The Milo
A solid walnut end table that borrows Milo Baughman's clean, luxurious attitude and swaps the chrome for more walnut.
- Wood
- 100 percent solid walnut, no veneers
- Size
- 23 inches high, 19 inches across
- Base
- Three interlocking legs, joined with the Domino
- Made
- Top cut on the CNC, then sanded and finished by hand in my shop in western PA
- Finish
- Hand-rubbed oil, with a Blacktail Nano ceramic coating over the top
- Lead time
- Built to order in my shop. Ask me for timing.
- Price
- On request
The story
The furniture makers who came before me, guys like Nakashima, Maloof, Wegner, and Baughman, inspire me to make furniture that looks nice, and to be clear, they wouldn't even trust me to build their lunchbox. Milo Baughman was one of the designers who defined American modern furniture, and a lot of his tables sit on clean flat-bar chrome frames with figured wood doing the talking. In his hands that looks like pure luxury, but every time I see chrome legs under a wood top it takes me right back to sitting at a school desk (that's my baggage, not his), so the Milo puts figured walnut on top of more walnut and carries the curve in the legs. I called it the Milo because it doesn't look anything like the stuff he made, and mostly because I just like the name.
The wood
It's 100 percent solid walnut, no veneer anywhere, and I picked the boards for the grain because on a table that's 19 inches across, the grain is pretty much the whole show.
What the wood is going to doWalnut doesn't get richer with age, it lightens. I pulled two pieces I milled from the same log, one had been sitting on my kitchen counter for three years and the other was buried in a dark corner of the shop, and side by side they looked like two different species.
The build
The top got glued up and cut round on the CNC, the legs got cut out, and every piece got sanded by hand and test fit before anything was glued for good. The base is three legs that interlock, joined with the Domino, and the logo gets burned into the underside where only the person who owns it knows it's there.
When I couldn't decide whether it needed a chamfer on the bottom, I put it to a vote on Instagram and everybody voted yes, so I chucked a 2.75 inch bit in the router table that's basically the size of an airplane propeller, and it went across all that end grain with zero tear-out. Turning a pile of lumber into something like this just never gets old.
The finish
The oil goes on by hand, and on walnut it soaks in heavy enough that you can see it running off the edge. That first coat is the moment I talk about every chance I get, because the grain that looked flat and gray a minute ago suddenly has depth to it.
Living with it
Once the oil cured, I put a ceramic coating over the top, Blacktail Studio's Nano, to see whether it can slow down how fast walnut lightens in the sun. The care card says to keep it out of direct sunlight, so naturally mine lives right next to a window getting three to four hours of afternoon sun a day, and I photograph it on a schedule so I have a real record and not a vibe. So far it has lightened noticeably less than the other walnut pieces in my house.
“Would you call this mid-century modern, or is it just a cool-ass end table?”
Me, on Instagram
