Creating furniture from diseased ash.

Notch is a furniture series designed to overstate and exclaim the beauty of the underlying substructure found in hand-built solid wood table assemblies. Typically hidden from view, the Notch table brings the 'skeleton' substructure of the table right up to the surface as a contemporary design detail to showcase the expert craftsmanship and joinery details.

Notch was designed in response to the ash tree crisis in Ontario, for a juried exhibition at IIDEX. Currently, ash trees are rotting and being eaten inside out by an invasive species of beetle, the emerald ash borer. This is leading to trees being cut down prematurely in an attempt to curb the population of the beetle, and creating an excess of low grade hardwood.

Traditional table designs incorporate large solid wood tops that require the highest grade of lumber, free from natural imperfections like checking and knots. This design demand for high grade lumber makes it more ever more difficult to source local materials such as diseased ash to use in high level furniture construction. By splitting up the table top into smaller sections in a sensible contemporary fashion, we are able to actually use diseased lumber, offcuts and shorts that are not 'furniture grade' and realistically source such materials locally and responsibly.