Ian Roberts is a former photographer-turned-woodworker living in Westchester County, New York. He’s embarked on a journey to create the perfect chair through a process he calls “Custom-Body-Mapping”. He attempts to map out the back’s sagittal curve—unique to each person—and replicate it through wood bending techniques he learned in CFC’s 2025 Curvature in Furniture Workshop with Tom Kealy and Yuri Kobayashi. Read more here about his process from milling local lumber to crafting multiple iterations of his design; what he learned in class; and how he completed his goal back at home after leaving campus. To explore Workshops here at CFC, visit woodschool.org/workshops.
How long have you been woodworking? What pathway did you take to get started?
IR: I’ve been around my father’s woodworking since I was born and was working with him since I was around 11 years old. He was a general contractor and later evolved into a cabinet and furniture maker.
Eventually, I graduated high school in Anchorage, AK, and moved to New York City on August 26th, 2001 to study photography at Parsons School of Design. My dormitory was about five blocks from the World Trade Center, so after the tragedy that unfolded two weeks later, students were given a choice to return home or stick with the degree program. I chose to stay and ended up living in Brooklyn for almost two decades afterward, working as a freelance product photography specialist.
After moving out of the city in 2020, I discovered that upstate New York has incredible woodlands and wildlife, but also a variety of the highest quality hardwood tree species. I was surprised to learn how many logs are lying horizontal on the forest floor for years and years, so I decided to invest in a Norwood HD 36 V2 portable bandsaw mill, probably the best tool purchase I’ve ever made. Now I’m producing my own lumber and it has been absolutely fascinating—slicing layer after layer through a 15” or a 34” diameter log is an adventure which never gets old. Waiting for the lumber to air dry, one year per inch of thickness, kind of sucks…but now that I’m a few years into it, I have a rolling supply.
What brought you to take a Workshop at CFC?
IR: 20 years after graduating from Parsons, I hadn’t furthered my education much, and as I waited for the first piles of lumber to air dry enough to use, I started shifting focus toward creating furniture. In the Fall of 2025, I found CFC’s two-week workshop on Curvature in Furniture with Tom Kealy and Yuri Kobayashi and immediately signed up. The course strongly appealed to me, as I was troubled by the disjointed notions that so much furniture and cabinetry consists of—rectangle after rectangle—and the human body doesn’t have any rectangles.
It sounds like you came to that class with a vision. Did the Workshop help bring your vision to life?
IR: The Curvature class was my first experience with lamination bending. I had seen my Dad use it a few times during my youth, but didn’t think much more than, “Hmm, neat trick.” In 2023-24 I made my first couple of chairs, and they were heavily focused on properly supporting my own body by following my spinal shape.
They each consisted of left and right assemblies which constituted the legs, armrests, and an upper section of ~25 rigid slats running horizontally between them. I fastened the horizontal slats to the L/R assemblies with floating tenons, which gave me the framework and flexibility to tune and refine exactly where to position each slat, which turned out to be a very nuanced challenge. I built 4-5 mock-ups from pine and poplar before I was satisfied with the first draft. I was very hard-headed about shaping the lumbar support section, convinced that it needed to be very pronounced…and subsequently needed to adjust the curve several times before it was actually comfortable.
Since then, I’ve been nurturing this idea that the way to achieve a supportive and comfortable chair is to map out the back’s sagittal curve. But this idea comes with a big caveat—similarly to the logs that I mill: no two spines are identical. That’s how I came to Custom-Body-Mapping.
If you consider the number of hours that we sit in chairs in a given week, for example, I think each of us deserves a closely fitting chair. A good chair shouldn’t leave you feeling achy or fatigued after sitting for two hours, it should give you a feeling of rest and even rejuvenate your energy.
Custom-Body-Mapping in woodworking sounds really interesting. Can you talk about how you came to that idea?
IR: As I mentioned above, I became fanatical about chairs supporting the body closely and actively. In this pursuit, I discovered the field of anthropometrics, or body measurements. Specifically, I found a super-eloquent publication from the 1970’s (MIT Press) called Humanscale—it’s basically a series of reference charts with some commentary, and it really spoke to me. In the introduction to chair design, they lambast so many chair makers as caring more about aesthetics than functionality, going on to ask, “Have they ever seen a human body?!” With all due respect and admiration for chair makers and traditions everywhere—that rings true to me.
Any highlights from being on campus at CFC that you’d like to share?
IR: During my two weeks at CFC, I met people ranging in age from nineteen to their mid-eighties. That alone is interesting; so many different backgrounds were represented. Lunchtime conversations about different woodworking journeys were great and, the library is curated and well stocked.
CFC helped me find housing that was within biking distance, so that’s how I commuted back and forth, which was a pleasant way to mull over ideas while also getting in my day’s movement.
Yuri and Tom were excellent listeners and provided valuable feedback, often riffing off each other. In that class, each student was working on a different project, so it heightened the interest level a lot. One person was making a light fixture, while another was making an instrument; others were refining chair and table projects; or using techniques like steam bending, coopering, and stack lamination. It was fun and eventful to do project check-ins with the group, and Tom and Yuri also did quite a few demonstrations and traditional lessons which were clear and well thought out. They invited alterations on the class trajectory and made very good use of our time.
When you went home after the Workshop, how did you re-approach your chair?
IR: After learning kerf bending, bent stack lamination, and coopering, it opened up a lot of possibilities for turning a straight board into all types of curves. I affectionately call it “Rejecting the rectangle.”
For my bent laminations, I felt confident slicing up ash into strips on my bandsaw, smoothing their surfaces on the thickness planer, and gluing up over a form with many, many clamps. I made new forms by stacking layers of plywood or MDF and then pattern routed them to match a 1/4” MDF master pattern that I had carefully cut and shaped with my edge sander, followed by a spoke shave.
Since I cut my own ash, there is a bonus in that you don’t need to wait until the moisture content is +- 8%, I learned in the workshop that closer to 12-15% is more effective with bent laminations, so luckily, I had less wait time.
After gluing up the stack in my own space, I was grateful to have run my first bent laminations over the jointer under Yuri and Tom’s supervision. It can feel a little sketchy jointing that first flat profile face, especially since I was working on a full-length chaise lounge with the main piece being roughly six feet long.
During the Curvature in Furniture Workshop, Tom and Yuri helped me fabricate a custom jig for the Festool Domino which allowed me to mortise the ~60 slat receptacles in the side of the body-mapped assembly, with consistent and dependable spacing. But even with that, the most mind-blowing part of the Workshop happened during a brainstorming session about how the slats were going to fit into the left and right assemblies:
I was verbally listing off the next steps in my build when I said, “Then I’m going to glue all the cross slats in…” and both Tom and Yuri exclaimed, “No! Don’t glue it!”
I thought gluing the 5mm thick x 25mm wide slats into the mortises would be key in holding the chairs left and right sides together, but they insisted that when the body sits down and loads the slats, they’ve got to be able to “Not only flex themselves, but flex in and out of the mortises.” This was key, and it led me to design two cross stretchers to hold the chair together, instead.
