This was one of my earliest “good” projects and it was entirely based around the hinges.

One day while browsing on the Horton Brasses site I stumbled upon these hand forged black iron hinges and from there I decided to plan a project around them. Since those hinges are $150 USD for the pair I needed to build something that justified the cost. That meant big and beautiful and you can’t get much nicer than natural walnut! To go along with the walnut I wanted to try the combination of cherry which is one of the best natural combinations I’ve found. I would’ve loved to use true quartersawn cherry for the panels but that’s not an option where I live so I used the rip & flip technique on some 8/4 stock to make a bunch of QS strips that were then glued together to form the panels. Hindsight being 20/20 I should’ve used a better technique to make the panel because as you can see from the photos, they ended up with a bunch of visible seams. Does it look terrible, no, but knowing what I know now I think a bunch of small bookmatched panels would’ve looked way better!