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A Gimson style oak chest
Mar 29, 2021
This oak chest was made to hold clothes awaiting wash day – a Gimson-style design but with a slatted lid and floor to let the air circulate, with some cedar slats in the bottom to keep things sweet!
As ever, the oak was reclaimed so the grain matches aren’t perfect. The basic design is frame & panel but with an unusual frame … curved top, through wedged tenons for the floor slat-supports and the lid frame jointed with half-cogged dovetails.
The slats on the lid are held also with brass screws, all clocked.
This one won a prize in Axminster’s “Made in March” competition. No one was more surprised than me.
The usual 5 or 6 coats of Liberon Finishing oil and a final wax when that’s dried.
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An oak chest for mucky clothes.
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Frame & panel design.
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A slatted lid and floor to keep the clothes aired. The floor is part pine and part cedar slats.
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Half-cogged dovetails.
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Carved handles.
Comments
Quite an unusual piece to my eye. Gimson is very underappreciated here in the States.
Hello Dave,
There have been a couple of FWW articles about Gimson and some contributors have written articles about Gimson-influenced pieces they've built. But, as you intimate, these are few and far between.
Mike Pekovitch did a hayrake table (a few months after I did that series of posts about building mine in Knots) and Nancy Hiller has done some stuff about English Arts & Crafts in general, including items by Harris Lebus, who I'd not heard of until she did her article and build of one of his pieces. Nancy Hiller also did an article about a Gimson piece she copied, quite recently.
I suspect that Stickley, Roycroft and various other US variants on Arts & Crafts were more influenced by the Cotswold makers (Gimson & The Barnsleys) than they were by some of the more elaborate A&C styles that were about at the time. American Arts & Crafts seems to have a greater proportion of the plain but fine proportions with a touch of over-engineering about them - aspects I much prefer myself to large dollops of decorative frippery. :-)
Greene & Greene sometimes borders on "frippery-enhanced" but the proportions and over-engineered aspects keep it at bay. G & G and Cotswold are the two styles I prefer best - the pieces I make for our own house are almost all of those kinds, with a bit of Shaker(ish), Roycroft and Mission.
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