Walking in the woods near our shop in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada we sometimes find discarded antlers, shed by our local black-tailed deer. We keep these antlers around as beautiful decorations and their shape eventually led to the inspiration for a chair design.

Chairs have three fundamental engineering concepts that drive their design: they must be strong, they must be light-weight, and they must be comfortable. The forking curves of antlers suggested solutions for all three.

Each individual member of the Wapiti Chair is relatively light and delicate, but tied together as they are by a series of webbed branches, the result is extremely strong, like a truss, or a honeycomb.