Handcrafted timber stool design, New Zealand

The Mullinger Stool began as a university assignment with three simple rules: design a stool, use timber, and build it yourself. There was no client, no site, and no council process. That freedom is rare in professional building design, where briefs, budgets, and compliance shape almost every decision. Here the only constraints were material and scale.

Woodworking runs in the family, so working in the workshop was familiar territory rather than a learning curve on top of the design task. The goal was not to make furniture for sale. It was to solve a small design problem completely: concept, detailing, fabrication, and a finished object you could sit on and critique honestly.

Early in the process Scott fixed one non-negotiable rule: three legs, not four. Childhood memories of rocking four-legged stools at grandparents' houses, with grandchildren tipping and crying, made stability on imperfect floors a design priority. Research confirmed the trade-off: three-legged seating gives a smaller stable sitting zone than four legs and is harder to make visually balanced. That tension became part of the design problem rather than something to avoid.

The central design idea was to fuse beauty with structural integrity so completely that the structure became the feature. Beauty is subjective, but for this stool beauty meant not adding decoration on top of joinery. The joint itself had to carry the visual weight of the piece.

That idea drove exploration of how three identical elements could meet and lock together. The seat is formed from three interlocking segments rather than a single disc with legs bolted on. A red gum centre detail runs from the middle of the seat down the face of each leg, so the connection that holds the stool together is also what your eye goes to first.

Three legs address stability without apology. Each leg tapers from the seat with a continuous curve rather than a sharp junction, so the stool reads as one object rather than seat-plus-appendages. The triangular footprint and rounded corners keep the form compact while leaving enough reach for feet on the floor.

The natural oil finish was chosen to deepen the red gum more than the surrounding oak, so the structural centre detail reads as the focal point. Finish is part of the design, not a neutral last step.

The project aligns with a long design tradition of chairs and stools as personal statements at human scale. Scott is not claiming fame or comparison with historical figures. The parallel is simpler: when one person controls every decision on a small object, the result shows how they think without the layers of compromise that buildings accumulate. That is why the stool sits in the Marsco portfolio alongside houses and industrial work.

Timber selection was Red Gum and New Zealand oak, both hardwoods chosen for contrast and for the chisel work required on the centre feature. The lighter oak carries the main volume of the seat and legs. The darker red gum forms the Y-shaped inlay on the seat surface and continues as a narrow vertical strip on each leg face.

Hardwood from kiln-dried stock is stable but labour-intensive before you reach the interesting part of the build. Surfacing, thicknessing, and squaring rough boards consumed a large share of workshop time. That is normal for fine joinery and worth stating plainly: the material choice drove the making sequence as much as the geometry did.

Construction relied on hand tools and precise chisel work at the three-way junction. No separate hardware carries the primary load. The red gum detail is not applied veneer. It is part of the joint logic that binds the three oak segments. Finish is a natural oil applied by hand. The oil deepens the red gum more than the oak, drawing the eye to the centre feature rather than leaving both timbers at equal visual weight.

Every visible surface was considered because at stool scale there is nowhere to hide a clumsy meeting. Grain direction, edge profiles, and the transition from seat to leg were resolved in the workshop as often as on paper.

The hardest geometry sits in the red gum centre detail and how it relates to each leg's centre line. If you follow the centre of the red gum strip in a leg toward the middle of the seat, you do not arrive at the geometric centre of the stool. Conversely, the stool's centre line viewed from above lands on the edge of the red gum piece, not its middle. Each leg therefore has more oak on one side of its axis than the other, and the cut angles on the oak faces differ leg to leg.

That asymmetry propagates to the leg feet. Left unchecked, the unequal angles create a subtle visual irritant at the floor: the eye notices that the bottoms do not resolve cleanly even when the stool stands firm. The fix was to square the bottom of each leg and fade the cut back to the point where the leg meets the underside of the seat, re-establishing a calm line at the floor.

On the underside, a curved arch in the red gum softens the junction where leg meets seat. Without that arch, sight lines from below pull attention to an awkward corner. The arch is sized so it appears just as the visual tension would otherwise register, and it grows slightly where more softening is needed. It also adds structural continuity, helping transfer load from the seat into the legs rather than acting as decoration alone.

Three-legged stability versus usable seat area remained a constant check. The stable triangle inside the seat footprint is smaller than a four-legged chair would allow. Proportion of seat diameter, leg splay, and seat thickness were tested in mock-ups and full-size layout before committing hardwood.

The finished Mullinger Stool stands as a completed design-and-build exercise with no client revisions, no value engineering, and no alternate pathway through a building consent authority. What was drawn and modelled is what was made.

It remains in Scott's workshop and office as a physical reference for a principle used on Marsco projects at every scale: structure and honesty in how parts connect should be legible, not buried. On a house that might mean expressed bracing logic or clear detailing at eaves and claddings junctions. On an industrial panel building it means sequencing and joint lines that installers can trust. The stool is the smallest place that idea was tested end to end.

The stool was completed in 2013 and has remained a personal reference through study, NZRAB portfolio preparation, and professional practice. For building-scale work that applies the same design discipline, see residential design services and the custom home and extension projects in the portfolio.