mailswoodwork

My furniture is designed to be lasting and beautifully functional. It is shaped from domestic woods, with the tools of 18th and 19th century cabinetmakers: axe, plane, saw, chisel, for exacting quality and a low impact on the environment.

I build with timber harvested from managed forests in the American southeast and, whenever possible, from locally felled trees. I do this in part, because I can be confident that the wood comes from sustainably managed forests. These choices also root my work in a place and in a historical tradition. While early cabinetmakers in the South imported volumes of mahogany, so much of their work reflected their surrounding forests: cypress and pine at the coast and, in the Piedmont, river birch, walnut and poplar.

Machinery does play a role in my work - the reduction of trees into boards - but to the greatest degree that I can, I rely on hand tools. Handsaws reduce boards to width and length. Planes thickness and surface. Axes and chisels shape.
This choice is less a rejection of machinery and production woodworking, than an exploration of the enormous possibilities of traditional methods.
The tools of the 18th and 19th century cabinetmaker were designed to be driven by men working with exceptional speed, accuracy and endurance in the making of a living. Still, they impose methods of work that tend toward thoughtfulness in the various tasks of joining wood together into furniture.
Further, these tools allow me to work without expending great volumes of electricity - in fact, hardly any at all.
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