Ogham chair featured in The Great Indoors

Just a quick post to let you know that the ogham chair I made a while back has been featured in the latest edition of The Great Indoors interiors magazine. Its free to read online and has lots of Irish craft and other interesting design pieces; not just the usual advertorials that most interiors magazines tend to be. So why not check it out.

Venusian Whorl Chair

I thought that a little more explanation of this chair was needed. The inspiration for it came from wanting to incorporate a marine theme into my work combined with a sculptural organic form. I achieved this by using a boat building technique called glued clinker to create the shell of the chair. This produced a exceptionally rigid shell structure. The shape of the chair is trying to emulate flowers or tulip leaves as they grow. I was designing this in the early spring hence the tulips. The name is a little bit of whimsy although whorl defines exactly what the chair is. (see here) This piece would look great in an entrance hall or even better in a plant filled conservatory. Or how about as cosy fireside chair to relax in with your favourite book. When sitting in the chair the warm wood wraps around you like a cocoon or shell. It's made from over a hundred separate pieces. The planks of the shell had to be individually steamed and fitted to each other. A lot of work; each chair took over a month to complete. The woods used were carefully chosen prime quarter sawn ash and Irish oak. These chairs were the first project that I have used natural hide glue on which has been used for centuries and should last for centuries to come. The finish was oil and west cork bee's wax. I will be offering an outdoor garden version of this chair with cover if required.

Chairs from Tiernan Roe Fine Woodworking 23/05/2006

Here are a few photos of some chairs that I designed and made recently. The client wanted a chair that was comfortable, simple, light, robust and unique to them. Everything that a chair should be really. They came to me first looking for some shaker inspired chairs but after a lengthy design process I came up with these chairs. The strong vertical elements in the back were something that the clients liked. All of their current chairs had this element. We choose to make the chairs from cherry as they wanted a light coloured wood that had some figure but wasn't over powering. Also each chair has the name of one member of the family carved on it. I used an ancient irish script called "ogham" which consists of horizontal lines on a vertical line. Apparently this script was based on the names of trees e.g oak in irish is daoire and represents D.



In the photo to the right it shows that although the back is made from two flat pieces that are sawn to a curve when joined at an angle they create an almost perfect curve for a chair back. To enhance the comfort of the chair the seat slopes back at a 3º angle. The triangular shape of the seat gives ample support to the buttocks as the body is supported on only two points of the pelvis that are remarkably close together. In fact there is a traditional type of chair in Ireland known as a Sligo chair that has a triangular seat which provided some of the inspiration for these chairs.




You can see in this photo that the back legs of the chair are joined to the seat using relatively massive through mortise and tenon joints that are fastened with wedges. This jointing arrangement was used as this joint on the chair experiences quite amount of racking and as they were designed for a family with four young children it is inevitable that at some time some one will tip them back onto their two back legs. All the other joints are pegged with hand made Holly pegs. The finish is hand rubbed Danish oil.