Rising furntiure, cleverly designed, simple, elegant and functional. Robert Van Embricqs focuses on combining functionality with an esthetically pleasing look, this is flexible furniture that reverts to its basic form. A collection that can be stored completely flat when not in use. Robert starts out by making small incisions in a flat surface and studies the otherwise rigid wood’s reaction to the new shape. When it comes to…
The innovative talents of David Roentgen and his inventive European furniture making. This work features finely worked marquetry panels combined with ingenious mechanisms using weights and springs, which with just the press of a button or turn of a key can activate the opening of adjacent doors, popping-out of drawers, hidden niches and secret mirrors. These objects seem almost to turn themselves inside out. Furniture as art is…
Economists would have you believe this is no time for launching risky new ventures. As for a venture founded on manufacturing techniques similar to those used before the Industrial Revolution, you’d be forgiven for thinking that sounds more than a little ‘risky’. But that’s just what Richard Maguire’s up to with his budding woodwork business, and he isn’t phased whatsoever by the current spate of pessimistic…
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Bold new venture
This past couple of years has seen Richard take to the workshop as a full time occupation, building furniture to order for all sorts of clients – some even prepared to pay well. More recently though, the bulk of workshop time has been dedicated to a new venture: making some of the finest woodworking benches around. Richard has chosen to concentrate on two classic designs, the Dominy…
The Old Grammar School, Blowinghouse Hill, Redruth. In a county like Cornwall — famous for its broken-toothed mine workings and the heavy brows of its granite cliffs long before the modern surf culture washed ashore — a name like Blowinghouse Hill conjures a picture all of its own, doesn’t it? Stern, institutional, crumbling and paint-peeling, the Old Grammar School is what Vivian Stanshall would have called ‘Miss…
We’re on the cliffs above Blackgang Chine on the Isle of Wight. Behind us, to the north, the skies are bruised and heavy with the threat of approaching rain. But before us, the glass top of a table — part-silvered by the autumn sun — reflects the passage of billowing clouds as they catch the wind in their huge sails and trail their shadows southwards over the mirrored sea, over the horizon, and over the edge of the glass.…
John Brown died in his sleep on the morning of 1st June 2008. John Brown was a maker of Welsh stick chairs, as well as a teacher and author. His book on Windsor chairs is, I believe, out of print although it is to be found here and there for stratospheric sums of money.
The world of woodworking is full of colourful characters, but John Brown stands out as one of the most unique. Often controversial, he was regarded as something of a Luddite by many fellow woodworkers for his loathing of power tools and modern woodworking machinery. In fact, his monthly column in Good Woodworking probably generated more letters from readers than anyone before or since. As a champion of hand tools, he had little time for…
Here John Brown tells of the very moment his career in chairmaking sparked into life. Along the way, in what would be typical JB style, he throws in a disparaging assessment on woodturning. In its life his column generated more readers’ letters than any other subject!
Below: Back in 1997, John Brown sculpts a bow arm using a rasp. Note that he does so using an engineer’s vice
I have written in my book, Welsh Stick Chairs,…
By appearances and background, the John Brown that Good Woodworking knew was a late-middle aged, middleclass gentleman. Yet in spirit he was a selfconfessed hippy. This treatise on practise and dedication again helps us to understand his approach to woodworking.
Right: John Brown allowed himself only the one machine – an ancient bandsaw. Typically it lived outside under a tarpaulin taking power off a tractor!
The last two years of…
One of JB’s favourite subjects was hand tools – or rather the advantages of hand tools over machines. Of course he had a holistic approach to the matter.
My grandmother had y a theory that the heartbeat hadn’t altered since time began, and that the pace of life should be regulated by that fact. Even 50 years ago she could not understand what all the rush was about. She used to tell me that most of life’s ills were…
There is little question here that John Brown found an inner peace in chairmaking and we dare say he enjoyed a level of happiness in his work that few truly find. His column in early 2001 championed woodworking for beating stress. And while his copy offered a typically eclectic mix of anecdote and empiricism, it was in a small aside titled ‘A chairmaker’s notes’ that John Brown revealed (not for the first time) his tactile if…