How to Design a Vernacular Chair

3 rules. No math.

I know this chair, which lives at St Fagans, as well as I know my own chairs.

When I plan out a piece of vernacular furniture to build, I rarely create a construction drawing. I also avoid using architectural principles such as whole-number ratios – at least consciously.

Instead, during the last 20 years I have developed a way of making chairs that derives from both seeing and memory. It stems from an approach I honed in 1992 when I was sure I was going to be shit-canned.

In the early 1990s, Lucy and were newspaper journalists in South Carolina. We each made $325 a week in salary before taxes and were paid every two weeks. So almost every other Thursday our checking account’s balance slipped below $50.

We couldn’t make any mistakes with money. And we couldn’t lose our jobs.

Factual errors get you fired. Sometimes it takes one big mistake. Other times you get canned after making several in short succession.

I had made four errors during a few weeks of work. And no matter how careful I was, i…