Catalogue № 7 · Spring 2026
Furniture Workshop · Hudson Valley
Four objects this season. Oak, walnut, ash. Everything here is cut, fitted, and finished by two pairs of hands in one room, and priced to say so.
Part One
Plate 01 · photographed against the shop wall, unstyled.
Plate 01
A chair for sitting low and long. The seat is woven in unbleached cane over an oak frame; the back is shaped with a spokeshave to meet the spine, not the eye.
Plate 02 · photographed against the shop wall, unstyled.
Plate 02
Casework in walnut, carcase dovetailed at each corner. The doors slide on waxed oak runners; there is no hardware to catch a sleeve. Interior in ash, left bright.
Plate 03 · photographed against the shop wall, unstyled.
Plate 03
Three legs, because floors are not flat. The seat is saddled by hand from a single ash plank; the legs are riven, not sawn, so the grain runs their full length.
Plate 04 · photographed against the shop wall, unstyled.
Plate 04
Steel where it must be, paper where it can be. The stem is blackened bar stock on a cast base; the shade is kozo paper on an oak ring, and it warms a room, not a page.
Part Two
We use glue, and we do not trust it. Every joint in this catalogue would hold with the glue omitted: the tenon is wedged, the dovetail is tapered, the stool leg swells against its socket as the seat dries around it.
The mortise and tenon is the oldest agreement in woodwork: one piece gives way so another can enter, and both are stronger for it. The pattern running through this catalogue is that joint, drawn plainly. We chose it over a photograph of one because the idea is the point.
Wood moves. A tabletop grows and shrinks a few millimetres every year, forever. Good joinery does not fight this; it leaves room. Buttons, slots, elongated holes; the quiet allowances are the craft.
Part Three
Oxbow occupies a former cider barn at 6 Millbrook Lane, ten minutes from the river whose bend named us. The bench room holds two benches, a wall of clamps, and the timber for the year, stickered and drying. The showroom holds whatever is finished and nothing that is not.
We buy logs, not lumber, from two sawyers within an hour of the shop, and we dry them ourselves for eighteen months. It is the slowest possible way to work and the only one that lets us choose a board for the chair it will become.
Part Four
Fig. iv · at the bench, one window, no styling.
Founder · chairs, weaving
Trained as a boatbuilder; still lofts every chair full-scale on the shop floor. Keeps the cane damp and the jokes dry.
Fig. v · at the bench, one window, no styling.
Casework, finishing
Thirty years at the bench. Grades every board in the yard by ear as much as by eye, and has never once rushed an oil coat.
Part Five
Half of each year’s bench time is kept for commissioned work: dining tables, benches, the occasional bed. The process has four movements and no surprises.
Write with a room, a use, and a budget. Photographs help. We answer within the week, plainly, including when the answer is no.
Full-scale drawings and a wood sample, posted to you. Two rounds of revision are included. A third of the price reserves the bench.
Six to fourteen weeks, depending on the work. You receive one photograph, midway, from the bench. The piece is better than the updates would be.
Blanket-wrapped in our own van within two hundred miles; crated in ash offcuts beyond. We place it, level it, and take the wrappings home.
The book opens for autumn on the first of September. Write to bench@oxbow.example.
Appendix
Dust with a dry cloth. Wipe spills when you notice them, not urgently. Once a year, a coin-sized pool of the oil we send with each piece, spread thin and buffed after twenty minutes. No silicone polish, ever; it cannot be undone.
Walnut lightens toward honey in sunlight; oak deepens. Neither is damage. A ring left by a glass will usually rub out with the oil; a dent can be raised with a damp cloth and a warm iron. Anything worse, bring it back. Repairs to our own work are free for as long as we exist.
Within two hundred miles of the workshop we deliver ourselves, blanket-wrapped, and place the piece where it will live. Farther afield, work travels crated in ash offcuts with a carrier we have used for nine years. Crates are returnable; most come back as firewood, which is also fine.
Lead times in this catalogue are honest, not optimistic. When a date moves, you hear it from us first, with a reason.