A very complex job with interesting design parameters, it took over a month to build it. You can see by the first photos that there were just three empty spaces cut into a wall of a houseboat in Sausalito. I decided to frame them with wood that the client had chosen after a trip together to a lumber yard: sapele, a brown hardwood in the mahogany family from Brazil, and curly maple either domestic or Canadian. To unify the elements, I sandwiched the curly maple between pieces of sapele, and, using miter joints, had them all linked together visually and physcially. The client wanted drawers without hardware, so I used very expensive push latch drawer hardware and a single plank of curly maple cut into the drawer fronts. The client wanted adjustable shevles, and a place in the center pod to show off his model train collection. Above that cabinet sits a wide flat screen TV hidden by flipper doors that open and retract back into the cabinet. The doors are made from a single plank of spalled curly maple that reads like a book from left to right, sandwich between pieces of sapele. The entire media center is made of solid wood except the book shelves with the curly maple facing.

 

The original configuration

Walls filled and made parallel, drilled for shelf holders,floor leveled, lower cabinet installed, outer frame and base installed.

Upper cabinet and adjustable shelves installed, wires run, backs installed behind shelves, except on the right hand side, the back is a door for accessibility to the wires, preliminary finish applied.

 

Detail of the corner and inner miter (tricky to cut), the wood grain and color, the curly maple face on the adjustable shelves, the false back, and the careful paint job.

The completed cabinet with the retractable doors, the drawers, the barely perceptible access door behind the right hand shelves, the level lines, and the alignment of all the vertical  and horizontal lines. ( Because of my camera and the lack of room, the lines came out curved instead of straight and perpendicular.)