Marco K. Tolomei
Helena Valley, WA

Matched pair of jarrah bedside tables

‘Nearly ten years ago, my father built my wife and I a beautiful jarrah four poster bed for a wedding present. He spent about six months designing and making it so I thought it would be a bit much to ask him to build the bedside tables as well. It was my intention to get him to help me design and make a pair of bedside tables later on. Unfortunately he passed away before I could explore the concept with him. Almost like an unfinished symphony I had to investigate the defining elements that would be true to the original bed design.

‘I focussed on the panels and turned elements of the design, modifying them slightly to accommodate a drawer and cupboard. Probably the hardest part was trying to decide on a suitable design to match the turned and carved posts on the bed. In the end I settled on a simplified version of the original design with carved leaves. Making the decision to carve the spindles was something I had never tried before and I was a bit anxious about the outcome. Anyway, I gave it a shot and four days later they seemed to turn out okay.

‘The material was recycled jarrah, sourced from a local salvage yard. I had to spend a lot of time looking in order to find pieces that would be reasonable to carve. Quite often the material was very hard to work with and prone to split and crack in the most annoying places. I kept the construction quite simple focussing more on the drawers and panel work to emphasise complexity.

‘It’s hard to work out how long it took me to build the cabinets as they were pretty much a work in progress over a 10 month period. I had to make them again I would guess that it would probably take me about three to four weeks to source the material, dress, construct, carve, lathe and finish the two units.’