Our newest custom finish is pure beauty without the pain: tattooed wood and acrylic. At JOHNHOUSHMAND we love the natural and uncontrollable characteristics in salvaged wood but this “tattoo” finish is a custom dream.
At the shop upstate we create a CAD drawing of the desired graphic and send it to a CNC machine which routes out the graphics from either wood or acrylic. Next we fill the path in with epoxy (which can be any number of colors) to really bring out the image. So not only do we have control over the image but also the color and thickness of line! Flexibility at its finest.
Here are some samples of the clean and crisp shapes created by this process for a project we’re currently working on.
What’s black, and white and sleek all over? Sporty and sleek, this No. 0149.36 smokey acrylic dining chair with bleached Spalted Maple legs is a fun, new addition to our family of No. 0149 bent acrylic dining chairs.
Dark but lustrous, the 1/2″ bent acrylic acts as the perfect contrast against the bright white of the bleached Spalted Maple. The dark shade of the acrylic is enhanced by the bright gleams of light that reflect on it, while the bright white of the Spalted Maple is accentuated by the dark lines in the grain.
Bold and simple, this piece is perfectly suited to be the center of attention.
The CLEARLY FUNCTIONAL line came to be from the wish to marry the airy glassine quality of acrylic with the substantial and vital quality of wood. The design world is full of plastic and acrylic products which for the most part we find alienating, ugly, and harsh. It was considered that if we could transform that problem with a natural element, we might get a magnificent synergy and an iconic design as well. As we developed methods of attaching the two materials invisibly and minimally, and as we also experimented with casting a “plastic” into a natural material (live-edge wood), we unleashed a fiesta of exciting designs that hit the mark…extraordinary visual appeal, industrial design pedigree, and a real wood component that takes us into the world of fine furniture. Win, win, win, win, win…fun, fun, fun, fun…cool, cool, cool, cool.
Years ago I began playing with a series of visual languages that emanated from dice…that magical little pair of cubes that has an almost platonic and mystical appeal. A numbering system that jives with a cube-face multi-dimensionality, and all the while screaming the mysterious rules of chance and probability. That resulted in page after page of visual language games that became viral in my mind. It was inevitable that I had a desire to express a line of furniture that was contrasting wood against synthetics. “Solid Surfacing” material is perfect for this. It is similar to this popular stuff found in kitchens and it’s made of an acrylic polymer and something called (according to the folks at Wikipedia at least) “alumina trihydrate” – which is simply a fancy way of saying that you can do almost anything with this stuff – mold it, sand it, you name it. I decided that moving from wood and clear acrylic to wood and white was a natural choice and “Martian Dice” was born. What would dice look like on another planet? What would furniture look like on another planet? The rest is visually self explanatory.
Polarity was a theme that took off as a result of the Martian Dice crap game. Wood has such bipolar visual divergence, the most pronounced being ebony against sitka spruce. Not your best combination for furniture, each being prized for its musical instrument qualities and hyper-rare. However, our Eastern mountains are replete with maple and black walnut. Not a bad ride…The line designed itself, jumping from one piece to the next almost instantaneously. It is a lot easier to channel than to labor, so I went with it. Once they were a family, I hit upon the problem of what to do with those pesky little glider pads that go under furniture. Nothing really works… wood blocks, felt, silicone discs. And then came the shoemaker’s art and the perfect solution. The little leather heel that meets the road beneath every good pair of walkers and stilettos on the planet. A never fail solution and just what a good pair of saddle shoes needs.
Here are some samples of the clean and crisp shapes created by this process for a project we’re currently working on.
