Carving

All carvings found in the Fine Furniture Design™ collections are hand-carved.

A Bit of Carving History

From the earliest days of furniture making, craftspeople have added dimension and drama to hand-carved wood furniture. Some of the first carvings were incised cuts and were often geometric in shape. As tools improved, carvings became more artistic and often captured the lines of simple elements seen in the natural environment like flowers, leaves and vines.

Carvings on furniture became more sophisticated as the role of some furniture pieces changed from strictly utilitarian to more of an art form. Splendid carvings adorned many kinds of furniture, either as a singular decorative element or as a repeated shape found framing a drawer or a bed.

Common Carving Motifs

Traditional furniture and 18th century furniture pieces tend to exhibit more carving than transitional and contemporary furniture. One of the most recognized carving elements, the ball and claw foot, can be found at the base of a chair or dining table leg. An animal foot, spoon, slipper, or even a serpent’s head can form legs and feet for tables, chairs, beds, chests or dressers. Scallop shells, vines, acanthus leaves, laurel leaves, flowers of all varieties and rice plants are present on furniture seen in museums and modern-day furniture stores.

Transitional and contemporary furniture designs will have simple curves or geometric shapes, if carving is present at all.

Attributes of Beautifully Crafted Carvings

Well-crafted carvings are crisp and precise and are attractive additions to a piece of furniture, rather than an overpowering element. The carving should be sized in proportion to the piece and serve as an integral part of the design. Moldings are strips of shaped or carved woods that frame sections of furniture. Where moldings move around a corner, a finely finished piece will carry the design across the joint, without an obvious stopping and starting point.

Types of Carving – Features to Look For

Hand carving is the finest work found in furniture. This artistry allows the carving to accentuate the grain of the wood and to transition around corners while preserving the pattern. It is done one piece at a time by those who are wood carving masters.

Machine carving uses a machine that can shape many pieces at one time while the machine operator moves a stylus across a carving template. This method is a bit like paint-by-number, with carving results that are usually crude and imprecise.

Applied Carvings

Hand-carved overlays are carved from solid wood and are applied as a design element to wood furniture. Less expensive overlays are machine-shaped and glued to furniture before the finishing process.

Another type of decorative element is molded out of resin. Resins can have very sharp detail because they are not carved but are a liquid compound poured into a mold to attain their shape. They may look like wood, but they’re really a member of the plastic species. Fine Furniture Design™ uses no plastics or resins.

Carvings Found in Fine Furniture Design™ Collections

The traditional collections, The Southwyck Collection and The RayLen Vineyards Collection, feature leaves, vines, shells and flowers, as are found in antiques.

In The Enduring Collection, carvings are simpler in form and have an undulating shape like a wave pattern. Hand-carvings frame mirrors, chests, dressers, entertainment centers, and the platforms and headboards of beds. All carvings found in theFine Furniture Design™ collections are hand-carved.