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Live edge furniture revival

Ricki Normandin
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Yin Yang dining table of salvaged bigleaf maple.

Photo: Live Edge Design

 

 

 

Pioneered by architect George Nakashima in the 1940s, ‘live edge’ furniture happens when a raw wood slab meets a master craftsman. The result is a design as individual as the tree it came from and the person who made it.

This concept has been revived as an eco-friendly, innovative style for the 21st century by skilled artisans who work with salvaged or reclaimed wood.

Furniture From A Tree 

A prime force behind resurrecting the live edge style, John Lore’s company, Live Edge Design in Duncan, B.C., salvages trees, mainly Bigleaf Maples, from various sources and crafts them into designs with a distinctive contemporary West Coast look.

Several months of air-drying and kiln-drying the wood to six to eight per cent moisture content starts the process. Lore is an ardent advocate of proper drying. “Improperly dried wood gives the industry a bad name,” he says. “It doesn’t cost much to buy a moisture meter.” Warping is an issue with large slabs and thicker the wood, the more difficult it is to dry.

Working with large wood slabs demands “great physical strength,” says Lore. “Existing equipment isn’t designed for it and a lot of handwork is required.” A good artistic eye also helps since the wood is not uniform and decisions have to be made on the fly. There are always surprises. “We use wood with knots, cracks and different grain directions that all have different shrinkage rates. There are lots of stresses on the wood.”

Lore and his artisans prefer to find a piece of wood and decide what to make with it, but the market reality is that 80 percent of clients ask for something specific. About half the company’s projects are residential and half commercial, with many found in B.C.’s top resorts.

Lore attributes the appeal of the live edge style to several factors, but it may have been best expressed to him by a woman at a trade show: “Thank you for reminding me that furniture comes from a tree.”

 Esthetically Inspired

Peter Bunnett, owner of Bunnett Live Edge Furniture, has been making things with wood for 35 years. His repertoire ranges from percussion instruments to vintage table hockey games to ice-racing boats. He invokes Nakashima as inspiration for his live edge furniture. Bunnett specifies that ‘live edge’ refers to the wavy edge or cambian layer just in- side the bark of the tree. This layer defines and gives clarity to the shape. To keep its integrity, Bunnett painstakingly debarks

the slab by hand with a hammer – “obsessive,” he admits, but critical to keeping the cambian layer as pristine as possible.

Bunnett gets most of the wood he uses from his own 700 acres of cherry, maple and oak in Ompah, Ontario. Nature decides which trees to harvest. An ice storm a few years ago damaged many cherry trees so Bunnet now has a lot of that wood to work with. The wood is air- dried, stacked and stored for up to four years before use. “I baby it,” Bunnett says, but he is considering adding a solar kiln to the process.

His design approach juxtaposes rough slab against refined material such as steel, glass or concrete. Combining ancient with modern, Bunnett uses a technique derived from Haida steam-bent boxes to create 90-degree angles that highlight the integrity of the board.

Bunnett’s pieces include coffee, hall and side tables, benches, some knock down designs, and a new line of bed- side tables. He favors designs that are both exceptional and accessible.

Green Rescue

Don’t waste trees is a principle most of us don’t question. But it takes entrepreneurs with vision and a green conscience to turn Toronto’s unwanted trees into eco-friendly, one-of-a-kind furniture designs.

When landscape designer Sean Gorham and his partner Melissa Niest saw that nobody in Canada was in the business of salvaging useable urban trees from the mulcher, they founded Toronto’s Urban Salvage in 2005. In the GTA alone, more than 9,000 trees per year are cut down for various reasons. The ‘green evolution’ was perfect timing for the idea, says Niest. “People are getting away from disposables and are tired of cookie- cutter designs.”

Rescued hardwoods such as maple, ash, oak, elm, poplar and catalpa are prized for their natural “beauty marks” like knots, grains and other imperfections not found in conventional lumber. The wood is kiln-dried to the right moisture content and to kill traces of insects or disease.

Urban Salvage has a broad clientele of individuals, designers, architects and others who either start from scratch to design and build their own piece or choose a rough sawn slab for the artisans at Urban Salvage to craft.

“We use the same shop tools as in conventional woodworking,” says Niest, “but with a different skill level. Wider slabs can twist and warp when cut and need special treatment.”

Like a treasure hunt, the salvage process can turn up exciting finds and great stories. A black walnut tree cut on the University of Toronto campus found its way back into the school’s library as a one-of-a-kind desk. And, some Urban Salvage pieces made of reclaimed old growth pine can trace their pedigree to a historic 19th century Toronto wharf excavated from underwater. 

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