High-back dining chair

Three variations of the same design, built for a joint timber exhibition in July 2025. Each chair is identical in form — what changes is the timber, and with it, the entire character of the piece.

The seat is coopered from S-shaped staves: curved left to right across the hips, and shaped front to back in a continuous S that catches you at the front edge and supports you through to the back. It’s a technical seat — the kind of shaping that is only possible in solid timber, where the grain follows the curve rather than fighting it. The result is a chair you can sit in for three hours without thinking about. The back slats are laminated to a gentle curve that flexes with the body and offers lumbar support without upholstery.

Legs join the seat rails with through-mortise-and-tenon joints, wedged with Huon Pine. The joinery is structural and decorative — the wedges are visible because they’re meant to be, and because a through-tenon with a wedge is indestructible.

The three variations: Red Gum, with deep fiddleback figure that shifts in the light. Tasmanian Myrtle, warmer and more even, with a quieter grain. And ebonised Red Gum with Silky Oak — the frame darkened with quebracho bark and iron acetate, the seat and slats left pale to show the Silky Oak’s lacewood figure. The Huon Pine wedges take the ebonising solution too, so on the dark chair they disappear into the frame rather than punctuating it.

420 mm wide, 420 mm deep. Seat height 460 mm, overall height 900 mm. All three exhibition chairs are available. Commissions in any timber, as a pair or a full set, from $2,100 per chair depending on species.