COMING SOON….. The year of the organics

From time to time between the crazyness of life it dawns on me that I really need to slow down and take the things around me in. I’ll admit that that’s sometimes a bit tough to do, and when I do, its sometimes boring. Boring, until you really put some effort into it and try to look deeper than the first layer of things you see. I’m really not trying to get all introspective and deep, just trying to explain something I deal with. Anyway my point is that when I work through this process and make it to that point when nature makes a different kind of sense its pretty inspiring. I’ve had a few of these really great experiences, and sometimes it results in some pretty cool design concepts. And then of course there’s the random times when I’m in the middle of complete chaos and noise and something just pops into my mind and I come up with a great idea. Its almost irritating that I can’t control my creative process, but I won’t get into that. My point is that I was reminded of this yesterday when I went to Don Seawater’s, our local lumberjack. Don has about every kind of domestic tree in his yard. everything from the almighty walnut redwood, and cypress, to the lowly pine. You can even bring your own tree to him and he’ll mill it and put it in his kiln, which is really just a semi container that he fires a heater into.
All this poking around the couple acres of fallen trees got me fired up and focused. Honestly I don’t have a problem with the first one, but the focused part I struggle with. This year I’m going to pack my website full of new pieces, most of them are going to be really organic. Boy its going to be hard to give up all that orange

Ash…. Don gave this one to me.

Redwood and Oak…. I think

Tyler checking out the crotch

The rest of the field trip participants

Some mean gut bomb!

Some mean gut bomb!

And the lowly pine, but in this form, its actually a bit tempting.

sapcicle

The gallery showing the furniture in San Luis

THE LATEST IN A NUTSHELL

The last 6 months have been pretty crazy for so many reasons. Some of those reasons are not even worth getting into. Luckily for me Making furniture well out weighs all of the lame things that life throws at you, and the things that lame people do to you. Of coarse its also pretty amazing to realize the good, and most importantly the good people who step up to bless the hell out of you.
So jumping ahead to the last couple months….. Tyler and I have been working on a bridal display for a jewelery store as well as making a couple new pieces, and as always remaking old designs. A new store is opening Downtown San luis Obispo next week. We’re doing all we can to pack it with about ten pieces. Come check them out at Atmodshperes on Chorro street.

THE DWELL SHOW IN L.A.

So we pulled it together for the Dwell show June 24th-26th. We shared a space and built a booth with our friends at Garcia Architecture and Design. For some time now we have been collaborating on opening up a store in San Luis Obispo that would be a showroom for our furniture. We have had a mutual respect for each others work, and have been doing more and more things together. The show was a lot of fun, with a ton of interest. It was all pretty encouraging.

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Sister’s Collection Photo shoot with Ron Bez

We have had a hard time with trying to figure out how to really portray to everyone what the Sister’s Collection really contains.

The piece itself is so completely interchangeable and custom at the same time, the options are truly endless. So, in order to show off a bit about how unique the Sisters are, we headed up to Paso and spend a couple days in the studio with Ron Bez .

Take a look at this stop motion video of the two day process that was our photo shoot.

Hopefully the possibilities of what this piece can be will help inspire you as well.

The Organic Door

We posted a bit before about the Organic design that is unique to Jory, but we want to show the process from start to finish.

In the video below, you can see how Jory takes a blank walnut board and creates, shapes, and designs the wood into a functional door that has such a natural feel to it, many people assume that it was cut directly from the tree to fit the rest of the piece.

Trade Show Booth in a Field

Here is the final product; the trade show booth for Rosemont Media.

We worked on the booth for somewhere between 2 and 2 1/2 months. So, rather than just ship it off to be inside in a stuffy trade show, we decided to bring it out in the fresh air and take some photos and a bit of video of it. Being from Slo, there is nothing more normal than beautiful open fields and rolling hills, sometimes they are green and sometimes, they are golden.

The images are courtesy of Cameron Ingalls (www.cameroningalls.com), we are so thankful for his talent and time that he placed into these photos.

Rosemont Trade Show Booth

Yeah..this post is a bit overdue, but we are really excited for what we are going to bring you in the next couple weeks.

The handful of images below are from around the shop and of Jory and I making a trade show booth for Rosemont Media.

Everyone knows that trade show displays, in general, are not very visually appealing and basically, boring in nature. They consist of fold-up plastic displays made in China and paper banners printed from Kinko’s; it seems that many companies, even though they may have a great product, do not know how to display it with creativity and originality.

With that being said, Jory made a small trade show booth for Rosemont Media a little while back and they loved it so much, they contacted him to make a larger one for some trade shows this year. We really wanted Rosemont to have a big impact on their show, so Jory drew up and created an original design out of his favorite materials: solid walnut & concrete.

Take a look at the images below and in the next post, we will bring you a great video of the booth.

the Organic

Completely unique and creative by all standards, the Organic is another design that when first seen, most people do not know how it came about.

They ask, “what kind of tree is that?” or “how does wood come like that?”; but what is not know is how much time, care, and artistic vision it takes to create something that looks so natural that people actually confuse it with nature itself.

The Organic is a design that is never the same twice and always created by hand. It is a combination of flow between the artist and the wood and the grain of the wood. Once again the creative process is pushed farther and farther to make this unique creation.

The piece that Jory is carving the organic on in the video is part of the backdrop for the Dwell tradeshow we are doing at the end of June.

Stay posted for complete pictures when the backdrop is finished.

This is another Jory original:

The Fluted Door

Hello.

As you recently found out, I am Tyler; I began working with Jory back in November last year and have been so thankful for all that has gone on.

The woodshop, as I call it, and Jory have such an air of creativity and design around them, it is hard not to be inspired and then see it come to life with your own hands. Anyways, we want to continue to bring you not only the work that we do, but also the process of how our works are made.

If you have ever see the door on the Parker or the Torino, many have assumed that this design has been cut with a CNC machine, but truth is far from it.

The Fluted Door is actually a meticulous design, created by Jory and made by hand. We recently made a stop-motion video on the process; check it out below:

TYLER!!!

It hit me a couple weeks ago how its a bit irritating when people don’t keep up their blogs… why do they even have blogs if they let them sit there in blog purgatory? Then it hit me that I’m that guy. To make things worse I promised not to do that when I first committed to doing this blog.  I have a lot of excuses but my best one is that I’m really not that good at it, especially the writing part. I have however been taking all kinds of pictures the past few months in hopes of just littering this blog with pictures, but I seem to  blown it with that as well/

From the start of the year, things have been pretty hectic. Its been a challenge figuring out a balance of work and family. Its an interesting thing when you love what you do so much that you get lost in it, and its hard to pull your mind from design mode, to daddy mode.  Its all a work in progress and I’m blessed that Ali is so good at being a mom, and picking up the slack when I have to work late.

Recently it has really hit me how life has its way of working itself out, and how we are constantly being reminded of how blessed we all are.  Aaron who was helping me for the last couple years decided to make jewelry full time.  It worked out fine, things were a bit slow anyway, but not long after that things started picking up, and picking up fast. But right before they did I met a guy through my friend Cindy.  Cindy is a cool enough lady that when she talks really high of somebody you know they are top shelf. Long story short Tyler turned out to be an awesome guy! I have never met anybody with such a natural gift at woodworking. Up until a few months ago he had pretty minimal experience with working with tools. That lack of experience has been trumped by his creativity, and confidence with just “going for it”.  Its made me realize that in many cases its our own fear, or pride that keeps us from moving forward. Especially the older we get. One of the many good things I can say about Tyler is that he is not afraid to screw up, and he’s not even embarrassed when he does. He has been helping me with many things that I am pretty terrible at, such as getting organized, and streamlining processes.  One of the things he is going to do from time to time is upkeep this blog. He takes pretty mean pictures, and I know he spells better, and places comas in better places than I typically do when writing.

TYLER.....

The Dwell show is coming up in two months. We have all kinds of pieces going on in the shop, and  two trade show booths (one mine). We are about to pour the first concrete “silent evolution” bench tomorrow, along with a few concrete doors for the new pieces. Either Tyler or I will post pictures of the mold making process that has consumed the past week or so, along with a pile of pictures that will describe the past few months better than words.