Art Deco Cabinet

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A-H

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I made this a few years ago.
Alan
 

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What? You thought my built in cabinet didn't work because it went all the way to the ceiling! Luckily the client did, asked for that, and paid handsomely for it.

I like the quality of what you built, though. I remember seeing it twenty or so years ago. Slainte.

Heaven-17.jpg
 
Alan's scanned image includes a letter he wrote to F&C in response to an article I'd written in a previous edition. In my article were images of the cabinet shown in my previous post, which was almost certainly the target of his "did not work" comment. Does that answer your question? Slainte.
 
Nice work above. What often happens to me is a customer wants a built in all the way to the ceiling and they don’t want a timber moulding or just a flat/blank section to the top. They want their existing gypsum coving style run right around the room. Problem is many of these are no longer manufactured.
 
The unit was made in five sections then joined together. Framework was of steamed Beech and the curved top were made in sections, joined with halving joints. The end and centre tops were formed with a router and trammel bar. The intermediate sections were more difficult to shape. As they were set back at about 30 deg and had to look semi-circular when viewed from the front of the cabinet. I used a method used in boat building – lofting – which gave the actual shape which was then cut with a jig saw.. Only the centre and end sections had doors.

The carcasses are made from veneered MDF.

The roofs are of two layers of thin ply separated with 25mm sq soft wood. I needed the gap so that lights could be installed.

I made to doors very snug fitting so that as little dust as possible could get into the cabinet. To this end two very low powered fans we installed in the bottom cupboards feeding air into the glazed units via fine filters. This is a system used in military helicopters, the cabin is pressurised to avoid chemical attack.
 
What? You thought my built in cabinet didn't work because it went all the way to the ceiling! Luckily the client did, asked for that, and paid handsomely for it.

I like the quality of what you built, though. I remember seeing it twenty or so years ago. Slainte.

Richard from your photograph the unit does not go the the ceiling, you have fitter cornice between the unit and the ceiling which IMHO is as it should be.
Alan
 
That's interesting, Alan, because in your letter to F&C you said "I could not help thinking how the 'cabinet 75' pictured did not work." And later you say "one of the things I learnt was that a built-in unit almost never looks right when it is built to the full height of the room."

Your comment, quoted above, perhaps more accurately, the mild criticism, referred directly to the photograph of that cabinet in the magazine which was described as Cabinet 75 in its caption, (p 42, F&C, Issue 86, March 2004) and is the same image as the one I posted earlier in this thread.

True, there's a cornice between the top of the cabinets and the ceiling that takes up the gap but, essentially, I'd describe that cabinet installation as a full height, i.e., floor to ceiling built-in piece.

Maybe your letter was misquoted or your message distorted in some way in the magazine's editing procedures? That happened to me a few times with articles I wrote. They'd sometimes get chewed up enough by the editing process in a magazine's office that frustrating errors were introduced by others after I'd supplied the manuscript, and some magazines were worse for that than others. That article about built-in furniture was about the last one I wrote for a magazine. By that point I'd got a bit fed up of writing for what quite frequently was really very small remuneration and other irritations, and basically decided to write no further articles. I didn't stop writing though, but I haven't written for magazines or journals since about 2003. Slainte.
 

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