Throne armchair

The Concept
A solid wood chair created for comfort and formed from 58 pieces of wood fitted individually into place, tapering to points at the front of the seat. Throne Armchair is a play on shapes. The seat is comprised of 29 rays of wood that fan out from the front centre towards the back, where they align with carefully chosen segments of wood that continue the ray concept into the back and sides of the chair.

The chair flares out at the top and the front, creating a solidity of shape and a wrap-around comfort experience, whilst minimising the weight of the wood. A small handle cut into the bottom of the seat makes Throne Armchair easy and comfortable to manoeuvre, even whilst seated upon it.

The ray pattern has a functional as well as a visual purpose. The carefully aligned segments allow the chair to move seasonally, responding to slight seasonal changes in humidity in a way that causes no stress to the wood.

Throne Armchair has previously been created in several different woods, the one currently available is made from warm British Cherry.

Creating Throne Armchair
Daniel started by joining together the central ray on the seat and back before gradually working out at either side. The rays are of varying size, thickness and angles, some tapering to as little as 1mm. Creating the wood segments, carefully matching the grains and joining the segments together took around 50 hours.

The seat of Throne Armchair has been sculpted and shaped by hand sanding, a process that took Daniel a further 60 hours to complete. This gentle shaping is what makes the chair so very comfortable, a quality that is not often attributed to solid wood chairs.

To bring out the exquisite grain and colouration of the wood Daniel made his own sanding blocks using automotive sandpaper normally used for polishing cars. This specialist sandpaper is 3 times finer than he would normally use and the fine finish is enhanced by eight layers of natural organic oil. The specialist oil takes a full week per layer to dry, meaning that finishing of Throne Armchair alone was an eight week long process.

The Wood
British Cherry. Throne Armchair is made entirely from a cherry tree felled in 2006 less than half a mile from Daniel’s previous workshop. At around 100 years old this cherry tree was right at the end of its life and many of its offspring remain. The wood has a darker, warmer colouration than most available cherry wood because of the great age of this tree, and the richness of the colour has been preserved by extremely fine sanding and the careful choice of a natural oil with citrus infusion. This same cherry tree was also used to create Chestless.