The funny looking table shown here was made in my own workshop this spring by craftsman, Tom Cornish. I have been fooling around with this idea for the past eighteen months, that is, to design a dining table with a similar structure to that displayed by large clematis flowers. The concept was that each petal of the flower would form a dining place and each petal would be attached to a stem which ran into the centre of the table and formed the pedestal. Later in the article I will talk a little bit about how Tom solved many of the constructional problems involved in this piece. But first I want to touch upon not how, but why, this piece was made.

Many years ago I remember Alan Peters advising me that I should always have one speculative piece of furniture design on the go. I know now that this was very good advice but I found this very hard to follow. For years now I've been making furniture to commission and it has been like pushing fine pieces of furniture into a black hole. They disappear never to be seen again. Worse still, and if I have not had the opportunity to photograph them before their departure it is almost as if the piece has—never existed. Commissioned furniture is very exciting and I enjoy it enormously. I love the dialogue with the client, I love the test of designing a contemporary piece within a real context. So, over the years one job has tended to lead to another. The danger of this situation is that the aesthetic progress that one can make is very much dependent upon the good will and adventurous spirit of one's clients and, though they must by nature be adventurous to even contemplate buying something that doesn't exist, most people would prefer to commission something that is a development of an existing object. So the freedom one needs to develop new ideas inevitably must come from the speculative pieces. These are inevitably expensive pieces to make for they should, if they are doing their job, be testing the limits.

The idea for this little test came to me, I suppose, nearly two years ago. Many people ask me where I get my ideas from and I am usually at a loss to give an answer but in this case I can be quite specific. I had been commissioned by two clients individually to design circular dining tables for their respective homes and I put the problem to one side to try and let my unconscious work on it then the idea grabbed me by the throat. My garden is full of climbing plants and a particularly large white clematis flower attracted me. This was the first of the season and I went to have a good look at it. Suddenly, quite clearly, I saw this flower in the form of a table top. Each petal formed a dining place. Each petal was linked to a stem which joined together to form the pedestal of the table before separating to form the feet. Almost in that instant the idea came fully formed. All I had to do was put it on paper.

In the event I went into work and made a very quick model or maquette as the image was too complex and three dimensional to realise in any other way. Having got the maquette, clarified the idea and realised that the construction of the piece was fundamentally simple I then proceeded with two dimensional drawings. These drawings had to sit in the folio for nearly eighteen months before I found the opportunity to use them.

The two original clients for circular dining tables went on to have much more conventional pieces and I was left with a design I desperately wanted to make but lacked the patronage to proceed. The designs were carefully put away until I was able to put aside the necessary time and money to produce the piece for nobody else but myself. I wanted a piece of furniture that even on a cold winter evening would sing a song of English summer. It had to be as delicate as a flower petal yet strong and resilient.

Quite early on I had made my mind up that this would be a blonde table, probably and eight seater, probably made with Maple for the pedestal and Ripple Sycamore for the petals. When we first set about making this in the summer of last year we had a bit of a false start. Dave Woodward was given the task of developing a rod and working out how to make the piece. Initially the legs were to have been laminated because this seemed the obvious way to get the two quite acute curves present on each pedestal leg. 2.5 mm band sawn laminates were cut, planed and bent round a former to give us a result that really wasn't quite what I wanted. Somehow, by laminating, the graphics of the timber had been changed and the feeling of wood had been lost. Laminates are very successful on small cross sections but I worried for quite a long time about how to overcome the laminated look. This is nothing to do with glue lines for Dave is such a good technichian there was no evidence of those. It was just that all evidence of wood figuring was lost as well.

Several of the pieces mentioned in this article are on show at the following exhibition:

"Drawn from the Wood" — an exhibition of fine furniture by David Savage on show at the Ferrers Gallery, Staunton Stables Craft Centre, Staunton Harold, Ashby de la Zoueh, Leieestershire, LE6 5RW, telephone 0332 863337 between Tuesday 29th September and Sunday 8th November. Admission free.

To part two