Rendition of a Chessboard
A redesign of the chess set in an Art Deco language — carved, cut and stained by hand in wood.
Self-directed · Hand fabrication in woodThe chess set is one of the most reproduced objects in design, and almost always in the same Staunton silhouette. I took the six pieces back to first principles and rebuilt them in an Art Deco vocabulary: stepped profiles, strong vertical fluting, symmetry, and geometry standing in for figuration.
Each piece still had to read instantly across the board — rank legible from a seated player's eye line, by silhouette alone. The redesign kept the hierarchy of heights and footprints intact while replacing every surface detail.
- Stepped, ziggurat profiles in place of turned curves
- Vertical fluting to catch light and mark rank
- Geometry instead of figuration — no carved horse, no crown
- Height and footprint hierarchy kept from the standard set
- Two wood tones for the sides, no paint
Silhouettes worked out at full size on paper first, then drawn up as sections so each piece could be checked against the others for height and footprint before any wood was cut.
Blanks cut and squared from stock, with jigs for the repeated pieces so the eight pawns and four rooks came out consistent.
Steps, flutes and angled faces cut by hand. The fluting is where the Art Deco language actually lives, so it had to be even across sixteen pieces a side.
Sanded through grits and stained to separate the two sides, keeping the grain visible rather than covering it.
The board is cut from a single wood, so the light and dark squares come from staining rather than from two species butted together. The grain therefore runs continuously across the whole field and the eight-by-eight grid reads as one object rather than sixty-four parts.
History of the chess set
Staunton proportions
Wood species and grain
Stains and finishes
Illustrator
Technical drawing
Sketching
Wood turning and cutting
Sanding and finishing
Staining
Jig making