#HTE
Minimalist Update on an Antique Furniture Form: Heidi Earnshaw’s Seven Day Dresser
From the Continent, there is an antique style of dresser called a semainier. “Semaine” is French for “week,” and the semainier contained seven drawers, each holding garments for a day of the week.
Canada-based furniture designer/builder Heidi Earnshaw has produced a modern update on the semainier with her Seven Day Dresser. Absent are the baroque design elements and fancy veneers; Earnshaw, whose style melds Scandinavian, Japanese and Shaker influences, opted for quarter-sawn white oak in a minimalist, open-frame and rectilinear design that still manages to look gentle.
A single brace on the back prevents racking, and is the only evidence of metal fasteners I can see. The rest of the unit appears to be constructed using traditional joinery.
Formerly a longtime Toronto resident, Earnshaw is one of the many creatives who has given up the city for country life; last year, prior to the pandemic, “I packed up home and studio and moved to a tiny hamlet in the Ottawa Valley,” she writes. “It had been a long held dream to live in a rural place and when our studio building on Sterling Road inevitably sold, the time felt right.”
You can see more of Earnshaw’s work here, and I also recommend checking out her Instagram.
https://www.core77.com/posts/102853/Minimalist-Update-on-an-Antique-Furniture-Form-Heidi-Earnshaws-Seven-Day-Dresser