When I decided to make a highchair, I planned to use my patterns for a child's sackback Windsor chair and simply stretch the legs. It turned out to be alot more difficult.

To get the seat up to 21 inches, a suitable height for a highchair, I nearly doubled the length of the legs on the children's Windsor. The problem was that this "stretching" made the legs look thin and spindly. After reading Wallace Nuttings A Windsor Handbook, I discovered that the legs on many highchairs were based on adult-sized Windsors, with the lower portion elongated and tapered to achieve the required height. I made a second profile and turned a sample leg, but this also left me unsatisfied. The base and the bulb of the legs looked undersized in relation to the taper, but at least I was getting closer. I reduced the diameter at the top of the tapered section and finally hit upon a profile that looked right.

The story doesn't end here, however. The beefier legs made the rest of the design seem too small. In addition, the picture of the continuous arm Windsor in Nutting's book kept tugging at me. It was clearly prettier than the sack-back I had originally envisioned, so I decided to go with the continuous arm instead. Also, I assumed that I would have to lower the arms to go under the table. A gallery manager suggested raising the chair so that the arms would clear the top of the table, which is the solution I chose.

After many hours of designing an almost completely new chair (I had to forget about using those patterns I had made), the lesson seemed clear: Scaling furniture up (or down) and getting it to look right is al lot harder than it may appear.