Maloof-Inspired Low Back Chair

This is my very first chair and I have to say it was a lot of fun to make. I’ve been wanting to build a dining set for a long time so I started looking into chairs and I found Sam Maloof’s work very inspiring. Having no experience in chair building I did some digging around and found some templates online and started building the low back chair that Sam referenced in his book. It looked like a good 1st chair rather than a high back or a rocker. I used walnut with purple heart plugs and an oil wax finish. I have about 25-30 hours in it.

I was going to build a set of 6 dining chairs next but my wife suggested that I build a rocker instead. There’s no point in rushing the dining set as I’m still waiting on a giant walnut crotch to get sawn and dry out so I can build the slab table, The slab for the table will be 4’x10’x 2 3/4″ thick from the mill. I think my wife really knew what I wanted to build next =) So I recently started milling walnut this week for the Maloof rocker.

After building the low back chair I can say that I found it to be easy to assemble and fun to shape albeit with a lot of elbow grease. But I think that is the beauty of Sam’s work, simple but elegant. I have plans to build at least 10 more chairs.