Bold, brightly colored merino wool bubble cushions sit against a checkered, circle-patterned fabric, their curved, puffed-out shapes giving the whole piece an unapologetically huggable feel. Mounted on a free-form base with oversized, bulbous legs, it takes on a zoomorphic, almost anime look — undeniably fun, and just as supportive, soft, and cuddly to actually sit on as it looks.
The base is milled from the same Bunker Hill Road slab Andrew first used as a print block for the Cloud Cathedral Prints — urban-salvaged wood, from a tree taken down in a Canton, Connecticut neighborhood and milled into slabs and boards rather than chipped or cut for firewood, the way most residential tree removal ends up — the object his 2022 thesis essay promised he'd eventually make, "completing the cycle my father started twenty-five years ago." The four bolster cushions on top are merino wool and "Cabbage" upholstery fabric, in the same island-on-a-wood-stream vocabulary as the Lion Turtle and Rainbow Hassock.
The legs are turned from urban-salvaged Atlantic white cedar felled by Andrew's friend Tyler Bristol, on a lathe Andrew first learned to use in high school — now living in the Bristol family's shop in Canton Center, Connecticut. Tyler's father Steve later told Andrew the lathe's full history: in the 1990s, Andrew's own father, an electrician doing work at Canton High School, arranged for the school to sell its retiring lathe to the Bristols for a $100 donation, then restored it himself and added a forward/reverse switch and a foot pedal. When Steve asked what he owed him, Andrew's father said: "Nothing. It is not for you. It is for Nate. So you can come down here and use this lathe whenever you want."