I first saw Yngve Ekstrom’s Arka lounge chair about a year ago and have been thinking about it ever since. I really like the shape of the armbow and sticks but the legs seem tense and nervous, they can’t relax. The coopered seat was another thing altogether. Nice shape, but without the saddling it looked uncomfortable for a lounge chair. The Arka chair looks like a nice stick chair that’s trying too hard to fit in those cool mid 20th century modernist types.

Peter Galbert recently wrote a blog post about a chair making class that came up with a prototype of birdcage lowback. Nothing to do with the Arka chair and I’m not fussed about the birdcage (the secondary horizontal bit in the back). But this design seemed to inadvertantly fix some of the things that I did not like about the Arka chair. Seat angle looks better, legs have a nicer shape, stretchers add visual strength, all the tenons run through the seat and armbow. No modernist pretentions here, just a beautiful design that’s grounded in the windsor tradition.

With those inspirations I could finally see the chair that I wanted to build. Beautiful armbow and sticks of the Arka chair, practical seat, nicely shaped legs and stretchers of Galbert’s chair. But Galbert’s chair looked a little too upright for a lounge chair so I decided to give that stylish swedish upper body the relaxed splayed legs of a welsh chair. (I know, that sounds a bit weird…)

And it wasn’t just random ideas that I was pulling together. There was also a growing pile of spare parts that had accumulated in the shop over the last couple of years. And I thought some of that material could be used for this chair. A couple of cast-off legs, sticks, and random bits in poplar, elm, london plane and oak. I knew from the start that this chair was going to be painted.

First task was to build a form for steam bending the arm bow. Even that turned out to be a patchwork of scrap pieces. I only had pictures to go on, so it was tricky to figure out the shape of the armbow and then build the form to achieve that shape. I had to make a few adjustments along the way. I had some nice straight-grained elm from the VIWG wood rescue program and used that for the arm bow blank. In previous episodes I had soaked armbows in water for a week or more before steam bending. But I read recently that if fabric softener was added to the water it would make the bending process easier. So this arm bow soaked for a week in water and fabric softener.

While the armbow was soaking I shaped the legs, glued-up and saddled the seat, drilled and reamed the holes and set up the legs and stretchers. That all went smoothly. The bend and assembly also went smoothly.

The finish was a base coat of grey-green analine dye, followed by several coats of red milk paint, then two coats of black osmo.

Poplar, elm, london plane, oak, aniline dye, milk paint, black osmo