Friday, June 27, 2014

Designing a Mission influenced living room chair

I had a client approach me a couple of weeks ago asking whether I could build her a living room chair in a 'sort of' Mission style like the Morris chair but different. She had a catalog with a picture of a couch in which she wanted some of the style/features incorporated and she had a piece of existing furniture that she also felt needed to be used in influencing the design / finishing touches. Trying to word how she put it.. sort of "feminizing" the Mission style a bit by adding more curved elements to the style.

I modeled it in SketchUp last weekend and incorporated some of her feedback on that into a final model. Currently the model doesn't include any of the joinery but for the most part it will be standard mortise and tenon joints with the exception that there will be no through mortises on the arms. Here are some of the renderings from SketchUp. I didn't include any of the final finishes that she requested like the amount of round over on edges and so forth as that will stylistically be finalized once she sees the dry fitting of the chair and the amount of round over on various practice pieces.

The chair will have a platform for the seat cushion to sit on at the bottom. She preferred that over an integral frame inside the seat bottom - frame and webbing. She wanted to have cushions that would be able to have the covers taken off and washed if needed.  The one issue I have to solve at this point will be the slope of the seat platform. The back is a little more upright then my current Morris chairs so that may mean adjusting the two cleats that the platform sits on. Since the inside dimensions of my chair will be the same as hers I hope to be able to take my seat cushions and using cleats attached to the chair by clamps adjust the slope to match the back to her personal comfort.