Asian-inspired mahogany shelves fit right in

We recently installed a set of three mahogany shelves with an asian inspiration. Our customer, who also happens to have a parent from Thailand, lived in Japan while she was in the military where she was inspired by the architecture. There is an air of this asian influence in the house already and she wanted to continue with that theme in her hallway along the stairs. She sketched up the design for the three units and let us roll from there.

The units are built out of solid wood, 8/4 mahogany, with most of the boards single width. They are connected with Domino connectors from Festool, which is a new favorite for loose tenon wood joinery. They are fast, accurate and strong, and quickly becoming the new standard in the industry, even if everyone doesn’t want to admit it (more on that some other day).

Most of the video below is focused on the finishing process, which is also where most of the time was spent. It included plenty of sanding before construction and tons more after. The mahogany is rather soft, so any rough handling along the way just added to all of the sanding fun.

I used Minwax Espresso stain for the color and Magnalac (modified lacquer) for the finish. I like the ease of application of the Magnalac and its forgiveness if I need to rework any areas.

The shelves fit into existing openings, and even though I didn’t show it in the video, they did actually get some fasteners after the satisfying slide into place (it just seemed like a great place to end the video).