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Hello my fancy friends! Thank you so much for tuning in today! One of the things I am often asked to do as interior designer is assess a piece of furniture, or even cabinetry built by a millworker, for quality. This is a quick and easy task for me, but it’s rooted in a mental knowledge library that I’ve built up over the years. And today, I’m giving that library to you, specifically in the form of joinery details. “What’s a joinery detail?“ you might ask. Settle in, because understanding this lexicon will allow you to quickly and easily determine the value of a piece of furniture.
It's easy for an item in a store to have a glossy finish or an exciting color, but what's going to make it stand the test of time is how the piece is actually put together, the little touches that actually indicate manufacturer competency. Wood joinery and detailing is considered a lost art by some, but when you know what to look for, it’s actually all around us. We're going to get acquainted with some of the most prevalent, high quality furniture and cabinet joinery details - so that you too know how to spot a piece of craftsmanship versus a piece of something else.
But first, let’s talk about the color of the week. Did you know that May is national Strawberry month? And for good reason too, Strawberry is season is right around the corner for the east coast, I for one am keeping my eyes peeled for that sweet two week window where strawberries are perfect and on sale. Red, while being one of the most magnetic colors, is also one of the most challenging to incorporate into an interior space without feeling harsh and even sterile. One way to make red feel more like home? Push it over just a little to the pink spectrum. Pantone 18-1652 TCX is specifically meant for fabric and upholstery and if you want this to be your guide in creating a room’s color scheme - dive in head first and bring in other rosy tones for a monochromatic look. If you can’t visualize this aesthetic, take a look at the work of designer David Hicks or Alexander Girard and let your home be sweet!
Raise your hand if you’ve assembled a piece of furniture from a place like Ikea. If your hand isn’t raised, it might be because you’re in public, but I’m pretty sure that covers most adults in today’s world. In that case, you are more familiar with furniture joinery than you may realize, however, the tiny fluted dowel shoved into a tiny hole is really just a variation of a classic woodworking dowel joint, which is one of several styles of fastening or joining that are commonly used by woodworkers. Different methods for joining pieces of wood together were developed to minimize the amount of nails, screws, or glue that a fabricator would need to assemble a piece in a stable fashion
. If you think back even to the 1800’s and certainly time prior to that, nails were still being hand forged and could easily rust and cause expansion, ultimately destroying the table or cabinet or whatever it was. Glues were not super reliable yet either and often wore away with moisture. So designing wood shapes that easily and securely interlocked was the best way to guarantee a true hold for furniture, cabinets, even some wood structures.
Today of course, technology has developed amazing fasteners and glues and all kinds of equipment to help apply them quickly and easily. However, much like with any tradition, the foundation history provides us is often honored as authentic and even nostalgic in some cases. For furniture building, even with glues and screws, some of the methods of woodworking developed thousands of years ago still provide the best combination of strength and beauty. What many of them lack is efficiency. We’re going to go over each connection style, and you’ll notice some are easier than others. Some are incredibly time consuming and require advanced wood working know-how. This certainly does not align with the priorities of mass production and the efficiency our culture embraced in the industrial revolution, so the amount of fine, handmade joinery seen in today’s retail furniture has considerably decreased. However, with the Maker Movement starting in the late Aughts, more designers are incorporating these details back into furniture as a sign of craftsmanship and even status. This time period kick started a revitalization in small-bath goods of all kinds, created by a single person or a small team, and often celebrating the joinery and hardware of piece because it gives a voice to the process and structural integrity. It’s form-follows-function, but on a handheld scale.
One important thing to pay attention to before we get into the different types of joinery, is where to look for them. So you see a piece of furniture or you're in a kitchen and you're liking the way it looks, but you want to understand the quality level. You want your eyes to go to the edges and the corners of pieces. This is especially true for storage pieces like cabinets, bookshelves, and anything square or a rectangular. If it's a rounded piece things might look a little different, sometimes the joinery is hidden, a lot of times it's where the leg or vertical support meets the top or horizontal component. If you have the opportunity to open a drawer, if it’s a storage piece of any kind, you can look at the corner of the drawer. So that’s where you want to focus, edges and corners. Also, I am not a wood worker or craftsperson and these are my opinions. Okay, now let’s dive into the details and their names.
A Butt Joint is a phrase I always feel a little immature and giggly about saying, which works in my favorite because this is one of the least refined joints. Two pieces meet at a 90 degree angle with no shape or form to connect them, and relying solely on glue or fasteners for the connection. It’s just one piece butted up against the other. This requires less wood working skill to create - no intricate cuts- but it’s also the weakest in terms of strength. It can be a nice, minimal finishing detail, so cabinet fronts get this detail a lot, think shaker style. It’s also helpful if something is being made in a hurry or it’s a temporary item like a quickly made desk on a construction site.
A modern technique used to secure a Butt Joint is the Pocket Joint. This type of connection seems to be a favorite amongst DIYer’s and involves an angled screw being drilled into both pieces of wood in a butt joined. It does require a particular type of jig to create the holes, although if you have this piece of equipment the process is very fast and doesn’t require any math or fine chiseling. The screws are typically done in pairs on the back side of a piece, and while the holes can be covered up, they are often left open, and don’t have the best aesthetic to them. It’s always reminded me of Voldemort’s nostrils from Harry Potter. I’m sorry, I’m that kind of millennial!
If you want to add a little more finesse to your piece, you can consider the miter joint. Well loved in the art framing world, a miter attaches two wood pieces that have both been cut at a 45° angle, to create a diagonal line at the corner. This adds a hint of refinement and makes the piece look slightly more dynamic. It adds an insignificant amount of tensile strength, but ultimately the connection still needs to be held together with glue and fasteners.
Many of the joints used in wood working can appear the same as a butt joint from the outside, but if you look above or to the side of a piece - you may start to see some interesting shapes occurring. If a corner looks like there is a stepped groove at the edge of one piece to receive the other, this is called a rabbet. That is rabbet with an e-t, at the end, not our furry woodland friends. Rabbet stems from the Old French word meaning a wall recess, and I like to think of it as rabbits in the forest dig burrows in the ground, and rabbets in woodworking are a dug out notch in the wood. This can be as simple as notching the end of one piece of wood with a shape that exactly fits the other piece of wood, or both pieces can have rabbets, a double rabbet situation if you will, and the two pieces fit together like a very easy puzzle. This is a popular joinery type amongst woodworkers, because it's a big payoff for a fairly simple amount of work. We see our rabbet friends in all kinds of trim work and doorframes, and even in the retired trend of shiplap. The rabbet helps a piece fit together snuggly, but still requires glue and nails or screws for stability.
If you’re looking for a stronger shape in your joinery, the mortise and tenon joint is your best friend. Each piece has either a positive or negative carving, the mortise being the negative space and the tenon is a projection that interlocks within the mortise. Fun fact - the famous rocks at Stone Henge are anchored together using mortise and tenon, so that gives you a hint at how long this system has been around. The awesome thing about this type of connection is that glue, screws, and nails are not necessarily needed, although glue is sometimes added anyway for stability. Or, there many be an additional dowel rod that pierces through the whole assembly once it is together for another level of security - this is referred to as a Phoenician Joint.
A tenon is inherently part of the larger board or piece of wood being joined. But, if you have two mortised pieces that need to go together, so that’s two piece of wood with negative space or holes, a biscuit can be used to connect them. The name biscuit comes from the traditional shape of this piece, which is a flat oval. The biscuit joinery method is actually fairly new, invented in Switzerland in the 1950’s. This system requires glue to be stable, and not any old piece of wood can be a biscuit, it needs to be thoroughly dried to prevent any expansion, and a lot of times composite fiber board is used, but the shape of the biscuit allows for more wiggle room and less precision than a traditional mortise and tenon.
The tricky thing about identifying a mortise and tenon or even a biscuit joint, is that they are not visible once the piece is finished. Unlike other more decorative methods that we will talk about next, once a piece is fully assembled, mortise and tenon connections are hidden. So if you’re shopping for a quality piece, you can always ask the manufacture, maker, or sales person about the construction and know that these methods are good ones. If it's an item online you can check out the detail description and see if it calls out mortise and tenon construction.
A variation of mortise and tenon that is visible is called the Bridle joint. Rather than the tenon fitting into the mortise like a peg in a hole, the bridle joint uses a mortise at the the very end of a piece of wood and is open on both sides, often referred to as a fork, and the tenon uses gravity to lock into place. These can be glued in place but they can also be used fastener-free for easy disassembly. For years, I slept in a bed frame that was put together like this, no screws, easy to disassemble, and an amazing example of craftsmanship. At the time I thought my old wood headboard was very out of Fashion and I could only think about getting a white wicker headboard instead. But once I got that wicker headboard, its rickety disposition made me appreciate the sturdiness of my old headboard.
A Dado joint is similar to a mortise, except it occurs along a piece of wood, rather than on the edge, to create a cavity with at least three sides - picture a Lincoln Log toy if you remember those. Another piece of wood is then inserted directly into the Dado. This is particularly common in cabinetry, for fixed shelfs or drawer dividers, and is exceptionally strong. If you see a u-shaped channel in a piece of wood, with another piece fitted into it, that’s a Dado.
The gold standard of detail joinery is the dovetail. This method predates written history, used in ancient Egypt. The word comes from the fanned shape of the namesake bird’s back feathers. This is the strongest of all standard joinery details, and is often used for the construction of drawers. Where two pieces of wood meet at a 90 degree angle, the wood worker carves a series of uniform, but angled notches, each side is the negative version of the other, allowing them to lock together like a more complicated puzzle. This creates a tight fitting lock, imagine weaving all your fingers together and then making a fist. This carving pattern also maximizes the amount of surface area for wood glue, and creates excellent tensile strength. The aesthetic result show cases the variation in grain, wood tone, and creates a very subtle checkerboard-ish effect. There are plenty of variations of the dovetail, and the exact style and shape can aid antique collectors in identifying a piece’s time period. The dovetail’s only downfall? Time and precision. Many dovetails were hand carved and required a great level of skills, precision, and math. But boy does it make my heart light up when I find a piece with a good dovetail. There’s also the box joint which looks like a simplified dovetail, there aren’t any angles in the carving, so it looks like a multi bridle joint - also very cute.
There are unique variations and plays of all of there methods, but now you have the basics under your belt. Keep an eye out on my TikTok account, I’m going to be posting visuals of each of these for reference, because we are all visual people. Follow me over there and you can tell me what your favorite style is and now, when you go furniture shopping, you’re going to be able to look at things through the eyes of a pro. Until next time, keep holding it together, and I’ll talk to you in the next episode.
