Our principal and owner, Matthew Senf of Sasen Homes, designed and built a piece of liturgical furnishing for Christ Church Cathedral Vancouver in his spare time volunteering over 600 hours towards the project.
The entire art piece was first envisioned two years ago. The components and pieces came from the Cathedral and its rich history. Written in the documentary are some amazing facts such as “all the wood used in the construction of this project came from pews that stood in the church at its first worship service in 1898. This magnificent, old-growth Douglas Fir would certainly have been harvested very close by and would certainly have been growing in this place long before local European contact. We were able, by dendrochronological dating methods to establish that this wood, not only predates colonialists’ settlement of Canada but very likely grew here on the coast of the Salish sea before the Lutheran and Anglican traditions were even born.”
This piece was made to last the next 100 years, like a time capsule, the glass panels are small replicas of the stained glass of the Cathedral’s new bell tower. The carved grape leaves, inset in the feet at the base of the piece were taken from pieces of the original Cathedral altar surround which was replaced with a freestanding altar in the third great renovation of 1909. The woodcuts of that original altar remain displayed on the back panels of the apse of the cathedral church even today.
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