One Of A Kind

One of the things Gunkelmans specializes in and I love being challenged with is a custom design. We recently had a client that was inspired by a Tansu cabinet built-into a staircase that she saw. Here is a condensed version of the process we go through on a custom piece.

This custom piece wasn't going to be built into a staircase, but she liked the feeling of the stepped cabinet, so I started with a preliminary drawing.

We discussed the overall layout and decided that fewer, larger drawers would work best for her. I revised the drawing to reflect that change.

I enlisted our cabinetmaker and set him off with the task to find reclaimed wood for the project and draw up the shop drawing.

I went looking for hardware.

Once the cabinetmaker had found a source we started working on finish samples and he did a small mock-up for me to look at. Here the reclaimed exterior wood is in its raw state with no sand-blasting or finishing.