Moving from a cozy city apartment to a spacious single family home presented us with several new design challenges. How do you make a hallway / landing area look cozy and welcoming? Considering the scale of this space (this particular hallway opens up to our main staircase), our immediate thought was “big art, dope rugs”, a tried and true winner.
However, the space felt incomplete and there was obviously something missing, so we decided to engage A Carpenter’s Son, for a sitting bench. Located in Columbus (but shipping nationwide!), A Carpenter’s Son is a go-to for hand-crafted, custom hardwood pieces.
We talked through various wood slab options with the good folks at ACS, and ended up settling on an 8’6” piece of sycamore. The sheer length of the piece provided us a degree of flexibility on leg options and we opted for single waterfall (where one leg is wood and the other is steel) as to maintain a bench length of ~7’. With the live, irregular edge, the bench width ended up 15-18”. The bench came out perfectly – beautiful wood, unique in design, and substantial enough to hold its own in a large hallway.
- First picture: the sycamore slab we selected
- Second picture: initial rendering after selecting the leg styles
- Third picture: assembled and ready for finishing
In our main hallway upstairs, the bench is accompanied by a stack of coffee table books (see our Coffee Table Design Guide here) and a pair of Loom and Kiln rugs.
