The Flotsam Furniture Works

The Flotsam Furniture Works Custom modern furniture handmade in Portland, Oregon. Things evolved quickly after that.

My name is Nick Sario, and I created The Flotsam Furniture Works out of a thoughtfully cultivated fusion of single-minded obsession and wild desperation. At the time this all began, home was a drafty Chicago apartment furnished almost entirely by hand-me-downs from my roommate’s grandmother. We were grateful to have any furnishings at all, but it was a bit odd living in an apartment that appeared

to have been decorated by an eighty year old woman circa 1975. Neither of us could afford anything new, so as the furniture began to very literally break down beneath us, I took it upon myself to peel back the faded gold velour and make repairs. Arcane looking upholstery tools began cluttering the apartment, then taking over entire rooms. The sun porch was commandeered for woodworking while the dining room was repurposed for sewing and upholstery. Before long I was buying supplies in bulk and recovering third-hand chairs just to learn how they’d been assembled. The growing industry in my apartment was a stark counterpoint to my day job. I was temping as a data entry clerk after losing two positions to the recession, and the daily reminder that I was almost thirty and my only marketable skill was apparently my speed at the numeric ten-key left me feeling a singular mixture of restlessness, self-doubt, and terror. I was desperate for some kind of radical course correction, some way to orient myself away from the pursuit of a paycheck and toward the pursuit of skills, some means to prove that despite the years of mundane repetition I could still muster in myself the tiniest bit of craft and grace, and thus The Flotsam Furniture Works was born.

So it was pointed out to me that the toy dinosaur in my last post was not a useful reference as it was not to scale. Hop...
05/31/2019

So it was pointed out to me that the toy dinosaur in my last post was not a useful reference as it was not to scale. Hopefully this remedies the situation.

Side table in black walnut (dinosaur for scale).
05/31/2019

Side table in black walnut (dinosaur for scale).

05/23/2019

And here’s the crib view. It surprised me how many crib mobiles weren’t made to really be viewed from a crib. Either they had thin tile-like pieces that were near invisible when seen from below, or stuffed animals that would only look like so many feet. I took a cue from kinetic sculpture and went with a simple form that would give complex movement. Just blow on that biggest fin and the whole thing will be spooling and unspooling for the next ten minutes.

I built this mobile some years ago to hang above my daughter’s crib. I always loved the simplicity of it, and every once...
05/23/2019

I built this mobile some years ago to hang above my daughter’s crib. I always loved the simplicity of it, and every once in awhile I think about doing a production run of them, then I remember how mind-bendingly frustrating it was to keep at all perfectly balanced while stringing the pieces together. Finding the fulcrum point on that smallest fin was like trying to balance a pin on the head of another pin.

Some walnut pairing well with walnut. That magenta hopsack doesn’t look half bad either.
04/09/2019

Some walnut pairing well with walnut. That magenta hopsack doesn’t look half bad either.

A final few details of the slat bench in oiled teak.
03/08/2019

A final few details of the slat bench in oiled teak.

A few more shots of this teak gentleman.
03/08/2019

A few more shots of this teak gentleman.

A quick peek at the latest custom piece, a slat bench in teak.
03/07/2019

A quick peek at the latest custom piece, a slat bench in teak.

So I only recently learned that there’s actually a term for installing screws this way, where all the slotted heads have...
03/06/2019

So I only recently learned that there’s actually a term for installing screws this way, where all the slotted heads have been aligned with each other. It’s called clocking, clocking screws. And all this time I thought it was called being a**l retentive.

Secret curves from a secret project.
03/05/2019

Secret curves from a secret project.

Pattern matching is one of those things that requires a lot of work for it to look completely invisible. Upholstering th...
01/08/2019

Pattern matching is one of those things that requires a lot of work for it to look completely invisible. Upholstering this fella probably took a year off my life, but on the plus side, I think it cured my OCD.

Can’t get enough of that heathered wool upholstery.
12/13/2018

Can’t get enough of that heathered wool upholstery.

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Portland, OR
97213

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