This Irish-inspired stick chair is built specifically for reading and relaxing. With a back that is pitched at 28°, a seat that tilts back at 4° and the sweeping curved backrest, this is one of the most comfortable wooden chairs I make.
The seat is 16” off the floor, which is 2” lower than a chair for keyboarding, though I don’t find the chair difficult to get out of. The overall height of the chair is 31”.
The chair is made from European oak (grown in Germany), which has an oranger tone than American oaks. The seat is a single board of oak, which was the most challenging saddling job I’ve had since I saddled a seat in dry elm. This chair is finished with three coats of super blonde shellac. The chair is assembled with hide glue, which means it will be easy to repair by future generations.
The design is inspired by the Irish chairs I inspected during a trip to the island a few years ago. Lucy and I visited numerous museums and private collections, and measured many examples. Like stick chairs in England, Wales and Scotland, Irish vernacular chairs were made using readily available materials with many ingenious touches of “made do.”
This chair had its challenges. I had only a small amount of European oak, and I struggled to get all the parts out of the boards on hand – and get the color and grain looking good. Surprisingly, it turned out OK.
Purchasing the Chair
This chair is being sold via random drawing. The price is $1,500. (I’m sorry but the chair cannot be shipped outside the U.S.) If you wish to buy the chair, please send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Friday, April 15. In the email please use the subject line “Irish Chair” and include your:
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 free yardstick. 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 $200 and $300.
Krenov (1920-2009) was one of the most influential woodworking writers, instructors and designers of the 20th century. His best-selling books – starting with “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” – inspired tens of thousands of people to pick up the tools and build things to the highest standard.
Yet, little is known about his life, except for a few details mentioned in his books.
After years of research and more than 150 interviews, Gaffney has produced the first and definitive biography of Krenov, featuring historical documents, press clippings and hundreds of historical photographs. Gaffney traces Krenov’s life from his birth in a small village in far-flung Russia, to China, Seattle, Alaska, Sweden and finally to Northern California where he founded the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program (now The Krenov School).
“James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints” brims with the details of Krenov’s life that, until now, were known only to close friends and family. The book begins by examining the noble origins of Krenov’s mother in Russia, and her flight into the wilderness during the country’s revolution. After Krenov is born among the Chukchi at a trade outpost, the Krenovs flee to Shanghai and then the United States. After time in Alaska and Seattle, Krenov heads to Sweden where he works in a factory and tries to get his writing published.
By the 1990s, the students who were coming through the school were, like the wider public, most familiar with the work that Krenov had published. But in the subsequent decades since the publications of his books, Krenov’s work had continued to evolve, and he began pursuing pieces that had features that were novel and outside his previous work. Hjorth-Westh remembered that some of Krenov’s work during his school years pushed Krenov’s own aesthetics to a new place. While his output was exclusively free-standing cabinets, most of which took the cabinet on a stand form, the early 1990s saw the introduction of a number of new techniques into his work, due in part to the exchange of ideas and inspirations he had with students and colleagues at the school. In 1991, Krenov put a small wall cabinet with a painted interior, the “Spalted V-Front Wall Cabinet,” in the 10th anniversary show at Pritam & Eames. The use of paint was a shock to many of his students, though he had used paint on the interior of two other cabinets, the “Bits of Maple Wall Cabinet” in 1962 and the “Birdseye V-Front Wall Cabinet” made in 1972. He also began exploring the use of large laminated panels inside his cabinets, accentuating their unique division of the internal space by placing glass doors on all sides of the cabinet.
A defining example of Krenov’s late explorations of technique was a series of parquetry cabinets, in which he explored a painterly composition of shop-sawn veneers. He made the first of these cabinets in 1993, and took advantage of the emptying out of the classroom at the end of the school year to spread his freshly sawn walnut veneers across several of the benches. Interestingly, the pieces may have found their strongest influence from a series of linen presses Carl Malmsten had executed nearly 50 years earlier. Malmsten’s furniture designs often featured abstract and geometric arrangements of parquetry, and even used walnut veneers in their execution. After this first walnut cabinet, Krenov continued to include parquetry as a central feature in a number of pieces, including “Fire and Smoke,” a rare “titled” cabinet Krenov made with pear and alarice woods in 1994 that found its way to Pritam & Eames. He hinted at this willingness to experiment in his essays published in “With Wakened Hands” in 2000, the book he was working to produce throughout the 1990s to showcase both his and his students’ work.
Krenov’s pear and alarice “Fire and Smoke” cabinet, completed in 1994. At 74, Krenov was still experimenting with new ideas. Photo by David Welter.
“I work fairly well, seeing how I have to overcome the arthritis in my right hand,” Krenov wrote. “I am able to work in a way that pleases me, that fills me with a purpose and with a certain secret satisfaction I enjoy sharing with my students … These last few years I have found a new freedom to experiment and do things I have never before dared.”
These parquetry cabinets came to be a favorite among many of Krenov’s admirers, for their deft application of Krenov’s composition skills with wood grain. The use of veneers allowed Krenov the freedom to compose much more complex or rich grain figures. Brain Newell, who saw these pieces come together, recalls that they represented a moment of continuing innovation and exploration.
“The work shows me that one can be dynamic and innovative within a very narrow framework, and that reinventing the wheel in furniture is a game of diminishing returns,” Newell recalls. “Krenov kept his simple, straight forms and let the wood do the talking, and in this sense he remained true to his lifelong philosophy.”
After the painted wall cabinet from 1991, Krenov ceased making any form outside his freestanding cabinets on a stand, though the variety within that format was significant. By the 1990s, Krenov was unburdened by specific demands of his work; those pieces that were not speculative (undertaken completely at his own will and not for an intended customer) were commissioned by an audience that was happy to let the cabinetmaker make whatever pieces he was interested in making. Many such commissions were subject to some short correspondence, in which Krenov might solicit some vague guidance from the client.
Krenov presents his “Oak Parquetry” cabinet to the class in October 1997. This was the second smaller parquetry cabinet to be made on a stand, rather than a larger base cabinet. Each new cabinet was a chance to play with the forms and techniques that had piqued his interest. Photo by David Welter.
“You indicated that sometimes a ‘hint,’ left gently in the wake of a former conversation, would revisit your mind’s eye while you were forming a piece, and you would find yourself creating a work that fit someone’s particular visitation,” one client wrote in 1992, accompanied by photos of a treasured set of cordial glasses the client hoped to store in the cabinet.
Krenov was, as always, more concerned with finding the right clients for his limited output than he was with receiving payment for his work. Where his contemporaries such as Wendell Castle were moving their prices into the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars via fine art galleries and exhibitions (while also employing techniques and assistants that allowed for a much larger output from their studios), Krenov was still charging just a few thousand dollars for his pieces, each of which took him somewhere between two and five months to complete. As always, Krenov’s lack of financial drive was rooted not only in his principles but the regular, though modest, income from other sources. Where in Sweden he had been supported by Britta and the artist’s stipends from the Swedish government, in his later years his income from the books, his salary from the school and Britta’s pension from Sweden (which she continued receiving, having been careful not to lose her Swedish citizenship) sustained the Krenovs’ comfortable and small lifestyle. The Krenovs’ modest two-bedroom home on Forest Lane was not the manse that some of his contemporaries built for themselves in their retirement. Tina Krenov recalls having to help her parents rebuff a photographer who wanted to photograph their home for a book about the dwellings of artists. Tina found herself explaining that her parents’ home was not a showpiece but a modest arrangement that suited their quiet life.
After exclusively showing at Pritam & Eames through the 1980s and most of the 1990s, Krenov found a second gallery in which he showed some of his work in the late 1990s, a move precipitated by the hassle and risk of shipping his delicate work across the continent. In February 1997, Krenov delivered a lecture at the grand opening of Misugi Designs, a furniture gallery and Japanese tool and materials importer opened by Kayoko Kuroiwa in Berkeley. Kuroiwa had worked for a number of years as an importer of fine Japanese tools and hardware for Hida Tools, a store that Krenov had begun ordering his saws and chisels from decades earlier. The new gallery, not far from her former employer, was intended as a hybrid space of sorts, one that both catered to a clientele of woodworkers with goods from Japan but also displayed the work of Northern California craftspeople. Krenov’s presence at the opening served to drive a significant amount of attention to the gallery when it opened, and attendance at the opening was significant. But Ejler Hjorth-Westh noted that the attendees were largely woodworkers and craftspeople, and not necessarily the wider public audience that could support the gallery aspect of the store.
One of the last of Krenov’s cabinets that focused on parquetry composition, completed in July 1999. This cabinet revisited his 1993 “Walnut Parquetry” cabinet [at the top of this excerpt], this time with a different board with less contrasting grain. The resulting graphics dictated a new layout and resulted in a different effect than the earlier piece. Photo by David Welter.
In the first year of showing furniture, Misugi Designs featured the work of several of Krenov’s students from the school. Hjorth-Westh noted that Kuroiwa was enamored with the work being done at the school, and saw “an almost spiritual connection with the Japanese philosophy of simplicity,” which Hjorth-Westh noted was also apparent in much of the Scandinavian furniture by which Krenov had been deeply influenced. Hjorth-Westh and a number of other recent graduates from Krenov’s school were in the opening show, and continued to show their work at the gallery in the next several years. Krenov sold the first piece he exhibited in the show, his last glass-door showcase cabinet, soon after the opening. This sale was, however, to one of his students, and the gallery’s effectiveness was impacted by a lack of promotion and publicity.
Misugi Designs operated for a decade after its opening in 1997, but its business shifted to selling Japanese hardware, materials and tools early in the 2000s. Krenov’s relationship with the gallery was short-lived. He never completely cut off his relationship with Pritam & Eames, and after showing a few pieces in Misugi he moved to largely selling his work that didn’t go to Pritam & Eames more directly, to visiting customers and friends.
Through his time at the school, Krenov often championed and featured the work of his students in lectures and presentations outside the community. Alan Peters noted that when Krenov presented in London, his slides had included a significant number of student pieces. A record of his presentation in Japan notes that his lecture focused “primarily on his students’ fine works.” He was also an advocate for his students’ work to be shown alongside his own. Krenov’s aim for the program was not designed to prepare students for a career, but starting in the 1990s, he began hoping to be able to connect his students with an appreciative public.
A pair of Ejler Hjorth-Westh’s chairs in the showroom of Misugi Designs. Several students showed their work at Misugi while it functioned as a gallery, though Hjorth-Westh noted that, early on, it seemed the gallery was having trouble attracting the right clientele. Photo by Glenn Gordon.
“I worry about these young people,” Krenov told Bebe and Warren Johnson in 1991. “I have this one last task: to build a bridge between fine workmanship done by generous, sincere, and responsible people who have a sense of adventure in their work, and the relatively small but very durable public that must be out there.”
On top of Krenov’s promotion of student work, in 2000 he had a chance to lend his writing to a student from 15 years earlier. David Finck, a student from the classes of ’85 and ’86, published “Making & Mastering Wood Planes,” which expanded on Krenov’s own approach to making his now-signature style of handplane. Krenov lent his own effort to the book’s publication, writing a short foreword to the book that detailed his decades of experience with making and adapting the tool to his approach. While the book was not Krenov’s, it served as another indication of a more material influence of his on the craft: the self-sufficiency and sensitivity that came with the creation of one’s own tools. Krenov’s approach to making the planes had always been, in his eyes, a first step in a sensitive approach to woodworking.
A recent plane made by David Finck, with a high bed angle aimed at tackling difficult grain, like those in violin fingerboards. Finck largely works as a luthier, though he continues to make and use wooden planes in Krenov’s style, which he described in his book. Photo by David Finck.
“Really, my simple message is that if you’re going to approach woodworking with sensitivity and maybe refinement, planes are a good way to begin,” Krenov wrote in his foreword. “They’re a start to improving the rest of your tools that need improving. After all, the hand plane is the first part of the woodworker’s aria. And what I’d like to see happen, through this book that David has written, is for you to make a plane or planes that will, in turn, make fine music.”
The following is excerpted from “Honest Labour.”This column was first published in The Woodworker in 1949 – please excuse the gendered terms as a product of their time.
Woodworkers deal in the very kindest of materials, the friendly, living wood. I think there can hardly have been a time when men were not tree lovers, for even if we go right back to the time when cave men piled brushwood on their fires to scare away prowling beasts, the living trees had always something to offer man. It is almost as if some sense of kinship, some sense of “mystery in the trees,” comes to us when we view sturdy trunks bearing witness to lives which long outlast our brief span bearing on them the scars of their own struggle for existence and hidden in their innermost being the life rings which make up the tally of the years. Not without awe does one see them when a tree has been felled and its life secret is bared as we count the annual rings. Two hundred? Why this tree was a slim sapling when Dr. Johnson was rising to fame in the literary world of the eighteenth century, when the Stewart cause was going down in final defeat at Culloden Moor and North America was still only a little group of English Colonies contested with the French. And here in this wide ring was a good year in which the tree grew apace, and here was a wild, cold, hard year when life was a battle for survival and growth was slow, a year which toughened the limbs and sent roots digging down deeply into the soil to keep the tree in heart.
•••
No wonder trees are an ever-recurring theme in literature and art, especially in English literature and art, because here in this miniature land of ours they have a character and individuality which are one with the landscape and yet help to give it an infinite variety. So many trees, those which are native—the oak, the ash, the thorn, beloved of Kipling, the yew of churchyards that bred the mighty bow of Agincourt, the poplars and their “whispering, cool colonnade,” the beech for restful shade and the turned bowl; and those others, imported through the centuries till now they seem at home on our soil as on their own familiar ground—the plane trees which have become such a typical feature of London, the walnut, originally a native of the far Himalayas, the lovely, symmetrical horse chestnut which in the springtime gladdens the eyes of suburban dwellers with its flame-like blossom, the larches and the firs in dreaming blue copses—all have something to give. No wonder that our two great countrymen painters, John Constable and John Crome, responded with such wonderfully intimate studies of trees. No hazy splashes of colour for them, but careful, loving work showing the trees in their own individual character, growth and structure, so that at once one may know them for what they are, elms, poplars, willows, oaks, rejoicing in the light and air, with the wind whispering through their branches.
•••
In one of Hardy’s novels, The Woodlanders, an old man becomes ill through fear of a tree which stands outside his cottage and which, in his sick fancy, he sees threatening him. It was planted on the day he was born, he says, and has human sense and has grown up to rule him and make a slave of him. When reasoning fails, his doctor orders the tree to be cut down, unknown to the sick man, and the elm of the same birth year as the old woodman is brought to the ground as silently as skilful hands can contrive it. But the next morning, when the old man sees the vacant patch of sky where once the lattice of the tree had been he has a stroke and, after lingering all day, dies as the sun goes down. “Damned if my remedy hasn’t killed him,” murmurs the doctor. Although mercifully one need not anticipate quite such devastating results from a tree felling, to see a mighty tree brought low by the woodman’s axe does induce a feeling of regretful sadness. Here was a living sentient thing which could, if we are to believe the poets and our own imaginations, take pleasure in the sun and rain and the life it lived. And now this is the end.
•••
But is it really so? Isn’t the life that is ended only one part of the story? Rather it means that new life is beginning, one which will take a new direction in house or ship or barn or fence. Maybe a century or more of growth has formed the oak which has gone into our gateposts, and they may still be standing when we ourselves are no more. It is a humbling thought, and yet because there is so strange a parallel between man’s life and the life of a tree there is comfort in it too. So often in life we feel that everything for us is over when plans we made and rejoiced in have been axed at the root. But it may be something which only seems the end and is a beginning, opening up new, unlooked-for possibilities at present hidden from us. There is much more of a pattern in life than we are often ready to credit, it unfolds so slowly. That is what makes youth so difficult a time. If its joys are keen, so are its sorrows. For youth cannot abide frustration and takes it so hardly when plans go awry. But if we will but possess our souls in patience, opportunity comes again in full cycle, not the less because it comes along unexpected paths. It is something the woodworker will understand better than most. He knows the living wood, knows how generously it gives in the patient hands of a craftsman, and that the real end comes only with decay. Life is not always a woodland dream, but it has its moments. And if we keep our belief in it to the end, some of them will be great moments.
Cross shakes. A piece of sapele with transverse shakes. These may be the result of improper drying resulting in honeycombing, but they might also be the result of natural cross shakes. In this case, I wasn’t able to come to a definite decision when the fault revealed itself during normal wood machining. Whatever the cause, the whole board went into the scrap pile and became firewood.
The following is excerpted from “Cut & Dried,” by Richard Jones.
Richard has spent his entire life as a professional woodworker and has dedicated himself to researching the technical details of wood in great depth, this material being the woodworker’s most important resource. The result is “Cut & Dried: A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology.” In this book, Richard explores every aspect of the tree and its wood, from how it grows to how it is then cut, dried and delivered to your workshop.
Richard explores many of the things that can go right or wrong in the delicate process of felling trees, converting them into boards, and drying those boards ready to make fine furniture and other wooden structures. He helps you identify problems you might be having with your lumber and – when possible – the ways to fix the problem or avoid it in the future.
“Cut & Dried” is a massive text that covers the big picture (is forestry good?) and the tiniest details (what is that fungus attacking my stock?). And Richard offers precise descriptions throughout that demanding woodworkers need to know in order to do demanding work.
The main drying faults in planks or boards are: distortion or warping that are the result of shrinkage in the grain; plus the internal checking, surface checking and end splitting caused by shrinkage where all these faults may be exacerbated by drying processes. The following faults are entirely drying faults: collapse (aka core collapse in North America), shell set in oversize condition, honeycombing, case-hardening and the very rare reverse case-hardening.
Another drying fault sometimes apparent is discolouration of the wood. One discolouration, sticker stain, has already been discussed in section 8.3. Additional drying-induced discolouration of wood is discussed in section 9.2.
The causes of distortion or warping are discussed in section 7.4, but the natural warping of wood due to moisture loss and aggressive drying, whether in a kiln or air dried, may magnify the distortion.
With reference to figure 9.1, at the beginning of the drying process wet wood is not under undue stress. It is only as it dries that stresses begin to develop. At the beginning of the drying process all the cell lumen are full of liquid, or at least partially filled and, most importantly, the cell walls show no significant sign of stress-inducing shrinkage. It’s not until free water in any cell in the wood has gone and the bound water in the cell walls and the cavities begins to leave that shrinkage starts. It’s counterintuitive but drying faults such as surface checking and honeycombing develop at high wood moisture content, but the following discussion explains this phenomenon.
At the beginning of the drying process water is first lost through the ends of a board where the end grain is exposed, and from the fibres near the board’s surface. The 12″ to 16″ (300 mm to 400 mm) at each end of a board exchange water vapour faster through the relatively porous end grain than the board edges and faces. As wood dries, a moisture gradient develops. If the wood is dried quickly with high heat and fast-moving air, a steep moisture gradient forms. If we take as an example wet wood, e.g., at an average 50 percent MC, and subject it to high heat, this causes moisture at the surface to rapidly evaporate out of the cavities and the cellular structure. The tissue below the surface or shell is still at an average 50 percent MC and also still cool. But the situation changes quickly as the now drier and warm shell transmits heat toward the centre of the wood through the intermediate zone. The additional warmth affecting the intermediate zone encourages moisture movement toward the now drier shell. In turn, the intermediate zone transmits heat toward the core of the wood and moisture starts moving from the core to the intermediate zone, and on outward toward the shell and out of the wood. It’s not difficult to see, having just described the mechanics of drying how, for example, surface checking develops whilst wood still has a high average moisture content.
All these different zones at different moisture contents create the moisture gradient within the wood. A steep moisture gradient means the wood is drying very quickly. For instance, extremely rapid drying occurs in the oven-drying test used to determine moisture content. In this case the samples are small and there is a large surface area (particularly end grain exposure) to volume ratio, letting the moisture out relatively easily. But you could put a piece of green wood 20″ long x 8″ wide x 4″ thick (500 mm x 210 mm x 105 mm) in a large-enough oven and start drying it in the same way. Now the surface-area-to-volume ratio is small compared to the small samples used in oven drying to determine moisture content. The rapid drying of a large piece of wood causes a steep moisture gradient that puts large stresses on it. The surface dries quickly, but the moisture in the cells in the intermediate zone and the core can’t escape fast enough to prevent tension and compression stresses developing in the board.
Figure 9.1. Flow chart of drying stages and potential drying faults.
On the other hand, if you put the same piece of green 20″ x 8″ x 4″ wood in a sealed plastic bag it will barely dry at all. Even keeping the bagged piece of wood in a warm room where heat transfers to the wood and causes the moisture in the shell to evaporate, there’s nowhere for the moisture to go once the air in the bag reaches 100 percent RH. In all likelihood leaving a piece of wood encased in a plastic bag like this for a couple of weeks in warm conditions would result in a fuzz of mould developing. But, importantly, from our point of view of discussing moisture gradients, this piece of wood would exhibit a shallow moisture gradient. Shallow moisture gradients don’t put much stress on the wood, but the problem from a timber or lumber dryer’s point of view with shallow moisture gradients and slow drying is twofold: firstly, stock turning over too slowly to make any profit; secondly, serious disfiguring mould development, which is less likely when wood is dried faster.
Tension stresses are “ripping apart” forces. Compression stresses are “crushing forces.” To dry wood quickly in a kiln requires getting the balance right between tension and compression forces induced by the movement of moisture out of the wood. Get the balance right and the wood comes out of the kiln stress free, or near-enough stress free. Get them wrong and the faults depicted in figure 9.1 reveal themselves.
