18th-century style reproduction "Tea Caddies" made from fruitwood
Steven Lash, DDS, MS, FACD Adjunct Clinical Professor Department of Orthodontics and Pediatric Dentistry
Working with wood has been an interest of Dr. Lash since he was a small boy. Starting with toy soldiers and model ships, Lash moved onto to furniture-making in 1966 with a tall case clock he built while attending dental school at the University of Detroit.
In the sixty years that followed, Lash became the co-founder and past President of the Society of American Period Furniture Makers and past President of the Associates of the American Wing at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
(Details about Dr. Lash's extraordinary Benjamin Franklin armonica reproduction can be seen here)
In the words of the artist, as written for Pins and Tales magazine (Summer 2021):
"At an antique show in 2001, my wife Carol and I saw a collection of fruitwood tea caddies. These tea caddies intrigued me, and after some research, I learned that these fruitwood examples as well as the more common box shaped veneered wooden tea caddies were introduced into England in the second quarter of the 18th century. Tea was very expensive and so important that even Chippendale and Hepplewhite had designs for all-wooden tea caddies in their cabinetmaker design books. The small fruitwood caddies were also made by turners. At the show, the prices of the antique fruitwood boxes were exorbitant, so when I returned to my shop, I made four of them, a full-size apple, a small apple, a pear, and a melon. The apples were turned from applewood and the pear and melon with the realistic grooves were turned from pearwood. The marks on the bottom of the melon caddy show the placement of the lathe. The interiors were carved out with a rotary rasp mounted on an electric drill and lined with silver foil. I made the escutcheons out of silver plate and the small box locks were ordered from Horton Brasses." - Dr. Steven Lash
