I've Been Chasing My Papaw's Porch Since I Was Five Years Old

I made a handmade sling rocking chair from white oak and chestnut bridle leather. This is my journey, behind the build.

 I grew up in Atlanta from two years old until I was nine. If you know the South, you know what that means. It means porch life. It means fireflies and weeping willows and the kind of summer evenings that have their own soundtrack of crickets, distant laughter, the slow creak of wood on wood.

I remember climbing into a rocking chair next to my Papaw and being so small I couldn't get the thing to move. So he'd rock it for both of us. And I remember his English leather cologne mixing with the smell of dewy grass coming up from the yard, and the light going soft, and thinking, without having the words for it yet, that this was what peace felt like.

There are moments from childhood that don't just stay with you. They imprint on you. Days that feel endless because you are endless. Because you haven't yet learned that time is an hourglass.

The Wesley Rocking Chair is my attempt to get back there.

What a Sling and a Rocker Have in Common

When I set out to design a chair that was simple, rustically beautiful, and genuinely restful, I kept coming back to two forms: my Wesley sling chair and the rocking chair. On the surface, they seem like different answers to the same question: How do you make a person feel held?

But I think both chairs meet at an ergonomic crossroads.

There's research on why infants calm down when you rock them, why a sling soothes a fussy baby instantly. It's not complicated. It's motion and suspension together. The body relaxes when it feels cradled and when it feels gently, rhythmically moved. We don't stop needing that when we grow up. We just stop giving it to ourselves.

So I chose to venture out and build a sling rocking chair with chestnut leather suspended across a rift sawn white oak frame, set on curved rockers so the whole thing breathes and moves with you. I wanted adults to have access to something we usually reserve for infants: the permission to just be held.

The Part Where I Drew on the Street

I had never built a rocking chair before. I've built chairs. I've built rockers in the abstract. But a sling rocking chair, where the tension of the leather has to work with the pivot of the rocker, that was new territory.

The arc of the rocker is everything. Too flat and you barely move. Too steep and you're working to stay seated. Too short and it tips. Too long and it's sluggish. And I needed to know, at full scale, whether my geometry was even close before I committed to cutting wood. So I drew it in chalk on the street in front of my workshop. A life-sized profile, on the pavement, in broad daylight. I felt a little weird doing it, as I normally have the back up of my daughters if I am drawing with chalk. This time I was on my own but I had grabbed some of their chalk before heading to the shop. I crouched down and traced the curve with my chunk of colorful calcite. After a few iterations and about half an hour in the sunshine, I stood back and looked at it. I did what I needed to do; and it absolutely maybe kinda sorta was going to work.

Rift-Sawn Oak, Chestnut Leather, and a Homemade Steam Box

The rocker runners are bent laminations consisting of 3/8" thick strips of rift-sawn white oak, lignin relaxed by way of a steambox (with a face for radio) I built for this project, then glued together and clamp over a mold to lock in the curve. Rift-sawn because the straight grain lines give you predictable strength and movement over time. The kind of material that ages honestly.

At each wood joint, predominantly half-laps and bridles, I added dowels I made from black wenge. Dark pegs in a light frame. You can see them if you look. I didn't set out to make them a feature, but I don't mind that they are present.

The sling seat is chestnut tanned bridle leather. Warm, supple, suspended across the frame just taut enough to hold you and take your form at the same time.

An Imperfect Chair I'm Proud Of

I'll tell you the truth: this is a prototype. I knew that before I started and I reminded myself of this important detail every moment of the build where I thought I was going to get it perfect the first time. One rocker runner needs to be dialed in. There is a very small hitch in the chairs giddy-up. The seat needs to be a few inches deeper for more of a lounge experience, and it sits a bit taller than I would like. These are the things you only learn by building the thing and sitting in it. If this rocking sling chair was an arrow out of Robin Hood’s quiver, it would definitely be in the yellow ring but it isn’t a bullseye, yet.

But a prototype that teaches you something is worth more than a flawless copy of someone else's idea. The Wesley taught me a lot. About steam boxes and the science of time, heat and moisture. Of bent laminations and chalk drawings and most head-scratchingly, rocker geometry. About what it actually takes to build a chair that moves. It also got me reliving those moments, rocking with Papaw on his porch. Now, however, it’s me with my little girls on my lap by our fireplace as I read them bedtime stories.

The second rocker will be better. Maybe even a bullseye. And I already can't wait to build it.

If a chair like this speaks to you, or if you just want to talk porch life and Papaws and the particular magic of a Southern evening, my inbox is always open.