The Invisible Store of Happiness sounds like a concept from Eastern mysticism. It’s actually the latest showpiece project for US hardwoods backed by the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC); an ingeniously crafted, 3m high ‘arch’ sculpture in maple and cherry, that will star in May’s Clerkenwell Design Week in London.
The name, said the man behind it, furniture designer/maker Seb Cox, 27, refers to the personal investment in the project from him and co-creator, sculptor Laura Ellen Bacon. "It reflects our love of the making process and passion for design and working with this incredible material – wood," he said.
Talking to Mr Cox, who himself seems a boundless store of energy and enthusiasm, you soon appreciate what he means. And the more you quiz him and AHEC European Director David Venables, the more the name proves apt in other ways.
Mr Cox clearly relishes tearing up the woodwork rulebook and the ISH pushes the technical capabilities of American maple and cherry to the limits and beyond; machining, even weaving the material into extraordinary forms.
It’s one of AHEC’s latest initiatives to flag up capabilities of lesser-used species and broaden their application. Hence maple and cherry, rather than white oak.
AHEC’s aim is also to promote its groundbreaking work in life cycle assessment (LCA), calculating US hardwood’s cradle to grave carbon and wider environmental performance. Adding to the challenge, AHEC set Sebastian Cox Furniture an actual carbon limit for the ISH.
"To make it something everyone could relate to, our target was a smaller carbon footprint than an iPhone6!" said Mr Venables. Finally, AHEC asked Mr Cox and Ms Bacon for a ‘show stopper’ to really fly the US hardwood flag. It got just that.
Mr Cox came to this challenge via two other AHEC projects – a 2011 challenge to Royal College of Arts students to make chairs in US hardwoods (Mr Cox was a mentor) and the Wish List venture, which saw him teamed with Habitat founder Sir Terence Conran, who helped devise the challenge with AHEC and Sean Sutcliffe, his co-founder partner at Benchmark Furniture where all the objects were made.
For the ISH, he wanted to apply all this previous experience. He also wanted to reference his earlier work, using ultrarenewable slender English coppice wood.
That’s where Ms Bacon came in. "She’s makes beautiful, intricate sculptures in woven willow," said Mr Cox. "I wanted that organic, free flowing feeling in the ISH, both for aesthetics but because it shows how simultaneously malleable and robust wood is."
Mr Cox also relished the opportunity of working with American maple and cherry, partly because of the AHEC mantra that exploiting these lesser used species makes most sustainable use of the forest, but also because they weren’t ‘run of the mill’. "It’s beautiful, but I won’t use American black walnut because everyone else is!" he said.
Cox and Bacon’s final ISH design has a 2.8mx4.4mx2.1m ‘foundation’ curving frame, comprising scarf-jointed 40mmx40mm cherry.
"And each of the scarf joints is unique, made using laser cut templates," said Mr Cox, demonstrating the fact at his Woolwich Dockyard warehouse workshop by piecing together a section, jigsaw puzzle-like, against a plan on the floor.
The cherry frame features Ms Bacon’s handiwork – 450 interweaving ‘swathes’ of maple and cherry, each individually peg jointed to the outer structure.
These are made from 45mmx25mm pieces, sliced nearly all their length to the tenon end into 2mm thick strips.
The wood all came from AHEC member mills, via Morgan Timber and NHG Timber, and to further maximise resource use, Mr Cox specified mixed lower grades only – no FAS. The ISH cherry arcs were steam bent -"it was trial and error, but the wood proved very resilient" – while, to achieve the necessary suppleness for ‘weaving’, the swathes were instead soaked in water.
"We couldn’t let the tenon end get wet and swell, so we were worried capillary action would draw moisture the entire length," said Mr Cox.
"But it didn’t, possibly because it was easier for the water to penetrate the thinner sections."
Finally, the structure was pieced together over six weeks. The frame was precisely planned, but Ms Bacon decided how the swathes interwove as she went. The other key aspect in the process was, of course, LCA, which was applied from start to finish.
"Because we were involved from the ground up, from timber sourcing, this project opened my eyes to LCA more than ever," said Mr Cox.
"For instance, it really brought home the different impacts produced by different modes of transport; with bulk shipping from North America potentially beating trucking from parts of the UK on carbon footprint." The arch was engineered to need virtually no glue and machine use was closely audited, with each swathe, for example cut on the spindle moulder in a single 25-second pass using precisely 3kw of electricity.
"What applying LCA also demonstrated was the benefit of batch processing to drive efficiency and minimise energy use," said Mr Cox.
"It really highlights the benefits of this sort of project platform for us, showcasing US hardwood’s technical, aesthetic and carbon merits, while pushing boundaries in application," said Mr Venables, adding that the ISH looks on course to beat the iPhone6 carbon challenge.
