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Building a Mid Century Desk

Building a Mid Century Desk

In this build, I create a mid century modern desk from rift sawn oak, with a custom shaped edge detail and three drawers using blum soft close guides

Specific Items used in this build:

Blum drawer glides:
Blum Installation Tools:
Blume Installation Jig:

Mid Century Modern Desk Drawer Mid Century Modern Desk

A Recount of the Video
As with most projects it all starts with squaring the lumber and milling to thickness.
Once I got it all squared up I started building the legs. I took careful measurements from my sketchup drawing as well as the angles to create the profile on the leg. If the height of the blade or angle was off by just a little bit. The profile would not match perfectly in the center.

After cutting the profile I rounded over the legs with a 1/4″ roundover bit. Mitered the legs and used some dominos to reinforce the joints.

Moving on to the top. I resawed the rift oak into veneer and flattened in out through the planner. To get the the right thickness for the top. I veneered 2 sheets of 3/4″ plywood top and bottom, and then glued both sheets together giving me a 2″ thick top.

Then I used dominos and glue to attach the legs to the top, and wrangled in the bottom and the top stretcher.

once all that was dry I flipped over the desk and built a frame to suspend the drawers from the top. I used glue and pocket holes to build the frame. This was necessary to keep the maximum amount of legroom under the desk and still have room to install the blum hardware.

I lost a fair amount of video for the drawer portion of the build but it is pretty standard as most drawers I build so I edited in some substitute footage.


I’m the owner of Benham Design Concepts, a mixed media art studio where I design and build custom furniture and other works of art using wood, glass, stone, and various metals.
In this blog, I talk about the art I create, my journey, and the things I learn along the way.

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