At Schplendid we like things that are at home with nature, that come from things like trees, sheep, geese and coconut trees. Even our joinery is related to pigeons.
We refer, of course, to the dovetail joint – which is the old-fashioned method we prefer for attaching together the important load-bearing parts of our beech hardwood sofa frames.
(This is extremely unusual by today's standards. The vast majority of modern sofas rely entirely on staples, whereas we use dowels, screws, glue, and yes, staples where appropriate, along with the dovetail joints. This means the frames will basically last forever and is what allows us to guarantee our sofas for life.)
A dovetail joint is so named because it looks a bit like the tail of a dove - or, less grandly, a pigeon.
It’s one of the oldest and cleverest ways of joining two pieces of wood. One bit is cut into a series of wedge-shaped “tails”; the other is cut into matching “pins”. They slide into one another and, because of that flared shape, they resist being pulled apart.
The beauty of the thing is that the joint is doing the work by its very shape: the two pieces are interlocked and thus the geometry itself is helping to hold the whole affair together.
We’ve no idea who first came up with the idea but it goes back a very long way, at least to the Ancient Egyptians.
And as well as being deeply practical, we reckon there’s something very satisfying about them. Even if you know nothing whatsoever about woodworking, a dovetail makes intuitive sense, having that pleasing quality of being comprehensible just by looking at it. (That’s presumably why ‘dovetailing’ is a metaphor for things fitting neatly together just so.)
Nature has always been giving human beings shapes, structures and patterns to borrow from, like leaves and shells, feathers and nests, honeycombs and countless others.
We are forever pinching ideas from the natural world and turning them into design, engineering or craft.
The very best things humans make, and have in our homes, are generally at home in nature.
Top: English Fantail, from Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868). Drawn by Luke Wells; engraved by Butterworth & Heath. Public domain.
Second image: Nicobar pigeon from Pauline Knip’s Les Pigeons (1811). Public domain.
Joinery by Pigeon
At Schplendid we like things that are at home with nature, that come from things like trees, sheep, geese and coconut trees. Even our joinery is related to pigeons.
We refer, of course, to the dovetail joint – which is the old-fashioned method we prefer for attaching together the important load-bearing parts of our beech hardwood sofa frames.
(This is extremely unusual by today's standards. The vast majority of modern sofas rely entirely on staples, whereas we use dowels, screws, glue, and yes, staples where appropriate, along with the dovetail joints. This means the frames will basically last forever and is what allows us to guarantee our sofas for life.)
A dovetail joint is so named because it looks a bit like the tail of a dove - or, less grandly, a pigeon.
It’s one of the oldest and cleverest ways of joining two pieces of wood. One bit is cut into a series of wedge-shaped “tails”; the other is cut into matching “pins”. They slide into one another and, because of that flared shape, they resist being pulled apart.
The beauty of the thing is that the joint is doing the work by its very shape: the two pieces are interlocked and thus the geometry itself is helping to hold the whole affair together.
We’ve no idea who first came up with the idea but it goes back a very long way, at least to the Ancient Egyptians.
And as well as being deeply practical, we reckon there’s something very satisfying about them. Even if you know nothing whatsoever about woodworking, a dovetail makes intuitive sense, having that pleasing quality of being comprehensible just by looking at it. (That’s presumably why ‘dovetailing’ is a metaphor for things fitting neatly together just so.)
Nature has always been giving human beings shapes, structures and patterns to borrow from, like leaves and shells, feathers and nests, honeycombs and countless others.
We are forever pinching ideas from the natural world and turning them into design, engineering or craft.
The very best things humans make, and have in our homes, are generally at home in nature.
See also:
Solid beech hardwood and proper joinery: Why we build Schplendid sofa frames the old-fashioned way
Images:
Top: English Fantail, from Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868). Drawn by Luke Wells; engraved by Butterworth & Heath. Public domain.
Second image: Nicobar pigeon from Pauline Knip’s Les Pigeons (1811). Public domain.