Last winter we heard from a local woman who had recently lost her husband. He had been a woodworker and left behind some interesting pieces of wood, and she wanted to find a good home for them. We stopped by to look over what she had, and wound up taking everything off her hands. There was an attractive redwood slab and a variety of odd pieces.
Two pieces of what looked to be California walnut stood out, as wood of that species tends to do. On closer inspection, they turned out to be cut from a single longer board, and the dimensions were promising: they were over 15 inches wide and an inch and a quarter thick (five-quarter stock, as the trade has it), an attractive thickness for the work we do, so we put them aside while we considered what to make out of them.
After a bit we discovered that the boards had a distinctive curly figure, which could be featured prominently in a piece but likely wouldn’t go well with walnut boards off the shelf. So we focused on a small project that would use them both with little waste: a new iteration of our waterfall table. We reduced the width of the table by an inch or so in order to have enough stock, and we planed the boards carefully, to flatten them while retaining as much as possible of the thickness.
The finished table is visually stunning because of the uniform color and figure, most notably the curly figure which is evident on all major pieces. Because of the slightly reduced width, the table feels noticeably more delicate than previous versions of the design. This seems like an improvement to us, further proof of the importance of serendipity.
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