Greene & Greene Gamble House Dining Chairs

[Robert Cherry]

A set of 15 dining side chairs in Sapele and ebony. These chairs are based on a Greene & Greene design for the Gamble House in Pasadena, CA, as adapted by Darrell Peart and Bob Lang. The leather slip seats were covered by a local upholsterer, Jet Upholstery, In Bedminster, PA, who did an excellent job capturing the original Greene & Greene look. This set of chairs took me a little over a year to build and were made to go with my interpretation of the Greene & Greene Thorsen House Table.

The chair was first designed in CAD, then CNC pattern routing templates were created from the CAD drawings for each curved part or detail (which was pretty much every part). Most parts were pattern routed to final shape. A few were too tall to pattern route and were roughed out with the bandsaw and either pattern sanded using a spindle sander or cleaned up by hand using spoke shaves. Most of the corner rounding was done by hand with a combination of floats, rasps and files before final sanding. All joinery is loose tenon construction, with the mortises cut mostly using the excellent Leigh FMT.

The crest rail and back splats were the most challenging parts of this chair. These parts have curved faces on all sides except the flat mortised ends. Each part required a significant amount of hand shaping using spoke shaves, floats, rasps, files and scrapers.

The ebony details are classic Greene & Greene. There are square plugs at most of the joints and ebony bars with nickel-silver pins inset into the center back splats.

The finish is General Finishes water borne dye stain topped with Target Coatings EM-6000 water borne lacquer.

Here are some project totals:​

Board feet of Sapele used: 315
4’ x 8’ sheets of 3/4” baltic birch plywood: 2
Number of chair parts fabricated: 285
Number of mortises: 720
Number of floating tenons: 360
Number of square ebony plugs: 405
Number of ebony splines: 120
Quarts of finish used: 10
Hours to complete: 596

thanks for looking!


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[glenn bradley]

Beautiful. Wishing for some action shots . Great color and finish. Your attention to detail and hand work shows clearly. Very well done.

[Sean Nagle]

Fantastic work! Thanks for sharing.

[Andrew Hughes]

That is a handsome look chair. Really like the color
Thanks for sharing

[William Fretwell]

Delightful! Why 15? You would think an even number would match the table....
Are the back components steam bent?

[Robert Cherry]

Delightful! Why 15? You would think an even number would match the table....
Are the back components steam bent?

Thanks everyone.

why 15? good question. The table seats 12 so I cut enough chair parts for 14, assuming I’d lose two somewhere along the way. Turns out I didn’t lose any, so that’s 14 chairs. The 15th was the prototype I build at MASW.

No steam bending on this chair, everything was rough cut on the bandsaw from 8/4 stock and pattern routed when possible. The parts were too wide for pattern routing I either pattern sanded them with a spindle sander or worked them by hand with spoke shaves, etc.

[lowell holmes]

Show Off

I am impressed. Good job.

[Yonak Hawkins]

Beautiful chairs, Robert. The care taken in the final stages is evident .. I see a lot of hand sanding there and gorgeous finish. The back reminds me of a corset.

[Robert Cherry]

Show Off

I am impressed. Good job.

Ha! Lowell, don’t confuse extremely good luck with showing off!

I did have my share of mess ups, but I was lucky enough to be able to recover from them. Like this one. A back assembly fell over while I was dry fitting the parts, landed on a wood scrap just right to break the top of the center back splat. This, of course happened after the back was glued up. Amazingly the break was perfectly clean and no lost wood so it went back together almost perfectly.

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[Robert Cherry]

Beautiful chairs, Robert. The care taken in the final stages is evident .. I see a lot of hand sanding there and gorgeous finish. The back reminds me of a corset.

Thanks Yonak. Yes, there was a lot of hand shaping particularly on the crest rails. Many hours working with spoke shaves, rasps, floats and sandpaper. Interestingly, I picked up a 14 grain Auriou Rasp and the finish off that tool was about the equivalent of 120 grit sandpaper, so the final sanding was not as bad as I expected.

[Bill Carey]

Absolutely beautiful Robert. The craftsmanship and attention to detail are top notch - really well done. Especially the crest rails. Must have been interesting just keeping track of the parts. And the broken back splat just confirms my suspicion that things wait to go wrong until the glue has dried. Speaking of which: titebond 3? Hide? Epoxy?

[Robert Cherry]

Absolutely beautiful Robert. The craftsmanship and attention to detail are top notch - really well done. Especially the crest rails. Must have been interesting just keeping track of the parts. And the broken back splat just confirms my suspicion that things wait to go wrong until the glue has dried. Speaking of which: titebond 3? Hide? Epoxy?

Thanks Bill. I considered using epoxy for the longer working time but in the end I used TB3 for the glue-up. I did the glue-up in two stages- the front legs and apron as a sub-assembly and the back legs,apron, crest rail and splats as a second assembly. After they were dry I brought them together with the side aprons. The parts were all stacked very carefully on my shop cart, and it was quite full towards the end!

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[Tom M King]

Awesome project at every step of the process. They will be enjoyed for generations to come. Where did you sign, and date them?

[Robert Cherry]

Not signed and dated, but I did brand them behind the front apron.

[Jim Becker]

Totally outstanding work, Mr C!!!! Those are going to kick your dining room setup up several notches beyond where it sits at a high, high level already! I guess I'm going to have to make a field trip up to do a "butt test" on them. LOL