The commission
The client asked for the doors to "look like one piece of wood" — a real bookmatching and flitch-matching problem, not a figure of speech. All three door panels were cut from consecutive leaves of the same flitch and hung in their original sequence, so the grain pattern flows continuously left to right across the full 72-inch width when the doors are closed. Drawer boxes are hand-cut half-blind dovetails at the front, through-dovetails at the back, running on solid maple runners rather than metal glides.
Cherry was chosen as much for how it will look in ten years as how it looks today — the piece will darken from its current pinkish cast to a deep reddish brown under the dining room’s south-facing windows, a change we discussed with the client up front.
