The first step was to refine the shape and the dimensions. It became fatter on the bottom with a smaller top to give it that grounded feeling and to reflect the taper of a tree trunk. The next crucial choice was the material. For something to seem grounded and solid, a darker color is best. The rest of the room is very light and spacious and needs some anchor points to pin it down. To enhance the tropical "contemporary island" flavor, I selected Black Palm wood, a rich dark wood with contrasting light streaks throughout the grain. Odds are, you won't find Black Palm at your local lumber store. It takes some hunting down, but is worth it. The end grain of the wood is especially beautiful, a collage of tiny dark and light dots. I planned for vertical grain up the sides of the piece to play up the height of the taper, and a butcher block top so that the vertical grain could continue up through the edge of the top and then show off the end grain.
Once the materials and dimensions were decided, the structural design began. The form of the base is a tapered cylinder with an asymmetric bend, a complex geometry to fabricate. After much consideration of possible techniques and methods, I decided to use modern computer aided technologies to construct the base form in a way similar to the traditional hull construction of a wooden boat by laminating wood over a mold. The difference is that the laminates would spiral around the tapered, bent cylinder rather than lay out onto the more open bowl form of a ship's hull. My best resource of techniques and methods that I could modify to my purposes was the book "The Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction: Wood and West System Materials" by Meade Gougeon. These drawings begin to illustrate the mold design and are where the hand drawing ends and the computer rendering begins.
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