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Tansu

This project was created in 2010 or 11 for the showroom of Design in Wood, the cabinet and furniture shop I worked in for many years before switching over to woodturning. It’s elm on the outside, maple ply on the inside. It’s about 7 feet tall and 61″ wide at the crown. Design by Andrew Jacobson. It was a challenging piece to figure out how to build, with lots of sub-assemblies. My time working at Design in Wood was some of the finest education in woodworking I’ve ever had and I appreciated both the challenging projects and the atmosphere of cooperation and encouragement.

Since nothing I build is complete without some finicky little joints, here’s a shot of the initial test fitting for the half-lap joints I used to make the shoji lattices that fit into the upper doors.

Snap!

The screens, completed. These will get a lovely, handmade mulberry paper attached to the backs, and then they’ll be fitted into the sliding upper doors.

Here you can see the screens in place in their frames.

This is one of the lower doors, ready for final glue-up. These doors were much more labor-intensive than I anticipated, but they came out very nicely.

The glue-up. Note the omnipresent can of Diet Pepsi. Those guys need to start paying me for product placement. (Note: since leaving the cabinet shop I’ve managed to whittle my Diet Pepsi habit down to almost nothing, for those of you who were concerned :>)

The lower doors are bi-fold, with butt hinges on the outside edges and these Soss hinges, which are almost invisible when the door is closed, in the middles. The hinges were a bright brass finish originally which would have been visually jarring with the rest of the hardware. I wire brushed the brass finish off, which left some sort of white metal, and then patinaed that down to the nice dark finish on the right.

Here are the lower doors at their first fitting, held in place with shims. In this view it’s easy to see how the interior of the cabinet steps back where it will recess into the wall.

Here you can see how the hinges work. There will be a couple of shelves behind the doors. Those little tiny drawers up above are actually just three drawers, with the fronts split to look like apothecary drawers. The rows of little holes on the slats of the doors are for wrought nails, which will get tapped into the holes after finish.

Here’s a view of the sawn veneer on the sides. I got lucky and found a couple of pieces on two of the planks of elm where there were some nice wiggles in the grain. I was able to resaw those chunks down into veneers about 1/16″ thick. The pieces are bookmatched, then alternately rotated 180 degrees.

The whole shebang. It was a thrill to see it all together after so many weeks of working on one tiny area after another.

Front view. It’s about 7 feet tall, and 61″ wide at the crown. The interior of the case is maple plywood, which will be stained to match the elm.

Here it is, finished and installed. There’s a window seat just to the left, and to the right of the beautiful walnut slab table is the dining room. The tansu is for dishes and table items, and you can just see Fulton The Dog in the background. He was one of 5 shop dogs who spent time getting underfoot as we worked. (Photo credit to Fine Woodworking magazine)