quail coop
April 2020
When I built my raised garden beds two summers ago, I had also recently given up on a tandem project of raising quail. I designed a coop sized for 6-8 hens if I remember correctly. The doors (painted green) are meant to hinge open, the lower ones are for collecting eggs from along the sloped floor. The style of the cabin of the coop was made to complement the house it would adjoin, while it was also meant to partner up with the garden beds.
yarn caddy
December 2020
When I made my sewing table I also designed a set of crates for each of my sewing machines. They each fit in a tray sized to their beds, and then each had a corresponding case with handles which connected using latch hardware. The case size varied according to the size of the tray, so that all the crates were the same overall dimensions.
One of my sewing machines does a kind of embroidery stitch, and uses a particular type of yarnlike thread. I have 25 rolls of this ‘tex 15’, and they roughly form a color space when arrayed with some care. I tried a couple variations on how I could display the colors and also keep to the standard overall size of my other crates.
wacom desk
January 2021
I have a wacom tablet from about ten years ago that sits on an adjustable stand, meant to tilt like a drafting table. It also turns on a radius at the center of the screen to almost any angle. The problem with the stand though is that when placed on the desk I found the screen was always a bit higher than I felt comfortable drawing on. Being from 2012, the screen itself is four or five inches thick at the center. It was always above where I felt the desk ‘should’ be (and was), no matter what angle i set it at.
I worked for a couple weeks attempting to make a desk that could swallow the tablet and make the two surfaces basically flush. The desk itself began with a design in James Hennessey’s book of DIY furniture “Nomadic Furniture”, designed to use just two 4’x8’ sheets of plywood in an interlocking, fastener-free joinery system. From there the design evolved a bit, first to slope at a set angle, then an adjustable one, and finally to allow the tablet the ability to rotate on a lazy susan, with a screw tightened brake.
cat sheds
March 2021
During the covid lockdowns I spent a lot of time living among and observing our new kittens. They’re the first I’ve ever really gotten to know, with attitudes and personalities that seemed to be there from the start.
Tony, the more aggressive cat would usually be the instigator, stalking Maria and pouncing and chasing her. Maria is more of a comfort-cat and is not as high energy, she always seemed like she was putting up with Tony’s excitement and humoring him until he became too vicious. We wondered if their names were deliberate, because Tony was usually bent on pursuing Maria.
I’m not sure what first caused me to think of designing play structures for the cats. It wasn’t in keeping with my project from college for dogs, but more along the lines of interesting and strange furniture.
The line of thinking here is a little weird. We had a couple carpet-clad towers and tubes for the cats to play on and they seemed to me like a strange kind of brutalist form. Carpet-brutalist. There was equally something scratching at the back of my mind that I had read somewhere in design theory, someone from the streamline era like maybe Raymond Loewy had said that the basic form of cars is derived from the sphinx, a strange prone homunculous of a forward oriented face and 4 wheel appendages. This got me thinking about my cats as little vehicles, in relation to their furniture scale play structures, which in my covid shut-in fervor seemed like little buildings. And thinking of little buildings pertaining to vehicles as their users, I thought of the roadside architecture of the 50s and 60s.
So at approximately the intersection of these two thoughts came the idea of “cat sheds”, as in decorated sheds for cat traffic. The first is based largely on the Chips restaurant in Hawthorne California, designed by Harry Harrison in 1957, and the other is an adaptation of a bus stop in Shymkent, Kazakhstan, designed by an anonymous state architect in the 1970s. They each feel proportionate to the different characters of the cats that I’ve come to know too, one a riff on the prowling inherent to “cruising the strip” and the other a humble monument to the braced and waiting.