Honestly, they are just cabinets, but they mean a lot to us. They are an earnest effort to create something useful, necessary, essential and beautiful. This is a tradition that started with the Shakers:
"If it is not useful or necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to make it.
"If it is useful and necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to enhance it by adding what is not an integral part of its usefulness or necessity.
"And finally: If it is both useful and necessary and you can recognize and eliminate what is not essential, then go ahead and make it as beautifully as you can."
-- The rule of thumb for Shaker creations, from ShakerBuilt by Paul Rochleau & June Sprigg
Kerf cabinets are the result of an ongoing artistic investigation into plywood construction. These are our rules:
1. Be honest in our craft: Let the materials we use and the methods of construction show through in the final product. The objects we make should tell the story of what they are made from and how they were made.
2. Be purposeful in our art: Everything we make is built for a reason; usually that reason is a person and a place. Every project begins with its own set of circumstances, and solving for these unique situations is how we find beauty.
In practical terms, plywood should look like plywood. We avoid decorating our cabinetry, especially when it is in the service of disguising it. Edge banding the plywood to make it appear to be solid wood is a perfect example and it is why the edges of our plywood are unadorned. (Ironically, you can now find cheap furniture out in the world with edge banding that makes the particle board look like it is made of plywood, but that’s another story). We don’t add handles or knobs to our cabinets, instead we cut a notch out of the cabinet frame to allow our doors and drawers to be accessed. Even better, sometimes two doors or drawers can share a single hand notch!
We also choose to show our joinery. Because we do not add ornament to our cabinets, the joinery itself becomes one of the main decorative elements. This does make our work more difficult. When every joint is on display every joint needs to be perfect. But this also helps guide the visual composition of our cabinets. The asymmetry in our work is based on making strong joints. If panels intersect in a grid-like pattern each joint becomes shallower and the panel they intersect becomes weaker. Staggering the joints gives us the best joint with the maximum strength possible.
Finally, while we strive for perfection, the real world is not perfect. The practice of adapting our principles to the real world is the genesis of every design we create. Working within tight constraints to solve difficult problems is a wonderful way to spark creativity. Our designers have the freedom to create anything they want to, as long as it is Kerf.
That is what makes our work beautiful.
That’s why they look like that.Â
