Benchwood Dresser.

The legs of the Benchwood Dresser carry a large round-over that isn't feasible to make with a machine — the radius is simply too large for any router bit. Instead, we turned to a method with roots in wooden shipbuilding: the 5:7 ratio. When mast makers needed to take a square timber to a perfect cylinder, they worked in stages — first to an octagon, then to a sixteen-sided polygon, then smoothed the rest with a drawknife and spokeshave, each step guided by the proportional relationship between the flat and the corner. The geometry does the work.

Applied here to furniture legs rather than mast timber, the method is the same: hand planes to establish the flats, a spokeshave to blend the transitions, careful attention to the grain throughout. The result is a round-over with a quality that machined profiles struggle to replicate — consistent, but not mechanical. While the human eye struggles to realize something like this is made by hand tools, when touched we believe one can sense that these legs were made by hand.