For the past 4 months or so I have been working on starting up a new business with my friend Joe Mansfield of Engrave.   He runs a laser engraving company specializing in doing all things cool.  Check out his flickr here.  While we have been neighbors and friends for years, it recently dawned on us that our skills compliment each other well and we shared the same passion and devotion for creative exploration.

While we will continue to operate our own companies we will collaborate on products for the new company named “grove”. Grove will focus on environmentally friendly laser customizable products made of bamboo.  We are using FSC certified bamboo and making the process as local and green as we reasonably can.  Finishes are all natural and packaging design will focus on reusing and recycling.

Ive purchased a CNC milling machine to use for TomitaDesigns and also Grove.  The new 4axis Haas VF2 is accurate to 1/25th of the width of a human hair.

I will design/build the products along with Joe and he will add the customization ability of his laser similar to his engraveyourbook series.  Combined with Joe’s large format Trotec Laser we can make just about anything!

We will be launching in about a month at the underconstruction website www.wearegrove.com   Stay tuned.

Amy Ruppel’s deer chaboo has found a home in Venice Beach, California.  Yes, there are deer in Southern California… well… now there are.

1 block from the beach!  Not bad

Continuation from part1…

Recap: Installed teak cabanas and bar at the Glo Apartments in downtown LA for Myhre Group Architects in August.

Part2 involved this solid teak bar with Corian top and accompanying jumbo cabana.

This cabana was HUGE.  9ft tall!  It was nerve wracking assembling it on site and erecting the thing because it is so heavy and tall.  I had a system using 2×4s to create temporary bracing which allowed me to slide the parts closer to each other with ratchet straps in unison moving very slooooowly.  Any racking and the teak could break.

I actually had not mocked up the fabric with any of the cabana structures before I had left for LA.  Stupid yes, but I had no choice.  The fabric arrived late from Italy setting off a chain reaction of stress which led to the finished fabric elements arriving as the freight truck was arriving, leaving no time to even open the package. I flew down knowing I would have to wing it on site- nothing new there!

The first problem I encountered was that the pitch of the tensile roof was not adequate to keep water from pooling.  If you ever estimate the minimum pitch for a fabric roof- double it!  On the spot we devised an elegant solution:  pull the center up reminiscent of the Olympic Stadium in Munich!

On site we made yet more design decisions on how to thread the cable through the grommets around the corner areas.  The details on these jobs are fun to figure out and refine.  How materials come together, fasten, secure and relate to one another has to be built to built to be truly optimized.  Cant do that sitting at a computer.  Often, I feel that its these little things that are super subtle that no one would seemingly ever notice MAKE good design.

Denver Sculpture lit up at night.  BambooDNA crew tried to arrange ourselves so we would all appear to be the same height through perspective but screwed up and did it backwards!  (im the shortest guy)

Here are few early designs I did for a new client.  She likes my gingko table and wants a dining table with the opposing leg design and through tenons on top.

Ive always wanted to scale the gingko up in size.  The main issue is the lower opposing leg will get in the way of feet, knees, chairs if its at a diagonal.  My solution is to align the legs in a cross so the legs interfere with sitting but right where there would be a division anyway.

Id like to use 1.5″ bamboo for the top but it only comes in 30″ wide.  There will have to be a deliberate seam that will also be a design feature.  It looks nice to have the seam follow the construction of the legs.

Another solution is to scrap the opposing legs altogether.  I played around with running the grain the opposite direction on the top here.