As you may or may not know, Val, my wife, is a badass risk-analyzing actuary by day and vibrantly creative mixologist by night. She is constantly inventing new cocktails and photographing them for her blog, Valcohol. I wanted to surprise her with an elegantly designed bar cart to complement her design aesthetic and provide a beautiful piece that would serve as bar storage as well as a surface for photography.
Conceptualizing the design brought me to the complex relationship of cocktails and Prohibition; the lack of easily available spirits pushed the limits of mixologists' creativity, resulting in some of the best classic recipes emerging from that time. Therefore, pulling design elements from Prohibition-era times was a logical choice. Imagine reading The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; if he were to describe a bar cart in Jay Gatsby’s mansion, this is what I would have imagined it looking like.
The drawings below show my first conceptualizations of the design.
I wanted to make a wood cart with metal accents; that would allow me to make sharp mitered joints in the frame plus visually minimal rounded metal accents. I thought taking a very geometric pattern with intersecting lines and sharp corners would be a perfect focal point for the top shelf of the bar. A great way to make that element pop would be to engrave it with a wood router and then paint only the engraving gold surrounded by a contrasting dark wood. Square-cross-section posts flanking the corners of the shelf would provide support. I could craft a handle into the posts by jogging a section of the posts away from the shelf, then joining two adjacent posts along a short end of the shelf. Metal rods would span across the perimeter of the shelves providing both security and an appealing visual accent. Wine glass racks mounted under the top shelf would provide a display area for fancy glassware. Lastly, decorative yet functional caster wheels would allow for simplified movement of the cart for photoshoots.
Below is a rendering of the model I created.
I teamed up with my buddy and was able to utilize his CNC router to make the engravings on the top shelf. I wanted to make the cart free of fasteners for a very clean and refined appearance. Therefore, I had to be very creative with the design to provide the necessary support. I used a table saw to slot the posts while mounted in a jig so that they could slot snugly into the notched corners of the shelves. With the slotted design, wood glue provided sufficient strength to hold the cart together. I cut holes into the posts to hold the metal rod railings and assembled the cart with the railings permanently in place. Utilizing jigs during the assembly process allowed me to square off the posts to the shelves. I added structure below the lower shelf in anticipation of the weight of many bottles.
Here are some of my in-process photos.
For my next cart, I would use a liquid–based metallic paint in lieu of the wax-based I used for the cart. Though the wax can hold an amazing amount of metal fleck, working with it was arduous and was not worth it in the end. Though I had computer models and drafts for parts, I was creating parts by hand. In anticipation of this, I made jigs for cutting slots into the posts. Despite this, there were some gaps to be closed with stainable wood filler upon final assembly. Improving the jigs and buying tools made specifically for some of the cuts I made would decrease the amount of manufacturing time and post-processing that was needed.
All of that work was well worth it though to see Val’s reaction when I surprised her with the cart. She promptly made a cocktail to photograph on top of it.
