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For more than a decade I have been interested in combining metal office furniture (predominantly filing cabinets and metal hardware drawers) with wooden components to form new pieces. Often my metal+wood projects are basic and include only a few components, whereas in other occasions they turn out to be more elaborate. Yet, in all 'cases' I try to compose the metal and the wood in a way that will unite them in a strong aesthetic bond.
My recent metal+wood project was a one-drawer filing cabinet which received a portable base and was crowned with natural slab top. I cut the top from a thin slab of hardwood that I found 14 years ago. Back in the the day I used to drive to a lumber yard in the south of Tel Aviv and look for boards and slabs of wood that had been discarded.
Wood imported to Israel was stacked on pallets made from secondary wood; the sawmill made these pallets for shipping their top-grade lumber. Sometimes the lumber stack was capped with thin slabs of wide board that protected the pile form the elements. I coveted that particular leftover wood and used it for my projects. The slab I chose for the filling cabinet top had a split on one of its ends. Instead of cutting the split area off, I decided to lock it and secure it with a butterfly key – in the style of George Nakashima's furniture.
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