Bookmatched cherry panels, resawn from 8/4 stock. Curly maple drawers inside. No pulls — push to open.
Every panel on this dresser is two faces of the same board, opened like a book. To get there you start with 8/4 cherry and resaw it down the middle. One board becomes two mirrored halves. Then you do it again. And again.
The carcass is American cherry, bookmatched from 8/4 stock so every panel reads as a single open book. Cherry darkens with age — in a year this dresser will be deeper than it is now. In ten, deeper still.
Pull a drawer and the wood changes. Curly maple, pale and chatoyant, catches the light differently from every angle. Contrasting dowels run through the joinery as small signatures — you only see them if you look.
The whole dresser started with a decision: bookmatch every panel. That meant buying 8/4 cherry and resawing it on the bandsaw, splitting each board down the middle so the two halves mirror each other like an open book.
Resawing 8/4 is slow work. You feed the board through inch by inch, watching the blade track, listening for the change in tone that says something's about to go wrong. Halfway through one of the boards, the blade did.
"...that was exciting."
Snapped clean. Loud. The kind of sound that makes you stand still for a second and inventory all your fingers before you move. New blade, new tension, back to work. The board was fine. I was fine. The film caught most of it.
The drawers are curly maple — pale and chatoyant against the warming cherry — with contrasting dowels visible if you look for them. No pulls. Push-to-open hardware tucked behind each front so the face stays completely clean. You walk up to the dresser and see nothing but wood.
Commission a dresser designed for your space — bookmatched panels, contrasting interior, hardware tucked out of sight. Different wood if you want, same care, same hand.