Nuts and Bolts Coffee Table

Design Brief: “Something funky!” That was it! The coffee table now resides in a corporate meeting room for a prominent financial adviser in Brisbane. He wanted glass. I gave him glass. When I mentioned Japanese-inspired design, he said “yes”. And then the design morphed into an asymmetrical creation (a nod to “asymmetrical investments”) which incorporated my decades old love-affair with nuts and bolts.

The build was quite technical, and in the end nothing is glued. Polished 36mm holes have been drilled through the 12mm toughened glass to accommodate custom timber nuts and bolts complete with male and female threads. These are reinforced with stainless steel rods in the centre of each “joint”. The interlocking layers of Maple and Wenge are carefully constructed, with timber precisely machined on my CNC thicknesser, and round components turned by hand and dimensions checked with digital callipers.

This original design is inspired along modern Japanese lines, and arises from nostalgic memories of huge steel nuts and bolts from my youth — growing up on a cotton farm in New South Wales, Australia.