Making
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How an Ask chair is made
Follow one Ask chair from a plank of ash to a hand-woven seat.
Two members of the Atelier team sanding an oak tabletop at a workbench in the Copenhagen workshop.
Every Ask chair starts as a plank of ash that has dried for 12 months at a Danish sawmill. We pick planks with straight grain, because bent parts snap along crooked grain. A chair needs about 14 kg of timber before it is cut, and the finished chair weighs 4.5 kg.
The back legs and the back rail are steamed for 40 minutes. The steam softens the wood so it can be bent around a metal form. Jonas Fjeldsted, who runs our workshop, says the wood has about two minutes to bend before it cools and sets.
The bent parts stay clamped in the form for 48 hours. After that, we cut the joints and fit the front legs and the side rails. The joints are glued and pegged, so no metal holds the chair together.
Next comes sanding in three grits, from coarse to fine. For the black chair, we brush on a water-based stain in two coats, with a light sand between them. The grain stays visible through the stain. A matt finish goes on last.
The seat is woven by hand from paper cord, which is three strands of kraft paper twisted together. One seat takes about 90 minutes and around 100 metres of cord. We pull each row tight and tap it down with a wooden block.
A second person then checks every chair. They sit on it, rock it and look at every joint. We make Ask chairs in batches of 24, and a batch takes about three weeks from plank to packing.
