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  Making a Cotswold Arts and Crafts Cabinet in Elm

© John Bullar 2002   

Travelling home from the Axminster Furniture & Cabinetmaking show a couple of years ago, I stopped off  at Cheltenham to stay with old friends.  We took a trip into town and spent some happy hours in Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum. This has a gallery devoted to the Cotswold school of Arts and Crafts furniture - inspiring pieces of work from mid 19th to mid 20th Century with a common theme of pleasure in unpretentious handcraft. I came away wanting to design and build some furniture that would express a few of the ideas I had seen. Straight away I got sketching while the memory was fresh - I would start by making a sideboard cabinet and follow it with a co-ordinated round table, both pieces for a large kitchen.  One fundamental of the Cotswold style was to use wide boards to give uninterrupted figuring on surfaces.  I very much wanted the sideboard top to be made from a single board without any joints, but I would have to find the right wood.

Some of the finest furniture in Cheltenham gallery, even quite large pieces, was in English walnut, which is certainly beautiful and good to work, but large pieces are in very short supply.  I have only ever been able to obtain enough good quality material to use it for small delicate work and haven’t come across English walnut boards wide enough for this kind of piece. Instead, I decided to use Elm, a beautifully wild organic-figured wood with bags of character. It has warm brown colours with occasional streaks of green and a profusion of cat-paws knots.  The downside of Elm's wild nature is that it can move a lot while drying, twisting and buckling around the knots and nearly always splitting around the central pith of the tree as it weaves up through the trunk.

Mature elm trees have been in decline in Britain now for more than half a century - the ravages of the fungus ceratocystis ulmi  (better known to its enemies as Dutch elm disease) has brought down most specimens with a trunk more than a foot diameter.  On the waney edges of my wide boards, just under the bark were telltale patterns of the galleries where the elm-bark beetles had hatched their fungus-carrying brood.

I had selected the boards very carefully when I bought them. They had already been air-dried - I had them kilned, then collected them within a day of coming out of the kiln. After several months storage in my workshop most of the boards remained completely flat while the ends had cupped by a few millimetres.  I picked through the boards for the cabinet top and sides to give an appearance of continuous figuring ‘wrapped’ around the top corner joints. I wanted the finished carcass to be a full inch thick. 

Having prepared the faces, edges and ends of the four boards and chosen the front edges  mark out the dovetail pins on the ends of the carcass sides with a 1:8 guide in the usual manner. With 29 pins and 30 tails into the 26-inch depth, the pitch of the pins works out at just less than one inch.  In keeping with the Arts and Crafts style, the alternate pins are cut to 2/3 depth to enhance the visual interest of the joints. Mark these out with a knife-edged marker gauge on the end grain and after cutting all the pins full size pare back alternate pins to the line.

For marking the tails the carcass side is clamped to the left-hand end of the bench with pins protruding above the bench surface. The corresponding carcass top or base is lightly scribed twice with the marker gauge for two depths of pins, laid along the bench and butted up to the side piece then clamped up tight against the pins using the tail vice. Next use a square to mark from all four corners of each pin to the scribed lines where the tail will be cut.  Cut the tails in the conventional way, checking by with a calliper that they will be a good fit on the pins.

The doors are frame and panel construction. The stiles and rails are jointed using open slotted mortises and full size tennons. The vertical and horizontal cross members meet in a halving joint and have small tennons to engage in the same slots as the panels. All the door parts are cut from adjacent boards to keep them looking ‘book-matched’, the rails and stiles are straight grained and the panels from burred ends of boards.

This cabinet uses internal pivot pins to avoid the look or feel of door hinges protruding from the front of a cabinet. These doors are hung on pivot pins made from large brass screws that pivot in washers that are trapped in holes in the carcass. Variations on this method have served me well for a number of years. When I first made these simple hinges I thought I could claim it as a new idea – until I saw a similar method on a seventeenth century chest (still bearing up well).d of the rail. The pilot hole can now be enlarged:

Gluing-up up any carcass can be a scary business, but with 120 dovetails and four double tennon joints all coming together at once, good planning and slow setting glue are essential.

The carcass of this cabinet sits upon a pair of fairly massive pedestals, undercut to form front and rear feet, and with stepped fronts. These are cut from three by six-inch elm, so the front end-grain patterns are bookmatched. The cut-aways are produced on the bandsaw, together with a mortising chisel to remove the angled undercut of the feet.  I used a finely tuned block plane where to chamfers where possible and, where the block plane would not reach, I turned to a long handled Japanese paring chisel to complete the finely cut chamfers.

To make a simple back, vertical strips of cedar of Lebanon were sprung into slots in the top and base. All the cabinet faces were sanded with fine paper only; to preserve the hand planed surfaces and sharply defined mitred edges. I gave all the outside faces four applications of Danish oil, brushed off then wiped off again, diluted with turpentine in ratios 1:1, 1:2, 1:3 then 1:4, sanding finely between each.  I brought the finish to a sheen with beeswax and turpentine polish,  I also recommended it on the label for future maintenance to help develop a patina.