Carpathian Elm Burl and Cherry Dining Set 2

Size:
Dining Table 108″ long by 36″-46″ wide
Materials:
Carpathian Elm Burl, Cherry, Macassar Ebony, Mother of Pearl, Gaboon Ebony
Description:
This is the second version I have created of my Carpathian Elm and Cherry Dining Set, this one is quite a bit larger than the previous version though ending up 9 feet long and nearly 4 feet wide at the widest point (the sides of the top curve in toward the ends).

The initial inspiration for this commission came when the client saw an image of the original table and chairs on a site that shows some of my work, Fine Wood Artists.  The overall scope is similar to the original but we’ve taken the design and detailing a bit further by adding Mother of Pearl and Ebony inlays on both the tabletop and the chair backsplats.  There is also some Ebony inlay on the base and we curved the trestle feet and the verticals to accent the curved lines of the table.

The chair design came from a chair maker (John Thoe in Seattle, who arguably turned out to be the worst chair maker I’ve ever met in more ways than one) that I commissioned to make 10 dining chairs because the client liked his design, into which I then incorporated my veneered and inlayed backsplats which were made to match the detailing on the tabletop.  When his very, very rough chairs arrived with all the various gaps in the joints and mismatched grain in the wood parts I completed the detailing and sculpting they needed and brought them to the finish level shown in the images by completely disassembling them down to the individual part and reshaping and replacing parts until they met my level of quality.  The end result is a very nice set of chairs, it would have been nice if John had delivered the quality I paid him for but he was very clear that he wasn’t interested in delivering good work but was just collecting a paycheck, quite unfortunate but in today’s world not entirely unexpected.  I do wish I had taken the time to see his work in person before paying him many thousands of dollars for a set of chairs, the low quality of all of his work would have been instantly apparent and I would have just made a set of my own chairs to suit the clients taste and saved myself the hassle of working with an unskilled maker like John Thoe. The end result is a hard lesson learned about outsourcing work to others and expecting the work to be acceptable.