museum benches

Written By Robin Wade

Museum benches

museum benchesFrom the start of this little business, as I considered bench designs, I've always envisioned them used as  museum benches.  Heavy, low to the ground, unadorned so the bench doesn't distract from the "other" art in the room.

Well, I can't tell you how pleased I was when Ed Bridges, the director of the Alabama department of archives and history started planning the benches for his new museum - the Museum of Alabama.  The museum will be opening in stages, with the grand opening in August.  And, for the first stage, we worked with Ed and his design consultants in the design of these first benches.  It was really a simple matter of taking a standard bench design, customizing the length, adding a couple inches to the height, adding some width for extra stability, and adding a low stretcher to plan for lots of heavy use.  I think they turned out just great, and look forward to seeing them in action during the grand opening ceremony in August.

museum benches

Robin Wade
Robin Wade Furniture is a celebration of nature—a melding of a forward thinking commitment to the environment and a quiet, harmonious design aesthetic. From his "slow studio" in North Alabama, award-winning wood artist Robin Wade designs and crafts one-of-a-kind handmade furniture. Years before a piece is ready to enter a client's home or a gallery, the process begins—naturally—with the tree. Sustainably harvested, each specimen of hardwood is flitch sawn into natural-edge wood slabs, debarked by hand with a draw knife, and stacked to dry, usually for years, before the final cure in the kiln. From here, Wade and his team use both hand and power tools to bring Wade's vision to life, and then finish each piece with a hand-rubbed oil blend. Each organic furniture creation by Robin Wade Furniture balances the raw, natural beauty of environmentally, locally sourced hardwoods with minimally invasive, clean lines—a juxtaposition Wade calls both rustic and modern. “I haven’t yet found a better artist than nature,” he says.
robinwadefurniture.com
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