Virtual Furniture Projects, 1992 — 1995

I did a traditional Furniture Maker’s Apprenticeship with Donal Channer of Bath, then went on to the London College of Furniture, finally becoming a successful furniture maker and designer.

By the ’90s I was using StrataVision, an early 3D Modelling application on the Mac, to design and produce these rendered images. It was a liberation. Looking at them now, it is clear they are synthetic but at the time, some people still thought they were images of real objects. It caused a lot of confusion.

It could take up to 40 minutes to open these models in StrataVision and a day to render them on my trusty second-hand Mac IIci. There was a time when I had all of my local Mac-owning friends rendering animations for me overnight … me chasing around town all day with a Syquest drive with 40 Meg cartridges, collecting renders, setting up the next night’s run. It was before there was much of a Net, it was madness.