The first time I sat in a Hans Wegner CH25, I looked at the chair upside down for about ten minutes. The joint that holds the back to the seat — a through-tenon, slightly proud, finished with a chamfer — was the entire reason the chair was beautiful. It was also the entire reason it would still be a chair in 2074. I built the first Delina Living sofa around that joint.
We get asked, mostly by industry people, why we don't hide it. The trade convention is to bury the through-tenon under a leg cap or a piece of veneer — to make the leg look monolithic, like it grew that way. We have nothing against that approach; it just isn't ours. Delina Living's pieces are held together by the geometry of the wood itself, not by hardware, and we want you to see that.
What "proud" means, and why two millimeters.
The through-tenon protrudes from the leg by exactly 2mm. This number is not arbitrary. At 1mm it reads as an accident; at 3mm it catches your sleeve when you stand up. At 2mm, the tenon is unambiguously a decision, but it sits below the radius of your thumb when you run your hand down the leg.
You can feel for it from across the room, in low light, with your eyes closed. We've tested this with about thirty visitors to the showroom — including a furniture writer who couldn't find the chamfer detail on a competitor's chair until I pointed it out. On a Delina Living, you find it within four seconds. That's the point.
The honest version of the cost.
A through-tenon takes about forty minutes longer to cut, fit and finish than the equivalent dowel-and-screw joint. Multiplied across our twenty-two pieces and the average four leg joints per piece, that's roughly three additional hours of labor per sofa — at our shop rate, about $180. We do not charge separately for it. It is, in the dry parlance of the trade, the cost of being who we say we are.
If you bought a Delina Living piece in the last five years, the through-tenon you're looking at right now will look better in another five. The hardwax oil finish deepens slightly, the end-grain darkens a half-shade against the long grain. Wegner's chair is sixty years old and still doing this. We hope ours will do the same.
A note on imitations.
We've seen a few competitors begin to ship "exposed joinery" pieces over the last eighteen months. Some are honest through-tenons; many are decorative caps glued to the leg. You can tell which by knocking on the top of the joint — a real through-tenon rings differently than a glued cap. It's a small thing to know. We're glad we live in a world where it matters.
— Astrid is the founder and only designer of Delina Living. She writes most months from the studio in Los Angeles, sometimes from the bench at the atelier.