Design

Nakashima, Maloof and Castle In the early ‘70s, there was a show called WoodenWorks at the Renwick Gallery, which is a part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. Now we would describe it as a show of studio furniture, then…

Specialties keeping tradition alive Wood certainly isn’t a sticky material. It’s fairly easy to reduce a large volume of wood into smaller ones, if you understand its propensity to split along its grain. But it is altogether another…

A journeyman’s graduation project In 1972, as a very recent design-school graduate, I spent some time as a private student of Jim Krenov. This Russian- born, American- and Swedish- based cabinetmaker had been introduced to me by my…

Invasive pest fells a homely beauty In the early 2000s, the emerald ash borer was first discovered in Canada. It’s a foreign insect that kills ash trees, and it has spread quickly. But who is noticing? There has not been much…

Quest for order goes beyond design Paul Epp I was helping a friend paint some window frames and I was surprised at her casual approach. Half of her paint went on the glass and I questioned this. “Why does it matter?”…

Proud Canadian heritage Paul Epp I grew up on the Grande Prairie in northwestern Alberta, an anomalous patch of grassland deep in the Boreal Forest. It takes only a moment of reflection to understand that it was…

Counting the rings on legacy timber Paul Epp I was sitting in a bar recently, with my son. We were in Vancouver, at the lower level of a large, late 19th century brick building. As nice as the decorations were, what…

Annals of our work, thick and thin One of the many beauties of wood is their growth rings. These variations in the rate of growth, season- to-season and year-to-year, are a large part of what gives wood its visual interest. There are…

Design elegance has rural roots It has always surprised me that country-style furniture is often a bit crude. It seems to not only be accepted but also expected that this anti-urban version of things be kind of rough and ready.…

Marketers do home-made one better It has become pretty hard to reflect on marketing without tripping over the word artisanal. We have artisanal beer, artisanal bread and artisanal cheese, to name just a few of the things to which this…

New chapter: RV conversion Now that I’m not teaching, I’ve had to find a project to keep busy with. And what that has turned out to be is a DIY Sprinter cargo-van-to-RV conversion. It’s certainly kept me busy and I’m not done yet. I…

Preventing waste is a responsibility To be a designer is to be very lucky. It’s our job to dream and to turn these dreams into reality. What a privilege. We get to impose our vision onto the world around us. That’s pretty good. Of…

Both tool and furniture touchpoints are key Handle: derived from the word hand. As a verb, it means: to feel or manipulate with the hands. As a noun, it means the part by which a thing is held, carried or controlled. Many of the…

I really like maple trees, but the tree that I’m the most familiar with is actually the most common tree in Canada, the Populus tremuloides, more commonly and (apparently) more properly known as the quaking aspen. We just called it the…

It was harder than I had anticipated. But that’s because I didn’t think it through. I wanted to visit a furniture factory in Cambodia, and that isn’t what the tour operators usually handle. I’m not sure they quite believed that was…