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Excellence in Arts & Crafts Furniture Design and Craftsmanship Felperin Design Associates has been designing and building Arts & Crafts dining furniture for over 25 years. Starting in October 2006, we shifted our focus to the design and production of individual pieces to order. The pieces presented here represent our work since then. As our product line evolves, so will this site. Please visit us from time to time to see our design and product evolution. Our Design Heritage The cutting edge of furniture design these days, we believe, is a fusion of Craftsman from the fin de siecle and a restrained note of Asian forms. The architects and furniture designers Greene & Greene gave an excellent expression of this fusion in their many Pasadena "Elegant Bungalows." Emerging in the late nineteenth century, the Craftsman style, also known as the Mission style in its California variations, sought to express modernity through a rejection of Victorian opulence and fussiness. In its California variation, Craftsman-Mission defined and expressed the aesthetic taste of the first generation of Californians - typically cosmopolitan and educated people from elsewhere. They brought to self-consciousness and self-expression a sense of California as a new beginning, oriented toward the future. Today that future beckons as well. While this style has its origins in California, it is not restricted to the Golden State. It is, rather - as it was in the late nineteenth century - a variation of the Progressive tradition that sought to make American life simpler, more efficient, more accessible, and more aesthetic. Our furniture designs are inspired by this heritage. We stand on the shoulders of such design luminaries as the Greene Brothers, Gustav Stickley, Charles Rennie Macintosh, Josef Hoffman C. F. A. Voysey, and Antoni Gaudi. We strive to make our products embody these ideals. We balance functionality with decoration, and our admiration of these masters is tempered by our desire to make our furniture more widely available. In some cases this means less ornamentation than the originals; in other cases it means adding design features made possible by technologies not available 100 years ago. In all cases we try to build our furniture to last many generations, upholding the best of the Arts & Crafts tradition. Our Brand "..Stamped
in red in an unobtrusive place."
All of our products bear this brand. It is hot-stamped on the inside of our products, typically on horizontal stretchers of chairs and table bases. Our Joinery
All of our "stick" joinery uses mortise and tenon joints. In some cases, the joints are "pegged," that is an ebony peg is inserted transversely through the tenon to further strengthen the joint, as shown below. This is particularly important in chairs, which are subject to continual stress.
As in much of arts & crafts furniture, the plugs add a refreshing beauty to otherwise monotonous surfaces, and at the same time greatly extend the useful lifetime and integrity of the product. Splines Some of our products use decorative splines. These splines are used in much of the original Greene & Greene designs. They are made of dark woods such as ebony or walnut.
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Shown is a walnut spline against a natural finish African Mahogany post in our #705 Gamble House Table interpretation. Laminations Some of the back pieces of our chairs are bent to curvilinear shapes that provide seating comfort in harmony with traditional Arts & Crafts design. To provide strength for these members, we make them by laminating several thin strips of the same hardwood as the rest of the chair to make the desired thickness. Typically, each lamination is 1/16" thick and eight laminations are required for each member.
The picture shows a shop made jig holding the glued laminations together. To provide a perfect fit for the piece, a full-size drawing of the inner and outer profile of the member is made using the AutoCAD computer aided design program. These drawings are taped to blocks of plywood, bandsawn and sanded to shape. One profile block is sliced into several sections--for the piece shown seven sections. The 1/16" strips are glued, clamped and machined to an exact fit. Drawings For all of our products, we provide shop drawings on this website. These drawings allow you to view the dimensions of all of our products, and see construction details. We believe you should know in advance exactly what you are buying, so you can make the best informed decision. If we modify a product to your requirements, we revise the drawings and send them to you for your approval. To view or print these files you will need Adobe Acrobat. If you don't have it already, you can download Acrobat free of charge from the Adobe website by clicking this icon, and following the instructions.
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