Adam Bezzina
Barrie, Ontario studio furniture maker Adam Bezzina on design, live edge dining tables and making pieces others aren’t sure they can make.
Business:
Pompous Fox Wood Company Inc.How long have you been building furniture?
About 6 years.
What sort of furniture do you specialize in?
Everything I do is custom, one-of-a-kind, to meet a client’s requirements. Something we’ve become known for is building pieces others weren’t sure they could make.
Solid wood or veneer?
Solid wood! We want our pieces to stand the test of time. If we do need to use veneer, we often make our own that is about 3mm thick.
Inherited Vintage Stanley Sweetheart or fresh-out-of-the-box Veritas?
I have a couple inherited Stanley’s from my grandfather, the rest are all new.
Flowing curves or geometric shapes?
Flowing curves.
Favourite wood?
Too hard to pick.
Least favourite wood?
Maple.
Photos of Adam Bezzina
Adam Bezzina
Mappa Burl Coffee Table
This piece was made for Hotel Julie, a small boutique hotel in Stratford, Ont. The piece has an MDF skeleton with mappa burl veneer on its outer face. According to Bezzina, sourcing good mappa burl veneer may have been the hardest part of making this piece. (Photo by Lauren Miller)
Whiskey Cabinet
This cabinet was designed for the Interior Design Show in Toronto. With this piece, Bezzina wanted to showcase how far a design could be taken using solid wood construction, a curved door, wood texturing, a solid natural quartzite top and an integrated electrical lift with lighting. Bezzina designed it with one main challenge in mind: “If I wanted the best whiskey cabinet money could buy, what features would I want?” By far the hardest part was creating the solid wood curved doors, he says. Normally creating a solid wood curved piece is easy, but ensuring the interior radius matched up to the radius on the cabinet was not an easy task.
Whiskey Cabinet (interior view)
Ash Coffee Table
The design of this solid ash table started with the top – the overall dimensions, the shape and the tapered underside. Bezzina had a sketch with a general design idea, but needed to understand what was possible with the bent base. “I machined a 1/4 scale of the top,” explains Bezzina, “and started playing with some pieces of veneer until I had a shape I was happy with. From there, jigs were made to construct the base.” The biggest challenge was forming the base. It was created from two bent laminations. Each lamination was formed in the jig in a custom vacuum bag.
Quotes from Adam Bezzina
Our shop is located in a small industrial building on the outskirts of Barrie. As much as I love working with hand tools, the shop has been set up for efficiency. Some of my big investments are my 5' × 8' CNC and 10' sliding table saw. I now have one-full time worker with me, and we usually have a co-op student helping us as well.
I’m pretty particular about the shop. Everything goes away when we’re done using it and we spend 15 minutes or more at the end of each day cleaning up so the shop is ready for the next day.
When I get a chance to design a piece, it generally starts in my notebook roughing out some ideas. Once a general idea has been put together, I put my engineering background to use and I get on my computer and create a 3D model.
I’m tired of seeing live edge dining tables. I think they have their place but I’m not very fond of them. To me, they don’t offer much of a challenge or creativity, as generally the table bases are very basic as well. I also can’t stand using epoxy with them – it’s just more plastic entering this world that isn’t needed.
So many people base furniture prices off of what they see on Wayfair but don’t understand the difference between something that’s mass produced using cheap materials and something that’s custom made. I do my best to educate people on this by sharing the process. People say it’s expensive but I believe the best word is costly. It costs a lot to produce a high-quality custom piece of furniture.
For the most part, I look at furniture makers overseas for inspiration: Joseph Walsh, Nick Pedulla` and Morten Stenbæk to name a few.
I grew up helping my grandfather in his shop and always enjoyed woodworking. When I bought my first house, I wanted some proper furniture – no more of this particleboard furniture that’s terrible for our planet. I started to build my own furniture with the goal of making pieces that last and are good for our planet. That little hobby grew into a passion and allowed me to leave my engineering career.
Being creative is what brings me joy in my work. Whether I’m designing a piece myself or get to solve creative problems with a design I’ve been asked to make, creativity is the foundation of our work.
It has to be functional but beautiful at the same time. For me, form doesn’t follow function, they must work together to create a functional piece of art.
Whatever the most challenging part is – that’s my favourite. Whether I have to figure out a unique design challenge or the design requires a challenging aspect in fabrication, solving the problem and making it happen is the best feeling.
I’m very proud of a whiskey credenza I designed and built. I think I had over 40 design iterations until I was totally happy with it. It combined so many unique features into one piece of furniture. It’s completely solid wood, including the curved doors, hand-carved Naguri texture around the entire exterior, a natural stone top, a unique swivel wine glass storage system and an integrated hidden lift with back lighting. It was a piece I designed for an interior design show to showcase the endless possibilities with custom furniture. It includes the use of textures and other materials like stone, the integration of electronics and lighting, and unique solutions for storage. Not only was it very challenging creating a refined piece, but the fabrication offered some extremely challenging aspects as well and culminated in over 100 hours of labour.
Our video of the work of Adam Bezzina
I just cannot think about the work that you do. To not only have an engineering degree, learn hand tools from a grandfather but also computers. When I started there was no TV, computers or even a neighbor to show me the way. God bless you.