Elin Solid Walnut Wall Mirror

Details

Elin is one closed line. Follow the frame from anywhere and you come back to where you started without meeting an angle, a dent, or a break in direction: a single unbroken curve, the whole way around. One end swells wide and full; from there the outline narrows steadily across to the other end, dipping a little as it goes, so what hangs on the wall is not a symmetrical oval but an egg-shaped mass, heavier at one end than the other.

The outer face of the frame is domed rather than flat, and that is what the light finds. A single ribbon of highlight lies along the crown of the walnut and bends with every change of direction the outline makes. Walk across the room and the ribbon travels around the curve with you; there is nowhere on the outside of this piece for light to sit still.

Why the band is not the same width all the way around

The wood is at its deepest through the top arc and the broad end, and it thins as it goes, tapering to a slim strip by the time it reaches the narrow end. That taper is what turns an oval into a teardrop. This is not a border of constant width laid around a shape; the changing width is the shape.

The grain is dark and easy to pick out at arm's length, leaning around with the outline instead of cutting straight across it, crowding where the band is deep and opening up where it thins. There is no joint to find, nowhere one length of timber has been butted onto the next. That is what solid stock gets you. Veneer has to be built up over a core, and on a curve that never straightens, the overlap has to land somewhere.

The glass sits down inside the wood rather than across the front of it. A thin dark shadow line runs where the two meet, and the walnut stands proud of the glass all the way around, so the frame holds the mirror rather than simply backing it.

Cut for you, in Konya

Mehmet Ali was born in Konya and has spent more than thirty-five years with wood in his hands. He shapes every piece himself. Mirrors are the newest thing to come out of his workshop, two years of them now; the workshop long predates them.

Nothing waits on a shelf. Your Elin is cut once the order is in, at the size you choose, and the color and figure it ends up with will belong to the boards it came from, not to these pictures.

Eight sizes, one shape

The proportion holds steady from the smallest size to the largest, so the big ones read as the same drawing enlarged, not a mirror stretched along the wall.

• 50 x 34 cm (19 x 13 inch)
• 60 x 41 cm (23 x 16 inch)
• 75 x 51 cm (29 x 20 inch)
• 90 x 61 cm (35 x 24 inch)
• 105 x 72 cm (41 x 28 inch)
• 125 x 85 cm (49 x 33 inch)
• 150 x 102 cm (59 x 40 inch)
• 170 x 116 cm (67 x 45 inch)

In these photographs Elin hangs with its long axis running across the wall, above a bench in an entryway. If you have a particular wall in mind, or want it hung the other way about, write to us before ordering and we will work the size out together.

The trip to your wall

So far these mirrors have gone out to around twenty countries. Yours will leave wrapped in protective material, shipped worldwide, with a tracking number to follow it. After that it asks little: keep the wood away from damp and lift the dust off now and then with a dry, soft cloth.

Elin is the egg of the walnut wall mirror range. Its nearest relatives are Rina, which closes the same unbroken line into a true circle, and Mira, which spreads it a little wider than it is tall.