Category: Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown

Today I dropped Chris Williams off at the airport for his journey home to Wales, and I cannot believe how quickly the last three weeks have rushed by.

In addition to Chris teaching two classes on making Welsh stick chairs, Chris and I spent a lot of time working on his forthcoming book, “The Life & Work of John Brown.” The book has – like all books – taken some hard left turns as it germinated below the soil. And Chris and I have spent many evenings sorting out the important chapters.

But the biggest discussion has been over whether or not to include detailed plans of a chair in the book.

After much thought, Chris concluded that adding plans to the book would go against the spirit of how John Brown made chairs during his life (and how Chris makes chairs now). John Brown and Chris contend that no two Welsh stick chairs should ever be identical. Instead, each chair should be built to suit the materials at hand, the skills of the maker and the tools available.

Don’t worry. You’ll be able to build a Welsh stick chair after reading Chris’s book. But your chair will start from a personal place instead of from an established pattern.

That’s how Chris built his first chair. He’d read John Brown’s “Welsh Stick Chairs,” and then figured out his own way by observing the chairs in John Brown’s book.

It’s not an easy way to make a chair. But it is satisfying. I built my first chair in a class, but my second chair went in a different direction than the first one. Even today I don’t expect my chairs to end up how I envision them in my mind or on paper. Each has a life of its own.

Chris tries to imbue his classes with the same spirit. His students were encouraged to go their own direction with their chairs. There are, of course, limits to what you can do during five days. But I was impressed by how some students took this idea to heart.

All of the chairs in the classes had four back sticks, but that’s where the similarities ended.

In the real world, Welsh stick chairs have enormous variations – in the number of back sticks (three sticks up to 11 or so). The shape of the seat (circle, rectangle, D-shaped etc). The construction of the arm. The undercarriage (if there even is an undercarriage). The comb. Plus the length of all the long stocks and short sticks, and the rake and splay of every component.

So when you look at Chris’s chair, or mine, or one of the thousands being built, know that your chair shouldn’t look like that. Exactly. Or at all. But it should look Welsh. And that is something you have to develop an eye for and will definitely be covered in Chris’s book.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. When will this book be out? Chris plans to have the writing done this fall. I’ll design it in November and December. And we hope it will be in your hands in February or March 2020.

On Friday I finished teaching my first chair class, 16 years after taking my first one in Canada from David Fleming. That class – plus John Brown’s “Welsh Stick Chairs” – set me on a long journey of building and researching chairs in an effort to find my own designs and techniques.

It was a personal struggle, which I didn’t document here on the blog or in my books except for the stray breadcrumb. And it was a lonely one until I met Chris Williams, a Welsh chairmaker who worked with John Brown for many years.

Finally, I had someone to talk to about chairs who spoke the same design language. Who had read the same books. Who looked at these gorgeous and eccentric chairs with similar eyes. (Side note: I like Windsor chairs, but they are different enough from Welsh ones that when I talk to Windsor makers I feel like the awkward stepchild.)

Meeting Chris about four years ago inspired me to finish work on my designs and push the structure of the chair a lot harder than I had been for the previous 12 years. There have been struggles and failures – cracked armbows, dead-end designs and a bad batch of glue. It was like walking in a fog for years. Now that seems to be lifting, and I think I can see a long distance ahead.

But I still remember my first chair class with a perfect clarity. I also remember the sheer frustration I experienced when I returned home and began building my second Welsh stick chair within days of stepping off the plane from Ottawa.

I didn’t have any patterns. I didn’t have the jigs I needed. I didn’t have any wood appropriate for chairmaking. And I was missing several important tools. But I plowed forward and made a chair anyway. And then at least 50 more.

When teaching my first chair class, I wanted to remove the barriers to making a second chair. So all the students made copies of my patterns in Masonite. I gave them all a set of the weird jigs I use, including the rig for drilling the sticks, the block for locating the stretchers, Zee Hinder Pluggen (don’t ask) and a handmade half-pencil.

And I offered them a kit of chair parts, just like the kit they received to make their first chair with me. I hope it works.

I don’t know how many chair classes I’m ever going to teach – certainly no more than two a year. They are exhausting to prepare for and execute. Plus, we have Chris Williams coming here in May to fly the Welsh flag and teach another batch of students using his methods.

That, and Chris’s upcoming book on John Brown, is probably enough to infect the next generation of Welsh chairmakers. I hope.

— Christopher Schwarz