Inside the Workshop: Making the Alder Chair

A chair is the hardest thing a furniture maker can build. It has to carry a moving body, day after day, for decades, while looking light enough to lift with one hand. Every joint is under load. Every curve has to be earned.

The Alder Chair takes around fourteen hours of hands-on work. Here is where that time goes.

1. Reading the timber

We start with white oak, chosen board by board. For the legs we look for straight, tight grain that runs the full length of the part; any wild grain near a joint is a weakness waiting to happen. Offcuts become trays and small parts, so very little goes to waste.

2. Bending the back

The curved backrest is steam-bent rather than cut from a thick board. Bending keeps the grain running unbroken around the curve, which makes it far stronger and gives it that gentle, continuous line. The oak spends about an hour in the steam box, then is clamped to a form and left for several days to set its shape.

3. Cutting the joints

The legs, rails and back are joined with mortise-and-tenon joints, cut and fitted one at a time. Each tenon is shaved until it slides home with firm hand pressure, not a hammer.

A good joint should feel like a handshake: firm, even and without force.

4. Shaping by hand

Once the chair is dry-fitted, the real shaping begins. Spokeshaves and rasps soften the transitions where leg meets seat and back meets rail. This is where the chair goes from looking correct to feeling right.

5. Finishing

Every surface is sanded through four grits, then finished with thin coats of hardwax oil, rubbed in by hand and left to cure between each one. The optional woven seat is the final step, laced from paper cord over an afternoon.

Made to be used

When an Alder Chair leaves the workshop, it has been sat on, rocked, checked and sat on again. We build them to be pulled up to the table every day for the next fifty years, and to look a little better each year they are.