Brown Oak and Cherry Cabinet

This is one of the pieces we are working on at the moment.  It is a wall cabinet in brown oak with a cherry interior.  Brown oak is darker than normal oak because the tree was attacked by a fungus.  The close grained cherry makes a nice contrast in colour and texture.  The finish is shellac and wax.

The dowels sticking up from the shelf are to secure it to the vertical divider beneath.  Once the glue had dried these were cut off, then secured in the shelf with a rosewood pin driven through the centre which expands the dowel.

Shelves and Dividers

Having settled on an arrangement for the cabinet's shelves and dividers I've been sorting out their details - how the edges will be shaped, and how the shelves will interact with the vertical partitions, and with the front and back of the cabinet.  This has involved quite a lot of painstaking work using mock ups.  Often a way of shaping a shelf edge that looks right from above will look quite wrong when seen from below.  In a wall cabinet this is important because the chances are that the top shelves will be seen from below and the bottom shelves from above.  One needs to find a solution that will work both ways, while still working harmoniously with the cabinet as a whole.

The cabinet is designed as a place to store beautiful things.  Japanese homes often have a special spot called a tokonoma in which valued items are displayed, with the object on view changed seasonally.  I like this idea - ensuring as it does that ones favourite things have the attention they deserve without having to compete with each other.  Everything gets seen, but not all of the time.  The cabinet is conceived of as a place to put these special things when they are not on display.