A way to look at furniture proportions

[GaryR]

I'm a fan of George Walker and Jim Tolpin, who over the last decade or so have written a series of books about furniture design that focus on what makes pleasing proportions rather than construction methods. Mostly they work from old furniture and classic architectural examples. Think classical orders of Greek and Roman buildings, but applied to furniture. They also have a wonderful book about how to make measuring tools in your shop based on Euclidean geometry (It doesn't have Steve's square of Thales, but that would fit right in)

https://georgewalkerdesign.wordpress.com/about-2/

I decided to explore their methods for my current build of a small table for my nephew's wedding. The construction thread is over in WIP but I thought I would start a separate thread here about how you all go about working out proportions in your furniture.

I'll start by showing how I'm refining the wedding table. I started with two given dimensions: the width and depth of the space where the table will reside in my nephew's home. It will sit in a recess in his entryway that is 33 inches wide and 15.5 inches deep. That gave me the maximum dimensions of the top at 32" x 15". I set the thickness of the top provisionally at ~1-3/8" (30 mm, actually).

i then need to decide the height. My nephew suggested something up to 36" to the top surface. I decided to make the legs about 31" tall with their outside faces 31" apart so that the outline of the table base in front elevation would be a square, and the top would overlap the base on both sides.

Given those dimensions and a square form for the front elevation I then left the ruler behind and picked up the dividers to determine the width of the table legs, their taper, and the height of the aprons/rails. Walker and Tolpin suggest starting by using either 1/5th or 1/6th of the leg height. I tried 1/5th first but and that looked too clunky. 1/6th was much better. Then to determine the width of the leg, I used 1/12th of the leg height since that seemed to be robust enough to support the weight of the stone top without looking too much like a workbench leg. To determine the taper I used 1/2 of that (1/24th the leg height) for the foot and drew the taper starting from just below the apron. It also is nearly exactly twice the width of the table top thickness. I slightly adjusted the width of the top so that the top overhangs the legs by 1/2 the table top thickness. I used the overhang dimension to size the mouldings that will be applied to the aprons. I haven't yet refined the meandros pattern to rationalize with the other proportions but I don't think it will be much different from what I got eyeballing it, since its height is within two mm of the leg width and half the height of the apron.




The proportions of the side elevation were then largely fixed by the space available, which turned out to be 2.5x the 1/6 leg height. The table won't be seen from the sides anyway so those proportions aren't as important.

How would you have determined the proportions of a table like this, given the same constraints?

 

[Cabinetman]

Very interesting and something I like to think I’m good at, I shall investigate those two Gentlemen later thank you. I’ve always drawn out any piece to be made to scale, and like you it’s usually based on one or more fixed parameters. I’m old school and draw with a pencil. Say a cupboard is being designed and the height is set, then after that line is drawn I visibly gauge how wide the piece should be to keep it in proportion. Etc etc.
When I was being taught furniture making we were asked to draw a 6” line then divide it up into 2 to give a pleasing proportion, from memory there were 15 of us and we all divided it up pretty much the same.
Ian

 

[NickM]

That book does sound interesting.

I would do scale drawings in pencil to start with and just use my (probably flawed!) judgement to decide what looks right.

Now, I would also draw it in CAD as it's really useful to look at furniture from different angles.

Finally, I would do a full size drawing. That's largely to help assist with the construction, but is also a final check on the design.

For my chairs, I also consulted various books and online resources for some guidance on typical seat height, depth, angles etc.

 

[Mike G]

How would you have determined the proportions of a table like this, given the same constraints?

Empirically. I'm not a fan of formulae for determining proportion, be it in furniture, or, more pertinently for my profession, buildings.