The Mosaic Table is a recent custom commission for e11even restaurant located at 15 York Street in downtown Toronto.

The table top is made from antique hemlock that was buried below York St for over a century as a part of the historic Conner’s Wharf. What we loved about this material was that in the time it spent underground, the hemlock timbers absorbed the vivid green and red mineral tones in the lakefront soil. After experimenting with many different concepts, we proposed a 14′-2″ communal top made up of nearly 300 off-cuts that we recovered from a commercial flooring project. We found that pairing smaller modules gave us added control over the composition and that incorporating discarded knots, piths, and cathedrals added considerable dimension to the design.

Each piece of hemlock was individually cut and pocket-hole screwed to the plywood underlay.

The structure is pinned hot – rolled HSS steel tubing. It comes apart into pieces for easy transportation.

Back in June we took a trip down to the Ukiah Valley in California to source old-growth redwood for use in our studio.  The shipment has arrived and we’re very excited to start working with it.  The incredible 17 foot slabs and large burls we received were salvaged during the dismantling of the largest and oldest redwood mill in the world.  They were found in and around the massive log pond that was used in the last century to transport the giant logs from the surrounding forests to the mill.  The logs processed by the mill were the largest redwood logs ever milled by man and measured up to 22 feet across.  It took over 19 months to disassemble the three acre, three storey redwood framed building including all the machinery, and yielded approximately 4 million feet of virgin old redwood and several hundred thousand feet of virgin douglas fir.

The reclaimed logs we received are certified through the Forest Stewardship Council as FSC Recycled material, and are called “buckskins”, because they had some form of sizing or growth defect that dubbed them unusable for standard timber applications at that time. Carbon dating of the material has revealed it to be 2500 to 4000 years old!

Here are a few photos of the huge redwood logs and burls from the trip.  We currently have a number of slabs at the studio.  A few will be used for prototyping new concepts we’re developing, and a few will be used for custom client projects.  Contact us at info@stacklab.ca for more information.

This week we are developing one of our table leg prototypes. The design features a tapered 4″ x 3/8″ steel ribbon; a 1″ x 3/8″ web; filleted corners and a 3/8″ thick top plate that will bolt to the underside of a solid, wood top. The legs are also angled and are designed to work with the table to achieve stability – here they are shown upside down in a 1:1 scale chipboard model and in steel. After they are finished and powder-coated, this set of legs will make up the base for a 9′ walnut slab dining table.

Please email us at info@stacklab.ca to find out more about the available colour options.

We recently spent an afternoon with our welder fitting a custom steel stand we designed to hold 6.5 foot elephant tusk - a family heirloom that has been with our client for generations.  This 70 pound tusk was a tricky object to display as it is unevenly weighted, and has a very fragile upper portion where the ivory forms a three foot cavity.  We developed a solution with two fitted steel arms working together to stabilize the tusk without putting pressure on its weaker points.  To ensure we accounted for all of the variables in our design we tested the stand before the final welds were made.  With just a few small adjustments we achieved the perfect balance.

for more information, please email us at info@stacklab.ca

Things have been shaping up in our space at 4 Adelaide Place since moving in this summer. After the initial few weeks of cleaning and painting we’ve been making steady progress on projects and setting up our studio. Currently we’re working on a number of custom design and build projects and we’ll documenting our progress here, so please check back for updates and new Stacklab developments.