About The Project
This cabinet was made to display the customer’s family heirloom china and glassware collection. It was built to compliment her cozy Arts and Craft style home. The cabinet is very large, measuring 53.5” wide X 95” high X 18” deep.
The cabinet sits alongside the living room fireplace. There was an original low height builtin cabinet in this space. While I don’t typically take on this kind of work, I’ve done my share of remodeling and agreed to make the space ready for the cabinet. This included removing the original cabinet, modifying the fireplace mantel, patching the hardwood floor, installing an electrical outlet, sheetrock, plastering and painting.
The cabinet is made from quartersawn white oak, which is a wood typically used in Arts and Craft furniture and trim work. Quarter sawing is the process of cutting the boards with the saw cut perpendicular to the annual rings. This results in board faces with a tight, uniform and parallel grain pattern, which can be seen in the photos.
There are four banks of storage compartments. Each is fronted with a pair of glass front doors. The upper three panes over single bottom pane glass pattern mimics the home windows, and again is a typical Art and Crafts design element.
When I built the cabinet all the shelves were wood, and there were only the overhead lights. After placing her collectables in the cabinet, the customer determined that the lower shelves were too dark and didn’t show off the glassware. To resolve this some of the wood shelves were replaced with tempered glass ones, and strip lighting was installed on the front bottom edges of the compartments. Both the upper and lower LED light banks are dimmable via a small remote control that is kept on the adjacent mantel.
Photo Gallery
