About The Project

This bedroom set was designed and built to complement the customer’s collection of beautiful Japanese lamps and accessories. The customer once lived in Japan where she assembled her collection and got a taste for Japanese design. The bedroom set consists of a kingsize bed, two dressers, and two nightstands.

The customer first commissioned the bed. She wanted a low platform bed, as is the Japanese style, but with the proper height to make getting in and out of bed easy on aging bodies. Using temporary blocks, we experimented with placing the mattress at different heights. This was then used to set the height of the bedframe. The bed prominently displays a large live edge ash slab for the headboard.

The customer was so pleased with the bed that she immediately commissioned two matching night stands and two matching dressers. The design challenge with these was determining the appropriate dimensions. While the bedroom is quite large, it has several varying height windows and door openings that the pieces had to fit into. To determine the correct dimensions, I make 3D full size cardboard mockups of the pieces. Full size drawings of the piece fronts were glued to the boxes. The customer then lived with the mockups in her bedroom for several weeks. On my return visit we were able to determine which dimensions needed to be tweaked. At the end of the visit I offered to take the mockups away and recycle them. This was met with an emphatic “no.” She liked the mockups so much she wanted to continue using them as her actual furniture until I completed building the real pieces.

The dressers and nightstands are made of quarter sawn ash. 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. All pieces are dyed and finished with an eco-friendly penetrating wipe on finish