one of our favorite projects is creating a custom dining room ... we have a project coming up where well be doing an expanding dining table with a hard curly maple inlay, 8 chairs, and a cherry and curly maple sideboard. we get to make the pieces relate, in essence, determine the style of the room ... the designs for this new project are loosely based on the furniture in my own dining room above, with of course, the clients unique input which is based on their own experience with a table i made for the clients brother in 1990 or so ... round and round it goes. click the photos to enlarge them ...
this is part of the proposal for that project ..
meanwhile, for a potential client who is coming to visit this week to discuss furniture for her dining room, i rounded up photos of different projects of different styles, most of which consisted of at least a table, some chairs and a sideboard ...
while in the natural cherry photo above this one, we were going for a more contemporary look, here were shooting for the traditional, with the dark, carved mahogany legs and stained mahogany and walnut chairs with burl backsplats ...
here, weve clearly taken a contemporary slant on the traditional, dark, arts and crafts style, taking our cues from the designs of greene and greene and stickley, but by using natural cherry we have (hopefully) brought it up into the present.
hanging fir and burl table lantern ... inlays in the top and 0n the aprons of the table
here we have the one board bubinga dining room ... plain and simple design, the table top and face of the sideboard was made from one 46" wide, 19 board of bubinga ...
here, the view from the other end ...
another take on what we refer to on our website as our studio style, a mix of natural or stained woods with painted details and accents. (love the milton avery boxers over the mantle) we used to make quite a few windsors, but, not so many any more ... im encouraging the padded seats ...
the sideboard for that table ..
and another ... for more, check out the dining table, seating, and sideboard sections of our website for other styles and designs ...
ok, here are a couple of cherry dining tables we made last week. 42" x 120" with a 1.75" thick top and 2.25" vertical uprights. click the photos to enlarge them ... we debated between the arced stretcher above and just below ... 
and the cloud lift stretcher below, a greene and greene inspired detail. 
our first version was a little heavy, so we took a little off and slimmed it down. 
better, but not as good as the arcs ...
this is the first version, upside down, with the heavier stretcher ... scotch taped on ... 
couldnt get my 11 x 17 printer to work so we taped two 1/8th" = 1" drawings together to have a full size paper patten for the model to work from 
ok, cats out of the bag .. these are 1/8 scale models. we made them for a meeting with our clients on friday and the models were extremely helpful in arriving at the final design concept below .. 
which is currently a combination (as so many designs are) of the two models above. the top one is a previous table we first made in about 1992 ... sam actually had the idea of suspending the stretcher on pins between the open verticals of the trestles. his idea would require that the whole trestle be glued up as a unit which might be fussy but it can be easily done. in that case, the pins become part of the structure 
