50+ Pieces of Furniture for One Magnificent Home

Oct 13

The hall table, pictured above, is made of solid wenge with hand-carved lion's heads and feet. I used 23k gold-leaf on the lion's heads so that the carving would stand out from the darkness of the wood, and I gold-leafed the bottom edge of the table as well. The top is uba tuba granite, a gorgeous very deep green granite with specks (rather than veins) of golds, greens, and browns.

My clients were building a new home in Rancho Santa Fe, CA. The home is a contemporary design with an extensive use of stone, high ceilings and extremely large rooms. The pieces of furniture needed to be oversized so they wouldn't be dwarfed by the size of the rooms.

The stone and the walls are light in color and they wanted the furniture pieces to predominate the rooms in style and in the use of unusual woods. They also wanted a neo-classic style (a little more neo than classic) that would fit with the curving soffits and classic elegance of the stone floors throughout the house.

I was hired to design and build over 50 pieces of furniture. The project would take two years to complete. Many of the pieces were to be fashioned as functional art, as is the table in the photo above. Among some of the other pieces were a curved sofa to be built into a curved glass window nook and large glass ceiling light fixtures in the dining room (photos below).

As I made the furniture, I would wrap them securely and deliver them to a storage container until the house was completed. Below is a sampling of some of the furniture in this magnificent home. You will see many different woods and styles in this collection, which really made it a fun project for me.

Above: Dog and Cat Chair, a whimsical and functional piece of art. The chair is made of figured maple, wenge dog, and imbuia cat.

Above: Game room, table and display case, made of curly maple with wenge accents.

Above: Display case in game room, curley maple with wenge accents.

Above: Coffee table, main living room, made of rift cut northern white oak with wenge accents and hand-carved acanthus leave capitals.

Above: Coffee table made of zebrawood with wenge accents.

Above: Small coffee table for living room corner, ziricote with holly accents and nickle feet.

Above: Three tables for dining room. Can be used as one large table, or separated into three, more intimate, place settings. Birds eye maple with wenge accents.

Above: Slumped glass light fixture with nickel and copper accents. These were hanging above the dining tables in the photo above.

Above: Buffet for dining room to match dining tables. Birds eye maple with wenge accents.

Above: Dining chairs. I did a basket weave for the wooden backs and used colorful aniline dyes so that the chairs would be coordinating colors with the area rug below them.