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Bombe Vitrine
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This piece will be auctioned on Ebay.com with an ending date of Oct. 1, 2005.
Contact Jeff Greef at jg(at)jeffgreefwoodworking.com.

Cabinetmakers rarely attempt a bombe vitrine due to the difficulty of producing the sculpted forms involved, but when they do the design possibilities extend far beyond what can be achieved with flat and single-bent forms. Furniture shapes of double curvature such as bombe chests were and still are produced using wood carving techniques, but bending glass to a double-curvature form and fitting it to wood is rarely if ever attempted in contemporary woodworking.

This display cabinet measures approximately 24 x 30 x 60 inches. Made of claro walnut (native to California) and slumped glass, it has three flat 1/4" plate glass shelves, dimming halogen lights in the top, locking door, and one drawer (not locking) in the base. Lites (panes of glass) are true-divided (the tree branches separate the panes with wood), with several dozen total separate panes of bent glass installed. The piece was made between 1994 and 1999.

'Bombe' is a French term which simply means rounded, 'vitrine' comes from the latin 'vitrum', for glass.

My intent with this piece was to create an organic form unconstrained by the limitations of ordinary woodworking, to make something that looked like it was about to get up and walk away. In order to do so I had to use very difficult and inconvenient methods. Most woodworking bears the earmarks of convenience- which is to say that woodworkers design pieces with straight lines and flat surfaces because their tools make those shapes far easier and faster than they make curves and bulges. I was growing tired of designing pieces around the limited capabilities of my tools, with straight pieces of wood and maybe a simple curve here and there. So I designed a piece as I wanted to without regard to convenience of tooling, and then went to the lengths necessary to acheive what I had designed. If you want to learn more about the technical challenge involved, go to this article on my site.

Photo credit Bruce Ashley, Santa Cruz CA.




Note that the glass in this piece is spherical in shape, that is, it is bent in two directions, both up and down and side to side (so-called 'double bent'). This makes the piece highly unusual. Most display cabinets use flat glass, and many use single bent glass which is bent one direction but not the other. Such single-bent glass is cylindrical, and is straight in one direction, usually up and down. The wood frames required to hold glass that is double bent as in this cabinet are far more difficult to produce than wood frames that hold flat or single bent glass, thus cabinets of this design type are very rare.

Historical precedents for this kind of work include pieces produced by French cabinetmaker Francois Linke in the late 19th century. Linke was famous for his sculpted and highly ornate pieces, such as a bombe vitrine which may be seen at Jan's Antiques. The extremely detailed and frivolous furniture of that period utilized natural forms without regard to efficiency and cost.

Gustav Stickley and the Craftsman movement of the early 20th century eschewed such flamboyant and expensive design, and rightly called for more practical design that was elegant but affordable by most people. Since then most furniture design has used efficient methods incorporating rectangular forms, and the excesses of the past are frowned upon. But did they throw out the baby with the bathwater? Is there a place in cabinet design for natural form which is not fancifully self-indulgent? Should all cabinet design be constrained by efficient technique? Is craft less artful when it depends upon efficient technique? Should production time and expense limit art?

In contemporary woodworking, I have not seen or heard of any other examples of this kind of work, though it's possible some may exist. I believe that my piece is highly unique in artistic concept, if not entirely original in engineering design. I doubt you will find anything like it available anywhere, with the exception of rare antiques such as Linke's work, which are not done in a contemporary style.


The techniques involved in making this cabinet were highly time consuming, and I took my time in order to do the best job I possibly could. In all, the piece took about 1350 hours to complete over a period of about 5 years. That's equal to 2/3 of a year of full time work.

Technical woodworking info: Joinery at the four corners of each of the five main frames that constitute the upper cabinet is lapped tenons (which are spherical like the frames), glued with urea formaldehyde glue. Curved bars (branches) are joined by cope and stick and polyurethane glue, then re-inforced with epoxy and cloth in the rabbets (entirely hidden by glazing putty). Four of the main frames are butt-glued to each other with dividers between using aliphatic glue, and the fifth frame is removeable. This door sits on pins at the bottom and is locked at the top. The upper frame assembly is screwed to the flat table top. Flat table top has two floating panels in a mitered frame glued with splines. The four legs of the base are joined to the rails with standard carcass mortise and tenon joinery, the short rails at the drawer are joined with mortise and tenon and dovetail joints. Drawer is dovetailed.

If the piece is moved to a climate that experiences extremes in humidity and/or extreme variations in humidity yearly, it must be kept in a humidity controlled environment. The wood in it was air dried for 10 years in the ocean air climate of coastal California and the piece has resided here ever since. This is an ideal climate for furniture because the humidity is moderate and doesn't vary a lot. I hope the piece stays in this area for that reason. Drying the piece in lower humidity than the wood has ever experienced may cause the curved tree-branch window bars in the frames to crack or their joints to fail, eventually, and perhaps other problems. Because these circumstances are out of my control, I can take no responsibility for the effects of low humidity or high variation of humidity on the piece.

Condition of the piece is near new, with a few very minor scratches from being shipped to several shows. The finish is orange shellac with paste wax. The door is one of the smaller curved side panels and lifts off with no hinges. It locks securely in place with a standard good quality extruded brass cabinet lock and key. Four halogen lights are mounted in the top four corners of the case, with transformer and dimmer mounted under the table top next to the drawer. A black cord hangs down from under the piece to power the lights, and plugs into a standard electrical receptacle. This cord doesn't look nice but it was necessary for the lights. The lights are a modular type that can be modified in various ways such as increasing or decreasing the spot angle by swapping out different bulb heads, or extending them downward with metal arms to focus on a particular object. The lights generate a fair amount of heat and should not be left on for extended periods of time. The bottom of the drawer has a knot in it that I think looks nice but someone else might describe as a defect. The underside of the cabinet base is finished but not as well as visible surfaces. A nitpicker can criticize a few joints for lack of absolute perfection but overall the joinery is very tight and well executed. I wrote a few words on the bottom of the base describing the glass radius used for the sake of future repair efforts (in someone else's lifetime).




The glass is GNA (German New Antique), which is not an antique glass, but rather a contemporary machine rolled glass with slight but noticably visible striations in the glass making it appear antique. Objects placed in the cabinet are very slightly distorted by this glass, but this is not objectionable when the objects are within 12 inches of the glass through which they are viewed. Objects on the other side of the cabinet, 24 inches or so away from the glass through which they are viewed, are noticably distorted by the striated glass. Some may find this objectionable. I will not put different glass in the cabinet. One piece of glass in the cabinet does not fit the wood perfectly and putty, visible from outside the cabinet, fills the gap between the glass and wood. At most this gap is slightly more than 1/16 inch. All other pieces of glass fit the wood with gaps little more than 1/32 inch if that. Putty is used to hold all the glass in the frames, is colored dark brown to match the walnut, and is visible inside the cabinet. I slumped the glass myself with a kiln and refractory-cement form which I made.




ABOUT THE MAKER

Jeff Greef is author of four books and over 100 magazine articles on woodworking techniques. His books include "Make Your Own Jigs and Woodshop Furniture", "Marvelous Wooden Boxes You Can Make" and "Display Cabinets You Can Customize" all published by F+W, and "Woodworking For Fun and Profit" published by Prima. Magazines he has written for include Fine Woodworking, American Woodworker, Home Mechanix, Popular Woodworking, Woodwork, Woodshop News and others. He edited Woodwork Magazine during it's first year. Many of his original woodworking designs can be seen on his website www.jeffgreefwoodworking.com.

He has also been a gamelan musician (traditional Indonesian percussion orchestra), tenor choir member with Pacific Voices Choir of Santa Cruz, Calif., radio disjockey at KUSP FM Santa Cruz, amateur piano technician and worse piano player. He studied ancient Greek literature at university and continues in the present to read (in the original) the ancient epics attributed to Homer, and has plans to write a book about how people in ancient Greek society of that day understood themselves and the world around them.

Greef is a tinkerer with an insatiable curiosity to experiment with and understand the fundamental principles behind the structure and organization of our world. His bombe vitrine came about from his desire to push the limits of woodworking geometry beyond common ground to the aesthetically sublime, to use the rational abstraction of mechanical technique for the purpose of imitating the blooming growth of natural form found in organic life.



This piece will be auctioned on Ebay.com with an ending date of Oct. 1, 2005. The piece is available for inspection in Santa Cruz, California. I encourage you to contact me with questions and to visit. All personal information will be kept confidential. If you would prefer that this auction be conducted privately, let me know and I may change it to a private auction, where no bidder identities are revealed.

Shipping furniture like this is very expensive when shipped far, and insurance is expensive as well. I have one estimate from a professional international shipper of antique furniture for about $3,000 (shipping and insurance, no setup) to ship from California to New York. They ship in climate controlled trucks with air cushioned suspension, and for an extra fee will set up the piece in its new home. Seller will pay costs of shipping and insurance (not setup) up to five percent of the sale price of the item. If the costs of shipping and insurance exceed five percent, the buyer must pay the remainder.

This cabinet is for sale as is, and is quaranteed to be in the condition described herein. The cabinet comes with two very heavy plywood packing crates custom made to contain it. Only the cabinet, packing crates and extra slumped glass are for sale. Rights to photographs of the cabinet are not included in this sale, also not included are any photos of the cabinet owned by the maker, nor rights to stories written about the cabinet, nor any tools used to produce the cabinet, nor rights to the design of this or any other similar cabinet. You get the cabinet, I keep the concept.

Contact Jeff Greef at jg(at)jeffgreefwoodworking.com

Thank you.

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