“How do you make those curved arms?”  This is always the first question anyone asks when seeing these chairs.  They are made by bending thin pieces of wood around a custom-shaped bending form and gluing them in place to retain their new shape.  This process is known as bent lamination.  Let’s briefly cover the basics.

When viewing one of the curved arm pieces from the side, you can see that it is basically a sandwich of 8 thin pieces of wood.  

To make this sandwich, you create a bending form in the shape of the piece you are making and then bend thin strips of wood around it.

Specifically, you need 8 pieces of stock (5 feet long and slightly less than 1/8 inch thick).  You then glue them together (with a LOT of glue), bend them around the bending form, and clamp them in place.  Doing this with 8 pieces is more difficult than simply hand-bending a single piece of wood around the bending form, but you get the idea.  Once these 8 pieces are glued together and clamped in the bending form, it looks like this:

The pieces need to stay clamped like this for at least a week to give the glue an opportunity to dry and cure.  After a week or so, you have a curved arm piece which just needs to be cleaned-up and cut to the proper width and length.