The grain of a maple tree slab swirls fluidly, creating unique eye-catching patterns. No two slabs are exactly alike which is why some people feel strongly that they want to see the grain pattern of their slab before they buy it. This is only truly possible if you buy your slab from a large distributor like Berkshire Product.
Ultimately, the material that we work with is the anchor for any Cannon Hill project. On the building side, the worst thing you can do is to fight the material, to try and make it do things it doesn’t want to: the wood will always win, in the end. On the design side, we need to understand what our client wants from the piece, and what sort of material will best deliver it. For this table, we pulled some of the most spectacular milled walnut you’re likely to encounter.
When our clients approached us regarding this table, they explained that they needed a live-edge table that would feel at home in their wood-filled Maine home. There were already a number of natural materials at play in the dining room, and they wanted to find something that would neither shrink from nor overpower the space. Happily, we were able to find exactly the piece they were looking for.
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.
We love to build a big dining table. They’re inherently dramatic, and there’s something special about knowing that they’ll be the gathering place for friends and family on the nights that mean the most. This table measures out at eleven-and-a-half feet, and more than four feet wide. There aren’t very many dinner parties it can’t accommodate.
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.
Sometimes, a client will come in with a very specific design idea in mind, and it’s up to us to turn that idea into a custom piece of furniture that can anchor a room in their home for decades, or generations. This live edge walnut dining table is the product of exactly that process. Our client wanted to see a square steel beam pass through a chunky walnut plate to create an “X” base of a type very different than what we often build.
A lot of wood comes through our shop, in a lot of different forms. We see reclaimed lumber of several different species, freshly milled boards in oak, cherry, maple, walnut, ash, and hickory, and live edge slabs in elm, chestnut, maple, oak, and various varieties of walnut. We see highly-figured pieces and flatter, simpler ones. It’s a testament to the visual appeal of wood that even with all that exposure we can all still get excited by the material we work with all day every day. It’s why we’re so confident that our clients won’t tire of the tables we make for them.
One of the advantages of working with us here at Cannon Hill is that when we say custom, we mean custom. Each project we do is a true one-off, designed, built, and delivered according to the specific requirements of each client and each home. That means you won’t need to compromise on size or aesthetics, because our holistic furniture design process takes every stage from drawing to delivery into account.
When we say that we’re a custom furniture maker we really mean custom, and it’s fun to get to show it off. Our clients came to us with a strong visual concept, and we worked with them to develop and hone it until that concept turned into a piece of furniture. We intend for our clients to be able to look at our work every day for the rest of their lives and see in their home exactly what they saw in their mind’s eye, so we take care to nail the design on the front end.