Desk

This desk and bookcase are both built from mahogany, the former in 8/4 material and the latter in 4/4. Our distributor in New Hampshire has a wide range of wood species in stock, and we hand-select every board for every piece we build. Cannon Hill’s quality control process involves various, regular checks to make sure that all the furniture that leaves our shop meets our exacting standards of aesthetic and functional quality. One of the first of these checks is a visual examination to ensure consistency of color and tone.

Most of the work that we do here at Cannon Hill is on dining tables — pieces that are meant to be the gathering place for family and friends, a centerpiece around which meals are shared and memories made. They’re deeply personal to us and our clients. Sometimes, though, we receive inquiries from businesses, interested in conference tables.

Our clients on this project approached us to commission a desk that would fit the aesthetic of the renovation that they were undertaking for their loft apartment in Boston’s Seaport neighborhood. With beautiful old posts dotting the floor plan, and exposed brick throughout, the goal was to evoke the historic, the well-worn, and the time-tested. In our book, that makes reclaimed oak the obvious choice.

Our client came to us with the idea for this desk, and we homed in on the final design together. Rather than having conventional legs or a base, it features a waterfall edge on one side, and rests on a preexisting built-in bookcase on the other. The “waterfall” here refers to the fact that it’s made from a single long section which we cut along a common seam at 45-degree angles and then glued back together to form a tight, right-angle turn down to the floor. When the process is properly done, the wood grain flows seamlessly over and down the corner like water over a fall.

When we’re making a desk, the design process needs to consider some different factors that aren’t present in tables. What will the use be? Is it a desk for meeting across, or for solo work? Will our client be working at a computer most of the time? Using multiple monitors? What are the storage requirements? If it’s going in a corner, like this one, how is it best positioned to maximize usable space of both the room and the desk? Answering all these questions is the backbone of the design process.

These three American elm tables are the result of a collaboration between Cannon Hill and a designer working on a Wellesley home. While our work with designers is typically characterized by a great deal of back and forth to ensure that all parties involved agree on each individual decision, occasionally, as in this case, we’ll effectively be handed a brief and turned loose to create some beautiful work that fulfills all the needs.

This awesome desk started with a small hand sketch that the client drew of her dream desk, and we made it come to life. It has two pen drawers, cast iron wishbone bases, and Morado accent pieces on the shelf. 

It was quite difficult to source the Bolivian Rosewood (aka Morado) for this project because you can usually only find smaller or thinner pieces. We ended up finding a distributor in Maryland with just barely enough material to make the project work! The design was a collaboration between Cannon Hill and the client, who wanted a better work from home set up as Covid has him working from home.

The desk is completely custom made by hand, with every detail off the build planned beforehand. The drawer boxes are solid maple, with dovetail joints. It has an oil finish. 

Custom built L shaped maple desk for a client in Belmont. It may look clean and simple (and it's supposed to!) but a desk like this oil the product of over 75 emails, and measuring, and re-measuring and discussing every option for support and design in through detail. We're a full service design and build company, and that's exactly what we did here with this maple desk.