st-thomas-church

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St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue

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  • New York, NY
    Columbarium cabinets in quarter-sawn white oak, mahogany, and ebony, with bronze lost-wax cast hardware. Columbarium Cabinets:
    architect designed;
    five cabinets, 9.5 feet high by 16 feet long in their installed form;
    quarter-sawn white oak with mahogany as the secondary wood and ebony inlays on the door panels;
    quarter-sawn white oak is traditional in churches because of its stability and subsequent longevity;
    mahogany, which forms the boxes making up the cabinets and the niches for the urns, was chosen for the same reason;
    the veneer-quality solid oak boards, specifically picked for their magnificent figure, came from the world’s largest supplier of quarter-sawn white oak in Ohio;
    the approximately 3,000 lost-wax-cast bronze hinges and pulls were commissioned by us from a jewelry maker;
    each of the five cabinets holds the ashes of a hundred people;
    we are pleased that this project won a religious art award from the American Institute of Architects’ Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art and Architecture.

  • New York, NY
    Columbarium cabinets in situ. Columbarium Cabinets in Situ:
    the previous picture shows the cabinets at our studio, before delivery;
    after delivery, they were surrounded by carved oak tracery meant, with its leaves and acorns, to evoke trees and, hence, the outdoors;
    this stunning neo-Gothic tracery was executed in England by carvers who were all under the age of twenty-five and who later worked on the restoration of
    Windsor Castle after the terrible fire of 1992;
    the stainless urns appear behind three sets of doors [an allusion to the Holy Trinity], each with its own progressively smaller hardware and ebony inlays;
    each cabinet has 60 doors, making 300 in all;
    our work alone, which included a full-scale prototype to test how the three-doors
    would work when folded against each other, involved nearly 6,000 hours of labor from our four-man crew;
    the cabinets appear, with slightly mistaken information, in the April 1992 issue of Fine Woodworking magazine.

  • New York, NY
    Statue base for Our Lady of Fifth Avenue in quarter-sawn white oak, incorporating iron hardware—original to the church—made by American master Samuel Yellin. Statue Base for Our Lady of Fifth Avenue:
    architect designed;
    quarter-sawn white oak with hand-carved linenfold panel and iron hardware;
    original to the church [where it appeared on an interior door which was later removed], the carefully preserved hardware was made by American master Samuel Yellin of Philadelphia;
    located in a shrine at the back of the church’s nave, the base holds a statue of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child created by a Benedictine nun in Kent, England

  • New York, NY
    Prie-dieux in hand-carved white oak. Designed by us;
    quarter-sawn white oak;
    fluted-column design with tracery bits in the top panel represents a simplified
    version of the church’s original kneelers, which are far more ornate.