Design methods and systems for chairs (and everything, really)

I was lucky enough to meet Ed from Standish Gatehouse recently, and to visit the amazing space he’s created there. One of many local delights we’re still discovering after moving to Stroud.

While there, I spotted this lovely little stool which struck me as a bit Enzo Mari, Autoprogettazione-ish in its design.

A simple rustic looking angular stool made of off cuts of wood batten. The legs are capital A shaped and the seat is slatted. It’s very basic yet oddly architectural and practical looking.

Ed confirmed that it was built in a workshop project using left over lengths of wood, so very Enzo, and very me. I just love thrifty and clever projects like these, especially when they end up creating such handsome objects from so little.

I kept looking at this photo and decided I wanted to try and build one for myself, using my own random offcuts of roofing batten. Douglas fir that’s been sitting outside for three years (Douglas is good for that sort of thing so long as it’s not sitting in water). Here’s what I dug out.

Three long bits of messy looking thin wood lying on grass

Some deliberately wonky bits that I can’t imagine being useful for much else (yet the sort of material I can never just throw away).

The detail about Ed’s design that hit me most was its seemingly very minimal lost of ingredients. One type of wood and from what I can tell, just three slightly different lengths of it. Add some screws and, boom! A stool. A super simple furniture system.

A very poor pencil sketch of the stool design, created in order to think more about the structure. The sketch has three arrows pointing to parts of the stool to illustrate which parts are the same lengths.
Roughly 9 medium, 8 long and 4 short.

I didn’t know exact dimensions so I based my stool off a rough height of 45cm and width of 35cm. I lined it up, gauged the dimensions and adjusted the design as I cut. Then experimented with some off cuts to see how they’d take the screws I had to hand. That resulted in a collection of wood that I roughly sanded and got ready to assemble.

A few lengths of wood that were the first to cut
7 lengths of the wood lined up to make the top aka the seat of the stool in order to check how it looks and might feel to sit on.
A failed test of screwing a screw through one piece of wood into another. The second piece as split open
How the inside of the split wood looks. You can see the screw marks on either side, like a fossil that’s been cracked in half
All the pieces together on the grass. Three piles of each length needed.
Two pieces of wood have been sanded and sit on the grass next to the others waiting to be sanded but my old piece of yellow sandpaper
A close up showing a few still dirty pieces of wood next to some lightly sanded ones. They just look a bit cleaner, not fancy or really smooth
The finally pieces. All sanded and lying on the grass

The screw test taught me that I needed to pre-drill the screw holes to prevent the thin battens from cleaving. By this point I had realised my full list of ingredients / materials, tools, and the design and build system required.

  • Lengths of batten
  • Tape measure
  • Wood cutting tool
  • Drill
  • Drill bit
  • Screws

I wanted this project to be an experiment and a bit of fun, plus I liked the idea that this type of stool shouldn’t be perfect. So, in less than an hour of fiddling (and having to change the drill bit and screw bit over and over as I’ve only got one drill) I figured things out.

4 pieces of wood are aligned into a square so I can start to figure out how to drill the pilot holes for the screws
The seat of the stool when it’s seven slats screwed in place with silver headed screws sitting flush inside the wood
The seat is in the centre of the picture surrounded by the teaming wood arranged into a shapes that will make up the lakes, again waiting for me to figure out how to fix them correctly. The arrangement looks a little like a snowflake design
A close-up of where a screw has been too long and poked through the other side of the Wood. My solution has been hit it with a hammer and squish the pointy part down.
The first two pieces of wood are lined up and waiting to be screwed onto the seat. This photo is the last one on grass because I realised getting it level would be difficult to do on an uneven surface.
The stool is lying on its side with the A-shaped legs balanced in place ready to be screwed on

After dropping the drill twice and breaking two of the necessarily thin drill bits (and amazingly finding a rusty third one in a pot), and once I moved to a flat surface to try and eye a roughly level seat, I was done.

A high contrast photo of my simple rustic looking angular stool made of off cuts of wood batten. The legs are capital A shaped and the seat is slatted. It’s very basic yet oddly architectural and practical looking.

And I think it’s ace.

Another photo of my stoll as before. From a slightly different angle. An unneeded extra photo for this post really but I really do like it so wanted two pics in slightly different lighting (this one is lower contrast)

I’d love to make more. Tweak it. Perfect it. Turn the method into a system. Share it. Try my own workshop version. Use it as a metaphor to teach about design and iteration.

This is a long time old idea though and sometime I think I’m closer than ever to making a priority (using discarded furniture in particular as a lens though which to teach about creativity, design, manufacturing, business, branding, sustainability, psychology, philosophy and self help).

Also, the project has made me think more about how everything becomes a system in some way. And how this is both a good and bad thing. Anyway.

Anyone fancy making a stool with me?