It begins with design exploration. Multiple drawings, one change each time, till something resonates. There is no shortage of ways to fail at this quietly, on paper, before a single board is cut, and that is rather the point of doing it that way.
The pull, to begin with, was the step-Tansu itself — those staircase chests the old Japanese houses built into a wall, storage disguised as architecture, treads you could actually climb. The plan here saluted that form without pretending to be it: something too small to climb, sized instead to sit atop a stand, a chest that remembers stairs rather than serves them.
Draw it life size, then — full scale, so the eye can lie to itself a little less and practice making the key joints. And having done that, the next move was to put that design away entirely and go explore something orthogonal. Asymmetry. Since there were no actual steps to a mezzanine, the steps in the idea of it could be irregular, could rise as they pleased. Nothing forces a step-chest's memory to follow a prescription.
The wood sorted itself into a small morality play. Air-dried ash is a pleasure to work with — the kanna makes its vaunted swishing sound and leaves behind a surface that obviates the need for sanding, which is as close to grace as woodworking offers. Cottonwood, chosen for the stand, gave back torturous grain, fuzz, and a softness that dents if you look at it wrong. The Tansu, accordingly, is Ash. The stand — patient, unglamorous, holding the good stuff up — is Cottonwood, and gets exactly the passing mention that kind of loyalty usually earns.
The stand itself was no afterthought, though — no leftover base pressed into service. It was designed and built for this one purpose, and no other: to hold the Tansu just so, at just that height, so that the chest above it would seem to hover rather than sit, floating a fraction of an inch above the wood that was, in fact, doing all the work. That is the particular fate of a good stand — engineered for the illusion that it does nothing.
Joinery carried the homage forward: pinned box joints and drawer sides nodding at the traditional look, while the drawers themselves were built to fit from either side, the asymmetry reversible by design, not accident — from the start, in fact, which meant the drawer cavities had to come out perfectly square and the door had to be built to hang on either edge. No margin for the drawer that's almost square. The front is curly maple throughout, chatoyant enough to change its mind about its own color as the light moves across it, which given the room's habit of soft western afternoon sun through curtains and potted greenery, it would have plenty of chances to do. The door itself swings open on one side and slides to reveal what's inside — a small piece of theater built into the furniture.
And as part of that theater, laid in early rather than late, sits the pattern that gives the whole piece its quiet center: asa no ha, hemp-leaf geometry, backed with green mulberry paper. The pattern has its meaning and seemed appropriate — hemp grows straight and fast without being asked twice, and the old wish behind the pattern was for children to grow the same way. The green was let in only as a hint of color, not a statement, the way you'd underline a word once rather than three times.
The hardware, custom as well, keeps its opinions to itself — simple ring pulls for the drawers, a stub knob for the door, nothing that asks to be noticed before the wood does. The finish is a hand-rubbed custom blend, worked in for protection, look, and feel in roughly that order of stubbornness.
What it's for was decided somewhere in the drawing stage without being written down: a treasure trove, for a young lady's jewelry or a child's small hoard of important nothings. If CC ever wants it, nothing would make its maker happier. There is a particular kind of joinery that has nothing to do with wood at all — the kind that fits a piece of furniture to a person, patiently, quietly, meaning for it to outlast you both, and hoping all the while that she grows up and finds, one day, that it was made for exactly her.