White Oak Shoji Cabinet – Design

This past summer I had a custom furniture project for a client overseas. The commissioned project was a custom white oak cabinet with shoji screen style doors. I designed and built the cabinet in Japan this past July, then crated and shipped it overseas on a long journey via cargo ship. Shipping ended up taking close to three months due to covid related delays at the ports, but thankfully the cabinet has finally arrived and is safely in the customers hands.

It’s a huge relief to have this project come to completion, and with the cabinet finally installed in the client’s home, I feel like I can finally talk about it. So I thought I’d share a series of posts detailing the design and construction process.

Shoji Door Design

The initial request from the customer was for a display cabinet with shoji screen doors that could be illuminated with internal lighting, and vertically slid open to display the contents. From the beginning the size of the cabinet was clearly decided, but we needed to narrow down a few other factors such as the type of wood and the design of the shoji screen doors. So I started to work up a some designs in Fusion 360 and produced a few different renderings for the client to look at.

Below are the first three variations of the cabinet, with door designs ranging from simple to complex. For each variation I tried to include a few different views showing each cabinet with the doors closed as well as open in different arrangements.

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Modelling and rendering the designs worked out well as it gave the client a clearer picture and helped them to narrow in on what style they wanted. It also allowed me to work out a few problem areas, such as the vertically sliding doors. The problem with vertically sliding doors is the hardware. I couldn’t find any good options available that would allow the hardware to be fully concealed. I was also skeptical about the long term use of any kind of spring hardware or hardware that relies on some type of friction to hold the door in position. My main concern was that the hardware would wear over time and as a result the doors would have a tendency to slide down with gravity.

So after talking it over with the client we decided to build the cabinet with horizontally sliding doors. That allowed me to design the cabinet using the same type of construction method used for standard shoji. Basically a set of wooden tracks that houses the top and bottom edges of each door, allowing them to slide freely in the track without the use of any hardware that could potentially fail overtime.

Joinery Considerations

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Joinery is another serious design consideration, as it affects not only the look of the cabinet but also it’s strength and durability. These days it’s not very common to see joinery, particularly on mass produced furniture. Joinery takes time, and good joinery requires a skilled hand. It also requires an understanding of wood movement and the proper ways in which wood must be allowed to move to avoid issues like splitting/cracking. For all of these reasons production furniture makers tend to avoid joinery in favor of easier to execute methods, such as mechanical fasteners. On the other hand, custom furniture makers love joinery like dovetails and box joints for their strength, durability, and looks.

Despite the strength and durability that come with quality joinery, sometimes the appearance of a row of dovetails or box joints can be too busy for the design. So a common alternative is to do a miter. When it comes to clean modern design, miters have the benefit of looking really subdued and minimal. The problem with miters is that they are not very strong, and they demand some kind of reinforcement. The most common type of reinforcement is usually joinery like biscuits or dominoes because they are relatively fast to execute. The problem with biscuits and dominoes is they are weak when it comes to heavy use and strong forces from wood movement. So another alternative is to use hidden dovetails inside of the miter. Hidden dovetails have a lot more strength but require a much more time and skill to execute well.

Budget aside, ultimately the struggle when designing and building furniture is to strike a balance between the design, and the strength and durability of the joinery. Over time as a piece of furniture gets used, moved around and bumped into the type of joinery used will greatly effect how long the furniture lasts.

For the shoji cabinet the initial plan was to use miters joints for a clean design. However I was worried that mitered joinery would be dangerous particularly when shipping the cabinet overseas. I figured the cabinet was likely to experience a fair share of rough handling, bumpy roads, and rocky seas, all of which could potentially break a weak miter joint. I was also concerned that the humidity difference between hot and humid Japan to an air conditioned home overseas could cause the wide solid wood panels of the cabinet to warp and potentially break the miters. So while the customer initially requested the cabinet have no exposed joinery, after explaining the dangers they agreed that dovetail joints would make for a much stronger and more durable cabinet.

The Final Design

With the joinery decisions and horizontally sliding door orientation decided, we started to narrow in on a final design. The last big change was to further simplify the doors. Instead of using elaborate kumiko pattens, the client chose to have a more open feel to the doors, with a single horizontal and vertical kumiko piece in each door. Overall I think the effect makes the cabinet feel lighter and more subdued. As for the choice of wood, the client chose to go with quartersawn nara; a type of Japanese white oak.

Here are the renderings of the final design.

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Here’s a quick sneak peak of the finished cabinet, along with my trusty pup Gus, who kept me company while working on this project.

Thanks for following along, and stay tuned for fabrications shots and lots of dovetails in the next post.

-Jon