entryway bench
A client reached out to create an entryway bench for their apartment. Their only requirement besides the dimensions was that they wanted seating built in. This was the original design: shoe storage on the left with a single seat built in on the right.
At first I was thinking of using ceramic tiles to tile the piece, but decided against that in order to try something a bit more my style. After a few weeks testing things to see what I thought looked best, I ended up “tiling” the piece with the end-grain of plywood. Here’s what that means:
Take a 3’ or longer board of plywood and cut 1/4” strips
Taking 3 of those strips at a time, set the table saw to 30 degrees and cross cut to make parallelogram “tiles”
Repeat for what feels like forever. Once you think you have enough, do some more, because it’s never enough
In the end, you’ll have a ton of tiles that look like similar to this (these tiles weren’t cut at 30 degrees, but you get the gist):
Glueing and screwing the carcass of the bench was simple enough, so once that was done, I spent the next few weeks laying down and setting the tiles in a 3D box pattern. This is the end result before and after stain + polyurethane finish:
