Heart of the Wood
Specializing in reproductions of 17th century furniture and woodwork

About Turned Furniture

In turned furniture, the individual parts of a piece are made by shaping  them with chisels and gouges while they are spun (or 'turned') between the centerpoints of the lathe.  Turned chairs and turned decorative elements are still commonly seen in contemporary furniture, albeit produced by automated machinery.

Turned work has a very long history, and the trade of the Turner was well established by the 17th century.  Turned furniture in this period consists predominantly of chairs, ranging  from very simple rush-seated examples to incredibly elaborate and highly ornamented board-seated versions.  Turners work also featured prominently in the work of joiners, where it was used to add decoration to various parts of joined work, from chair and table legs and the large posts of bedsteads, to purely ornamental applied split-spindles found on case pieces.  In these cases, the Turner generally acted as a kind of sub-contractor to the joiner.

Many of the chair forms common in the 17th century are familiar enough to us today; these  have woven rush seats, and a back made up either of turned spindles or flat slats.  There are, however, a few forms common in that period which are lost in ours - these are the board-seated turned chairs, which were made in both three and four-legged varieties.  You will find examples of all of these styles in the turned furniture pages.

While turned work produced in 17th century America comes out of the European tradition (being made chiefly by English or Dutch-trained craftsmen), there are some notable examples of turned work made in the colonies which are stylistically distinctive, as well as historically significant.  The earliest of these, and the best known, were made in the Plymouth and Mass Bay Colonies.  They acquired stylistic names in the 19th century, which derive from the original owners of the pieces (i.e. 'Brewster', 'Bradford', 'Carver'), but appear in the records of the time as 'a turned chair' or 'a turned great chair'.

Most of the original pieces, when studied closely, show traces of original painted finishes (and sometimes of several layers of paint), the common colors being red, black and a blue-green.  Turners in the colonies used several species of wood in their work, ash, soft maple and poplar being the commonest.   These are very apt woods for turning, but are all very plain and almost paper-white when new; in addition, two or more of these woods were often combined in one piece, so that paint was not only a decorative device, it also created a uniform finish as well.

Turners, like many other woodworking artisans of the time, did their work in 'green' or unseasoned wood.  They did this to exploit the ease with which wet wood can be worked, saving on labor and tool wear.  The evidence for this fact can be plainly seen by looking at any old turned piece - the legs, viewed on end, will be seen to be clearly out-of-round, the effect of the uneven shrinkage of the wood as it looses its moisture.  Turners used this shape-changing characteristic to strengthen their pieces.  The rungs of a chair would be turned first and allowed to dry and shrink for a week or two.  Then, the legs would be turned from fresh wood, the holes would be bored in them for the rungs, and the chair promptly assembled.   As the legs dried and shrank, they would clamp tightly around the rungs, eliminating the need to rely on glue to hold the chair together.

We apply these same techniques in the making of our reproductions.  Freshly felled trees are split out with maul and wedges to provide the rough stock for our turning (for an illustrated description of this process, click here).  We turn each individual part by hand, and largely by eye rather than by measure, which gives our work the same slight irregularities and lack of uniformity common to the originals.  Only by bringing 17th century attitudes towards the work  is an accurate reproduction produced.

If you would like a list of books with good illustrations of 17th century furniture for further visual reference, check our bibliography page.

About Joined Furniture	About Heart of the Wood	About Boarded Furniture