece lower section, as described in “The Stick Chair Book” plans. This dramatically reduced the amount of waste for this part, and allowed me to resaw the 8/4 to make perfectly symmetrical bookmatched arms for each chair.
The backrest presented an interesting challenge, however, because the radius cuts a generous curve into the two segments that are glued up to form the back section. I went into the layout with good intentions, picking the darkest parts of the tree. But after cutting out all four backrests, I ended up with three highly varied degrees of grain and color matching. Not perfect, but I ended up justifying the result by claiming that each one has its own personality – from “creamy” to “burned.” I guess I’ll assign those to my dinner guests corresponding to their own personalities. The lesson here is don’t try to get too fancy with the back rests, and pick the most consistent color and grain possible.
Four lowback stick chairs in bog oak, arranged in order of light to dark.
Staked Table on Steroids Having made six stick chairs at this point, I wanted to apply some of the new techniques I learned to the table. I also wanted to have the chairs and table look like they were intentionally designed as a set. I love round tabletops, but don’t get many commission requests for that shape. Also, our kitchen remodel had an open floor plan, so I decided on a round top that would take up less room and make the flow from one room to the next more subtle.
The six-piece top measures 60” x 1-1/2″ thick; it came from three sequentially matched boards closest to the center of the log (for the most ray flake). I cut them in half lengthwise then arranged in a bookmatched orientation similar to the arrangement on the first dining tabletop.
Shaping a large tabletop by hand had a Sisyphean feel.
The legs are made from two laminated pieces of 1-3/4” x 3-1/2″ stock, which gave me 3-1/2” square blanks to work from. For the table legs, I opted for hexagonal legs, which gave me more visual mass from less material than the octagonal legs on the chairs. The points of the hexagon help hide the lamination lines and, after cutting the blanks, I struggled to identify where the two pieces were joined.
I took time to dial in the color and grain match for the two-piece laminated leg blanks.
After cutting the hexagonal blanks on the table saw (see The Stick Chair Journal No.1 on cutting hexagonal legs from rectangular blanks), I marked the centers on each end to lay out the tenons. Next, I turned 1-3/4”-diameter x 3-1/2”-long tenons, including a quarterround cove to mark the shoulder transition. This was essentially the same process as turning the parts on the chairs, only scaled up. Later, I also used the band saw to cut slightly thicker kerfs on the tenons in order to accommodate for the beefy wedges during glue-up. Finally, I tapered the legs on the jointer – much like how they were tapered on the chair legs, there’s just more material to remove. So by marking layout lines on the facets for the tapers, and adjusting my jointer’s fence to 30°, I was able to sneak up on the line with multiple passes. (image)
The legs with tenons, flats and coves at the transition point.
The low-profile underside of the table is made from four, 6”-wide x 1-3/4”-thick boards reinforced with solid corner blocks that accommodate for the large mortise-and-tenon joinery of the legs. The table legs have an 8° splay from the corners along the 45° axis, with ends that sit far enough in from the table edge for the chairs to be pushed in most of the way under the top. I drilled these out on my drill press with a beefy 1-¾” Forstner bit (with threaded tip, and a rudimentary 8° plywood sled to help hold the frame rails in place during drilling. (image)
I drilled the mortises at the drill press.
The other modification I made to the leg assembly was the addition of a wide, flat shoulder around the mortises to allow for the most contact possible between the shoulder of the leg and base. (image) I figured this would give the sub-assembly the best possible mechanical connection to support the weight of the tabletop. I did this by making a rudimentary router template, sloped at 8°, and used a straight bit with a bushing to make a clean, consistent cut. The flat contact between the legs and base, along with some wedges, made the glue-up and assembly go smoothly. (image)
Both the legs and table base have flat points of contact.
Leveling the table base and cutting the legs was exactly the same process as the stick chairs, minus the slope in the seat.
Finish & Final Photos For the chairs, I used two coats of Katherine’s Soft Wax 2.0. Having seen in person what this finish looked like on some of Chris’ bog oak chairs, it was an easy decision to make. For the table I needed something a bit more durable and something I’ve had consistent results with in the past. So I applied three coats of Minwax oil-based wipe-on polyurethane (satin finish), then took the sheen down after the finish was cured with a fine grey Scotch-Brite pad. I know some people will give me crap about applying a “plastic” finish to this ancient wood, but it’s what I like and it is easy to apply by hand in my small shop. For my tables, I prefer to not sweat it over a dinner guest’s sweaty glass, spilled food or hot plate. You’re free to use whatever finish you choose on your own table made from 2,000-year-old wood. (Click here to see a video of the table and chairs.)
‘It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.’ I think the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote above best summarizes my experience. And while I still have about 75bf of bog oak remaining, the many branches my journey has taken with this wood have been the best parts. I was incredibly fortunate to be able to work with ancient and rare material. This included a commission project from the start that was big enough and a client willing to use bog oak, and a local supplier where I could get the material in the first place. I went down the history/science rabbit hole of bog oak, so I learned lots of interesting new facts. With the addition of the radio-carbon dating to the story, it added some authenticity to the unique nature of these pieces. I added new skills to my woodworking repertoire, with plenty of mistakes along the way. But I got in my reps, and improved my technique across six chairs and two table projects – not to mention these builds provided a good excuse to buy some new handy tools. Sharing this experience with the Lost Art Press team reconnected me with old friends right in my own backyard. Throughout the entire journey, I’ve documented the process in photos, video and now in the written form. As a professional creative and content producer, this work makes me better at my full-time job. (Remember, woodworking is my side hustle. My full-time job is with the OneSight EssilorLuxottica Foundation.) Building these pieces has enriched my life as a creative and storyteller. It fed my natural curiosity of ongoing learning as a furniture maker and lifelong student of nature, history and science.
I have just finished this seven-stick comb-back chair, in 2,000-year-old bog oak, that is set up for dining or use as in an office. I’m offering it for sale here via silent auction. Details are below. First, some specifics on the chair.
This seven-stick chair is made from bog oak that is 2,000 years old that was excavated in Poland. The seat is 16-7/8” off the floor. The back sticks lean 9° off the seat. And the seat is pitched back about 4° off level. So this chair is nice for both dining and keyboarding. If the buyer wishes, I can trim the rear legs to increase the seat tilt. This will make the chair strike a balance between dining and relaxing.
For this chair, I pillowed the hands much like an old Welsh chair.
The chair is 39-1/4” tall. The seat is 20” wide with 19” between the arms.
All the wood is cut from one tree, but the color and texture varies throughout all the parts, which is part of the charm of this material.
All the joints are assembled with hide glue, which is easily repairable by future generations. The finish is a beeswax and linseed oil blend, which is free of toxic solvents and is also easily repairable.
The wood graduates in color from almost black to milk chocolate.
I’m selling this chair via a silent auction. To bid, send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Wednesday, March 22. In the email, please use the subject line “March chair sale” and include your name, shipping address, phone number (this is used for a trucking quote only) and your bid. There is no minimum bid, and the highest bid wins. The winner will be contacted on Wednesday after the auction closes.
On shipping: You can pick up the chair at our storefront, or I will deliver it for free within 100 miles of Cincinnati. Otherwise, I can ship it via common carrier to addresses in the continental U.S. This usually costs between $200 and $300, depending on where you live.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. The next chair will be sold via a random drawing.
The stretchers are quite low on this chair, which adds to its stability and its old look.
The seat is one single plank. The dark front edge was close to the bark of the tree.
