Sunday, July 31, 2011

interior design ... dining rooms

one of our favorite projects is creating a custom dining room ... we have a project coming up where we'll be doing an expanding dining table with a hard curly maple inlay, 8 chairs, and a cherry and curly maple sideboard. we get to make the pieces relate, in essence, determine the style of the room ... the designs for this new project are loosely based on the furniture in my own dining room above, with of course, the clients' unique input which is based on their own experience with a table i made for the client's brother in 1990 or so ... round and round it goes. click the photos to enlarge them ...
this is part of the proposal for that project ..
meanwhile, for a potential client who is coming to visit this week to discuss furniture for her dining room, i rounded up photos of different projects of different styles, most of which consisted of at least a table, some chairs and a sideboard ...
while in the natural cherry photo above this one, we were going for a more contemporary look, here we're shooting for the traditional, with the dark, carved mahogany legs and stained mahogany and walnut chairs with burl backsplats ...
here, we've clearly taken a contemporary slant on the traditional, dark, arts and crafts style, taking our cues from the designs of greene and greene and stickley, but by using natural cherry we have (hopefully) brought it up into the present.
hanging fir and burl table lantern ... inlays in the top and 0n the aprons of the table
here we have the 'one board' bubinga dining room ... plain and simple design, the table top and face of the sideboard was made from one 46" wide, 19' board of bubinga ...
here, the view from the other end ...
another take on what we refer to on our website as our 'studio style', a mix of natural or stained woods with painted details and accents. (love the milton avery boxers over the mantle) we used to make quite a few windsors, but, not so many any more ... i'm encouraging the padded seats ...
the sideboard for that table ..
and another ... for more, check out the 'dining table', 'seating', and 'sideboard' sections of our website for other styles and designs ...

2 comments:

Mansfield Fine Furniture - Nick said...

Thank you for your work in sharing your design, processes, and galleries of finished work. I can't begin to say how much inspiration I've derived from reading your posts. I'm curious as to the method/species used to create the black for the details on your dining room set, I love the look of the natural cherry with the black and hope to try that on some of my own projects. Thanks, and keep up the good work!

Dorset Custom Furniture said...

hi nr ... i've done the black a couple of different ways...we started out with old fashioned milk paint, which is a great product for some things. lately, we use an aniline dye (lockwood) understain and then sponge on black latex, more or less of it, until we like the way it looks. when it's dry, we sand it lightly, sometimes steel wool it, and wipe on a coat of oil ... here's a link:
http://dorsetcustomfurniture.blogspot.com/2009/12/art-deco-bar-cabinet.html ... and here's another : http://dorsetcustomfurniture.blogspot.com/2010/02/paint-it-black.html
cut and paste them to your browser