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Treasure Chest
AN ENVY-INDUCING STATEMENT PIECE PUTS A CONTEMPORARY SPIN ON THE CLASSIC CURIO CABINET
By Caroline Sanders Clements
Behind the luminous bronze screen and the handsome dark walnut casing of Elijah Leed’s Warren Cabinet, pottery, art books, trinkets, and turtle shells are meant to nestle next to model ships, marbles, and Matchbox cars. “The driving narrative for this piece was the notion of having something tucked away that’s not completely hidden,” says Leed, a designer in Durham, North Carolina. The premise has been around for centuries: Cabinets of curiosities have existed since the Italian Renaissance, when collecting rare and unusual souvenirs from the world over indicated social status, and viewing the assemblage doubled as party entertainment.
But for a segment of the audience who saw Leed’s sleek and modern finished design at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York last spring, a classic American piece sprang to mind. “Some of the older-generation folks I know said it looked like a pie safe,” Leed recalls. “That was the first time I heard a reference to that.” While he didn’t intentionally fashion the cabinet after the folksy eighteenth-century kitchen essential conceived to protect food from insects and animals in the days before refrigeration, he doesn’t mind the comparison. In fact, Leed believes that he—and every other artist and artisan—is constantly being influenced by one thing or another, whether or not he realizes it.
“The folks who try to say that they are inventing something new—I don’t subscribe to that,” Leed says. “I wanted to make a recognizable object, but in a new way. [The cabinet] is not entirely brand-new, but I think a lot of the small details of what our team implements in the work set it apart.” And despite the cabinet’s resemblance to time-tested forms, its refined elements—integrated joinery in figured walnut, a delicate woven (not welded) bronze screen, hand-cast bronze pulls to match—demanded innovation.
Before beginning his career in woodworking, Leed studied glassblowing and sculptural ceramics at Centre College in Kentucky, and he approaches each furniture project with an artist’s eye. In his workshop in downtown Durham, in a building that also accommodates his metal fabricator, an arts nonprofit, and a glassblowing studio he and a friend opened in 2017, Leed began by sketching out a handful of cabinet styles. One was tall; one short; one squat and square. “There’s no formula for any of this,” he says.
After settling on the Warren’s current shape and dimensions, he collected materials, obtaining rough-cut walnut from nearby Gibsonville before milling and shaping it in-house. “We use a lot of walnut in our furniture,” Leed says, noting its resilience, malleability, rich hues, and intricate grain. “I spend a lot of time traveling around and picking up extra walnut whenever I see it. Almost all of our material comes from somewhere in Appalachia.”
Although most of the tables, shelves, lounge chairs, and credenzas Leed creates rely on hard angles, shaping the cabinet’s curved edges came relatively easily. “But wrapping the bronze around that curved end was an entirely new ball game,” he says. “It was trial and error in getting that correct, but honestly, it was a lot of fun. Most of the time we’re working on something we’ve done before. This was something we had to figure out.” Pulled tight and secured, the screen has a twinkle to it, as any treasure chest should; at the ICFF, attendees couldn’t help but reach out and touch the metal as they walked by.
The hardware, topped with thumbprint-like indentations, also invites contact. For the pulls, Leed whittled a wooden form before crafting a silicone mold around it. He then worked with a local jeweler to cast them in bronze. “Most of the other pulls we make are just round,” he explains. “They’re turned on a lathe and have a much more polished look. These were important to me
