Reconstruction of Buffet in the Art Nouveau Style

About The Project

This project is for a customer whose home is filled with gorgeous custom furniture, glass, fabric, glass and tile work. The customer is an Art Nouveau aficionado. As he commissioned more and more Art Nouveau style pieces, he felt the straight lined built-in buffet in the dining room looked more out of place. The goal of this project was to rebuild, not replace, the cabinet. The design challenge was turning the very angular buffet design into the flowing, organic lines, and asymmetrical compositions of Art Nouveau. I worked with the customer on a simpler version of the stiles and rail, but it didn’t carry the visual impact of the second version's CNC carved tendrils. The customer gets the credit for this, as he drove the design process.

To improve functionality, new drawer boxes utilizing mechanical slides were installed. The old wood boxes on wood runners were practically unopenable. The new drawers can be opened and closed with a single finger. The customer made the additional functional improvements by adding lights and an outlet, and better insulating the exterior walls of the buffet.

The highlight of the project was crafting the new side stiles, top rail, and two door panels. The customer found a photo of a European Art Nouveau piece that he admired. Greg Flanagan, a talented CAD and CNC colleague, converted the photo into a vector CAD file. The basic design repeats between the top and bottom stiles, the halves of the rail, and halves of the door panels. Left and right designs are mirrors of each other.  Once the base CAD file was created, the others were slight modifications. Greg then CNC carved the undulating tendrils in the quarter sawn red oak stock that I provided. 

After much scrapping and sanding, the pieces were stained, varnished, and then installed. New iris motif handles and knobs were added to complement the Art Nouveau theme.

Contributor Credits

CAD file creation and CNC carving - Greg Flanagan, Tree on a Hill Workshop

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