The objective of this project was to design and create a bench or a stool
Concept Development
Here is some early concept development I did for my project. I was heavily learning towards making a bench, and after doing research, I was leaning towards more of a large, monolithic style bench that had visual weight to it.
Refined Concept
I eventually settled on a design resembling those on the left. The objective was to kind of form both the bench and the stool into one piece, allowing for different ways to interact with the furniture. The idea I began developing further was to have the stool be a removable box that can be moved or used however the consumer needed, then could be nested back into the bench.
After looking at construction techniques, I adjusted the design even further to be two separate elements, a bench and a stool, that shared the same design style, and could be moved around and interact with each other.
Start of Production
For the wood, I purchased a very large piece of cherry wood. The piece was about 23" wide, by 108" tall, by 2.25" thick. My design required multiple, different sized pieces of wood to be lined up and connected in a butcher block setup. So step 1 was cutting a lot of planks.
After all the wood pieces were cut with flat and square surfaces and end pieces, the next part was to line up what pieces I wanted to combine to each other and next to each other, as seen below.
You can see that the length of pieces alternate, the objective here was to have a design that had finger locking joints for better structural integrity.
After I knew what pieces went where, it was time to glue with lots...and lots... of clamps.
Once combined, I was able to see all the different possibilities these benches could achieve. Initially, the stool and the bench were each supposed to be 9 planks wide. But due to some complications, they ended up each being 6 planks wide, with a 3rd floating piece that was 3 planks wide.
Time to stain
Final Product
I am very happy with how these benches turned out. They both serve a unique function, but when combined together they have even more possibilities, from a bench a small table, to a storage device, and even as a sculptural piece.
