Chest of Drawers Part 1: Mock-Up

    As my brother have stated before, we design our furniture primarily in the physical world through the process of building mock-ups.  We start with a very rough mock-up of the furniture form we are working on. In the case of the chest of drawers it began as a box, roughly the size we wanted, tacked together out of very thin plywood. Then we refine and re-mock the form by trying different leg treatments, different drawer arrangements, different knobs, etc... until we arrive at the form we feel fits the mood of the piece we were looking to build. We prefer this method because it is direct. When building in this way we are able to understand the volume and proportions of our furniture at human scale. How the volume of our chest of drawers feels, the feel of how a knob fits the hand, the direct experience of furniture is what differentiates it from fine art sculpture. You are meant to touch. Gauging the "feel" of something is impossible within the white plastic realm of 3D modeling or on the flat page of a sketchbook.

 Here is a series of pictures of our mock-ups for the chest of drawers we're currently working on...

In the first picture you can see the basic rectangular volume we have settled on with a few different leg options. The second picture is Ian determining the size and placement of a side rail. By composing in material there is less guesswork and more handwork.

The top left photo is the (rough) top treatment along and the top right photo is a possible drawer arrangement sketched onto brown paper that has been stretched over the face of the chest.  This drawer arrangement is an arrangement I designed some time ago, and I am glad we are finally going to be able to see and feel it in action. I will post more about this drawer arrangement later.

Here are three different leg options we toyed with (note the two different ones in the picture on the left,) I think we mocked-up roughly eight different leg options by the end of the design process. The mocked-up legs are simply made out of trued 2x4s that had been cut in half, shaped in a variety of ways and then screwed into the sides of the mock up. Building the actual mock up took no time at all, fine tuning our design decisions and preparing to buy the wood was a good day or two of work.

    Because this chest of drawers is  something we are building as a kind of "stock" piece of furniture that will be able to recreate on demand at a modest price, we are keeping everything very straightforward. The next chest of drawers build will be a one-of-a-kind piece of furniture with a much more involved and challenging design/construction process.