Chocolate Pecan
A commissioned ash bench for a beautiful kitchen
Oh, man! Everything about this house is beautiful.
The architecture is sharp and polygonal, and there is so much natural light that the walls and floors can contrast nicely with a dark and deep grey. The kitchen is spacious and inviting.
Yet precisely because the island in the kitchen is the perfect hangout place, it can easily become the center of the mess.
We are building a wide bench that serves as a seat when needed but also to put stuff on top of it. Let’s clean the mess!
The space is all clean lines and minimalism. Sharp edges rule the day, with polygons taking center stage over curves. But there’s a subtle nod to classic Americana — those high, open windows in the ceiling come out of a fifties dream house.
Ash became the wood of choice, offering a classic American vibe (think baseball bat) with the strength and durability of oak.
The engineering followed the same idea — we ditched anything metal or modern and went old-school with classic tenon and mortise joinery.
Square tenons on each leg corner, peeking out from the top. This creates a neat symmetry between the board sides and those four little squares up top.
Length
50″
Depth
17.5″
Height
23″
Thickness
2.25″
Design-wise, it was more straightforward, but manufacturing-wise it was way trickier. Complex designs can hide flaws, but with simplicity, perfection is the only option.
I love building mini prototypes of the projects I am working on. They allow me to refine the process of building before the actual building happens.
So I dove into building a tiny mini bench. It would allow me to calibrate the machine I would use for the square holes and serve as a sampler for different colors.
I’ll be honest, I made ALL the mistakes, some on purpose, some by idiocy.
They chose Odie’s Oil with Pecan pigment as the final color.
The milling process was cool and uneventful, and the wood behaved nicely — no warps, no cups, no chips, just pure butter.
This bench is 2¼ inches thick, and the panels are heavy as heck. Nothing needed to be forced more than usual; apart from minor cosmetic mistakes, everything went smoothly.
Yet in woodworking, one has to tell the wood where to go, and the force required for that is proportional to the weight and hardness of the material. This ash was exactly as we wanted it — dense and hard — so it required a fair dose of zercher squats, opposition grabs, and a fair amount of grunting.
With the bench built, I feared it was a tad too tall, so with Ali, we decided to just measure it in place. Before it was oiled and stained, I took it to its forever home, measured it, and decided to shave off an inch. Once that was done, all that was left was to give it a last sanding pass and oil it till it was smooth as butter.
Andy Warhol famously said: “Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.” People often confuse that with everything is beautiful, which is not true.
The main objective of this bench was to simplify the design to its minimal constituent, just highlighting its structure and letting it be. I realized in doing so that simplification makes you find the fundamental beauty of the object.
Simplified. Redefined.
Labore et Constantia.
Material
American Ash
Joinery
Mortise & Tenon
Finish
Odie’s Oil, Pecan
Dimensions
50″ × 17.5″ × 23″
