Marcus Sly - Furniture Making and Design

I was recently looking again at an old dresser that used to live in the dining room of my Grandmother's house. It is big, heavy and made of oak, and is probably about two hundred years old. I suspect that all of us have some vivid memories of objects that used to fascinate us as children, and this dresser was one of mine. I was intrigued its size, by its feeling of antiquity, by the way it smelled, and the excitement of exploring all its drawers and hidden spaces. Also it was just generally a very pleasing thing - attractive, solid and well proportioned.

So there I was looking again at this dresser, but this time with the more discriminating eye of one who makes furniture for a living. I was fascinated by how roughly it was put together in many ways, and how inaccurate the measurements and angles were. But the interesting thing is that in previous years of looking at this much valued object, I had never once noticed the imperfections, although I was very aware of the effect of life and personality which came with them.

There may be lesson here for the modern cabinet maker when we become obsessed with accuracy and precision. Of course there is a place and need for these things sometimes. Often however the objects we love the best (and what are we doing if not making things for people to love?) are not perfect - and it is this lack of perfection, if handled sensitively by the maker, which constitutes their character. In the past, when there was not the help of super-accurate machines, it was often not possible to make things that were technically perfect in a commercially realistic time frame - if at all. Part of the skill of a joiner was balancing up and accommodating those imperfections so that the whole still looked "right" and harmonious. In the process, things were produced which, even if copies of one another, each had their individual character. For me, one of the attractions of working by hand as much as possible is that sometimes it forces us to confront the unavoidability of imperfection - and through skill and judgment, to transcend it.