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I wish you a Happy New Year and all the best for 2014. With the year advancing and many new year's resolutions
taking hold... or fading, I want to keep one of mine: to provide you with an update of MapleArt Custom Furniture.
It has been a very hectic past 16 months. Thanks to you giving me lots of challenges, I have been able to work on very exciting projects. In this letter I present you with a sampling. (To see more photographs of any of the works shown here, just click the photograph.) For a full overview of my new work I invite you visit my website at www.mapleart.ca. If you see anything here that you like which inspires you to request something similar, I would happy to hear from you. Have a great 2014! Andres Schneiter January 2014 |
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CORPORATE FURNITURE
Creating furniture for businesses, and other large items, has been my predominant activity this past year, with the largest work being a boardroom table measuring 15 by 5 feet (4.6 by 1.5 metres) and weighing 650 kg, made from a single figured maple tree. Needless to say that moving that beast up to the 9th floor of a Vancouver Downtown building was a challenge of its own! 
I strive to look at the minutest of details and design and build each piece of furniture with the entire room in mind. The boardroom projection screen / white board, credenza and boardroom table shown below are examples of a family of furniture with harmonious integration of different woods, stone and glass. 
CHAIRS AND COFFEE TABLES My biggest challenge this past year was to make a dozen chairs based on a sample of a single 40 year old chair. This is a truly beautiful and comfortable chair but requires extremely difficult joinery to construct. The result was my own "Feverfew" chair in walnut and leather upholstery. 
The "Cherry" Coffee table below may look simple but had its challenges too. The layer below the glass is live edge, natural walnut. To achieve this look with the narrow strip, I sliced the trunk into many strips along the grain to remove material and then glued it backt together, matching the multiple grain layers. The purpose was to match other furniture in the client's house and achieve a well balanced design. 
CURVES AND GARDEN FURNITURE These elegant three "Ulmo" benches have a big secret: the curved backs. The benches had to follow exact radii so they could be placed in concentric circles around the fire pit, as determined by the customer. Laminations are generally easy, but these inclined backs are three dimensional curves which made the project almost impossible. Simple, clean lines are often a lot harder to achieve than more involved and "loaded" designs. 
NOTES FROM THE STUDIO I often get asked what I do with all my left over wood and scraps. You may have read in my website that my chickens get the shavings; the sawdust is mixed with grass and leaves and turned into compost where my pumpkins and beans grow... The larger pieces are incorporated into art: my wooden quilts. Here is a sample, approximately 50 by 50 cm. As you can see, nothing gets wasted! 
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