The Lost Art Press storefront will be open – as per usual – on Oct. 12, and the topic of the day’s free lecture will be a (hopefully inspirational) look at my favorite stick chairs – and not just Welsh ones.
For the last 16 years I’ve collected photos from auctions and old books that guided my understanding of staked chairs and assisted me in designing my own versions. This presentation will tour the highlights of my image collection and will be an open forum for you to ask questions about the designs as well.
(Before you ask, I cannot post this presentation on the internet. Many of these images are copyrighted; publishing them would violate those copyrights. So if you want to see the pretty pictures, you’ll have to visit.)
The presentation will begin at 2 p.m. and will last about an hour.
We open our storefront to the public on the second Saturday of every month, and it runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Yes, we will sell you a book or a tool during that time, but most of our energy on those days is devoted to answering woodworking questions, demonstrating techniques and drinking coffee. You are welcome (even encouraged) to bring your family, your dog or any bit of woodworking you are struggling with.
Our neighborhood is also an outstanding place to eat brunch on that day. We recommend Otto’s, Commonwealth, Coppin’s and Libby’s (to name a few). We also recommend you stop by the Covington Farmer’s Market (9 a.m. to noon) at the approach to the Roebling Bridge. Great baked goods, salsa and produce.
When I design and build a piece of furniture, it does not belong to me any more than the birdsong of the warblers outside my shop door.
Since the start of my furniture career in the 1990s, I have never claimed ownership to a single design. The world is free to copy, adapt, interpret, sell and (I hope) improve my best efforts. And the world has occasionally taken me up on my offer. I’ve seen my published designs show up in furniture catalogs and galleries all over the United States.
And I’m fine with it.
I suspect my attitude comes from growing up and living in the areas of the United States that are steeped in traditional mountain music. The first half of my life was spent in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, and the second half has been spent living in the hills of Kentucky. In these places (and other mountain communities), traditional string-band music – guitar, mandolin, fiddle and banjo – is something you can still hear regularly at neighborhood bars, church picnics, school fund-raisers, weddings and funerals.
By tradition, this music does not have a strict sense of ownership, other than the fact that it belongs to everyone who can play it or sing it. When I visit the Comet bar on a Sunday night, the band might play songs that were first recorded in the mid-1920s in Bristol, Tennessee. But these songs came from Scotland, Ireland, Africa or France hundreds of years before. Tonight they sound new, like they never have before. And next Sunday, they will sound a little different. Verses will be added or removed. A second singer might add a counter-melody.
The furniture from these mountainous places is treated in the same manner. Farmers in the Ozarks and Appalachia have long made ladderback chairs during the cold months (this is a quickly dying trade). These chairs might look identical to the untrained eye, but if you open your eyes, you will find immense variation. The arrangement of the sticks, the curve of the backsplats and the shape of the finials at the top of the back posts are as good as a notarized signature for identifying the maker. And if you look at enough of these chairs, you can see traits handed down through generations and via geography.
Copying the work of others and adapting it has long been the predominant way that furniture and vernacular musical forms have been kept alive and fresh for hundreds of years. Bob Dylan’s song “Maggie’s Farm” is a rewriting of his song “Hard Times in the Country,” which is a rewrite of the song “Down on Penny’s Farm” by the Bentley Boys from the 1920s. And who knows where they got it.
Is “Maggie’s Farm” less fantastic because Dylan swiped a traditional song? Or (I would argue) is it more fantastic because it transformed a song about sharecropping into an electrifying statement against the Vietnam war?
Is Jennie Alexander’s iconic chair from the book “Make a Chair from a Tree” – the most comfortable and lightweight chair I’ve ever sat in – less amazing because it sprung from the mule-ear ladderbacks on thousands of porches in Eastern Kentucky?
This tradition of observing, copying and creating anew is the fertilizer for people to make new music and new pieces of furniture. If you take that tradition away, you risk handing over our music and furniture forms to the people with the most money or the best lawyers.
Plagiarism lawsuits are nothing new in music or furniture. The Music Copyright Infringement Resource (an effort by the law schools at George Washington University and Columbia) traces plagiarism claims in popular music back to 1844. Furniture plagiarism has been litigated in this country (the United States) for as long as our Patent Office has existed.
What has changed is that these lawsuits, especially in music, have increased dramatically in the last 30 years.
As a furniture maker, I sometimes lie awake at night worrying that I have unconsciously ripped off another furniture maker’s design, and that I’m going to be sued. And so when I write about a new piece, I acknowledge every influence I can think of. In fact, I’ll even acknowledge influences I haven’t seen.
I know that sounds weird and wrong. So here’s an example: Several months after I designed and built my Staked Worktable for the book “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” I found an antique Swedish table built on the same principles that had the same feel to it. Though I’d never (knowingly) seen the antique table before designing my version, I decided to include a drawing of it in my book and acknowledge it as a likely ancestor of my design.
Why? Because it probably is.
My table’s design emerged after looking at hundreds and hundreds of pieces of medieval furniture – lots of square worktables with tapered legs, thin tops and battens below. In my mind, I simply reversed the tapers on the legs, dressed up the battens to be sliding dovetails and changed the overall proportions of the top from 1:1 to 2:4.
The maker of the Swedish antique probably saw similar medieval tables – they’re everywhere in books and museums – and made the same small leaps that I did.
And so I can’t possibly claim credit for my design or any of the other designs that flow from my pencil and onto the workbench. And so I don’t. I give them away.
But wait, what about the books I write? Aren’t those copyrighted? Indeed they are. Sometimes by the publisher and sometimes by me. But I’ll be honest, I’ve concluded it’s all a farce. People steal my work all the time. Every one of my books is available for a free download on bit torrent sites run by hackers. I don’t have the money, time or people to stop them. And so – for books written by me, at least – I don’t.
Recently, I’ve come to grips with this reality, and that’s one reason why my latest book, “The Anarchist’s Workbench,” is covered by a Creative Commons license that allows people to reuse and adapt my work. I hope to move all my other books into a Creative Commons license in the future as well.
I am sure that some of you are thinking my ideas about giving away designs are unrealistic. What about the big furniture company that outright steals a design from some impoverished individual maker? Surely that poor woodworker is entitled to sue the big corporation for redress.
I do not propose to change our laws or system of jurisprudence. Egregious cases of theft probably should end up in the courts, and it’s likely the party with the most money will win in the end. Or at least get their way for a small fee.
Instead I am merely arguing that to maintain and grow our rich furniture heritage, we need our traditional system of borrowing and loaning designs (and melodies). And one way to do that is to allow your own designs to be freely copied and interpreted.
Consider the following questions:
Do you want to spend your time threatening to sue people, or do you want to spend that time making and building furniture?
Are you so bereft of ideas that you cannot come up with new designs or iterations?
How likely is it that you will prevail in the world of copyrights, trademarks and design patents?
How much money do you really need?
Can you say from the heart that your design is truly original and did not spring from the work of the millions of woodworkers who came before you?
Oh and one more question. Aren’t there enough songs about “John Henry?” Henry was the fabled Black steel-driving railroad worker who beat a steam-powered drill in a tunnel-drilling contest, only to die from the exertion.
I contend there can never be too many songs about John Henry. Or too many ladderback chairs, trestle tables, chests, stick chairs or milking stools.
And the only way to guarantee that is to give yourself in to tradition.
This week we will begin selling laser-cut templates for the Staked Armchair in “The Anarchist’s Design Book: Expanded Edition,” and I have received more than a few raised eyebrows and cutting remarks about the templates.
After all, isn’t this a Welsh stick chair of the kind made famous by John Brown? The guy who said there never ever should be a plan published for a Welsh chair? And who also said that people who sell plans should go out of business?
First, this is absolutely (and you know it hurts me to write an -ly adverb) not a Welsh stick chair. As I’ve written time and again, I call this form an American Welsh stick chair because it is designed for modern American woods and with details that make it as contemporary as I can manage. The “Welsh” part of its name is a nod to its origins. If you want to build a real Welsh stick chair, go to St Fagans, soak up the fantastic vibe there and get to work. Or get a good dose of it through Chris Williams’s new book “Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown.”
But still, why am I offering plans and templates?
OK, close your eyes and imagine… Wait, that’s not going to work because you have to use your eyes to read the next sentence.
OK, let’s say it’s your first ever day in music class. You’re sitting in a chair with your foreign-feeling trombone, violin or (God save my ears) a plastic recorder. The teacher then says: OK class, I’d like you each to compose a sonata in G, and please don’t forget to return to the tonic key during the recapitulation. I’ll be back at the end of the class to grade your work.
Before you can write music, it’s helpful to be able to play music.
Music class is the opportunity to learn your instrument by playing beautiful pieces composed by others. When I taught myself to play guitar about age 11, I played “Froggy Went A-Courtin” so many damn times I thought my sisters might murder me. So then I sang “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” about 60 times to torture them anew.
After learning hundreds of folk songs, standards and country tunes, I could feel their patterns in my hands as I moved them across the fretboard. I felt how suspended chords could brighten a progression. I knew so many songs composed with G, D and D chords that I also knew how odd (and wonderful) it was to encounter an A7 in a bridge. I could also spot chords that really didn’t have a name, made by people who had never formally studied music. Those were my favorites.
After a few years of playing other people’s tunes, I began to write my own. But I still continued to play other people’s songs in an effort to get inside their heads and make myself a better musician and songwriter.
So (if you are still awake at this point) this is why I offer explicit plans for this chair. If you want to become a chairmaker, it helps to learn the processes, joinery and setups while building someone else’s design. Some people do this by taking a class. Other people can’t afford that route, so plans and templates are an effective way to learn.
It is my sincerest hope that after you build a bunch of chairs that you will see the patterns and rhythms built into my designs (and the chairs of others). The language in my chairs is as straightforward as 12-bar blues. It ain’t jazz. Then, perhaps, you will be able to build chairs of your own devising.
And then maybe someday, we’ll have a world where every chair is different.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. We are working out the pricing on the templates that were designed and made by FirstLightWorks. We’ll have full details on them and their availability in short order. So I don’t have any more information to share just yet. Apologies.
Before the translation for “Slöjd in Wood” became available last year, English speakers had limited opportunities to hear Jögge Sundqvist describe his craft in his own voice.
Jögge is a generous teacher and artist. His Instagram account is full of design inspiration and glimpses of works in progress. Here are some short videos of techniques covered in the book:
The knife grips he uses can be intimidating at first, but Jögge patiently breaks them down for the reader. These are all covered in detail, along with how to sharpen and hone your knives. See the Morakniv YouTube channel for their Swedish Knife Grip Sessions playlist for a video primer in English.
If you see only one video in the series, I recommend A Silent Session. Jögge carves a spoon blank at full speed, making design decisions on the fly and changing grips to alternate between heavy stock removal, shaping, and planing cuts. Even though I’ve taken multiple classes with him and spent many hours editing the book’s translation with him, I still marvel at the choreography between his hands, the knife and the material.
His work goes beyond woodenware and small decorative objects. He is also known for furniture and sculptures, including public displays. His latest blog post shows the process from timber to finished doorway for a theater in Sweden. If your browser doesn’t prompt you for a translation, try right clicking on the page.
The techniques described in “Slöjd in Wood” include everything you need to know to carve small-scale sculptures. Carving sculptures and figures out of basswood for my young nieces and nephews now actually seems achievable. No fairy garden is safe!
He has done extensive research into 15th– and 16th-century vernacular furniture and woodworking techniques. Here are links to short videos showing him using traditional knowledge in his current work:
Jögge is currently a judge on a Swedish craft competition show, “Mästerskaparna,” in the format of “The Great British Bake-off.” The series isn’t available to view in the United States, but you can watch the trailer on the SVT 1 website. Jögge appears briefly throughout, including all the hand modeling for carving a spoon and even a few seconds of slow-motion axe work. We’ve all taken a fast-paced project class and blown a major component of the piece. The trailer proves this is a global phenomenon.
For an excerpt from the book, see the Lost Art Press shop listing.
His directing and editing skills are on display in the documentary he made about his father, Wille Sundqvist, called “The Spoon, The Bowl, and The Knife.”
Throw a spanner in the works, and even the smoothest-running machinery will come to a stop. Most of the time you can diagnose the problem, make a quick repair and get back to business with minimal delay.
But when the spanner takes the form of a pandemic, not so much. You can moan and groan, lament lost income and opportunities, retreat into a funk. If you’re lucky, you may reach a point where you recognize yourself as weirdly liberated from the everyday grind and be open to new directions.
This is how I found Australian woodworker Bern Chandley when we spoke at the end of September. Ordinarily a prolific and highly focused designer-builder of contemporary chairs, Bern, based in Melbourne, has spent much of his time over the past few months laboring over a single piece of furniture: a small settee in blackwood. “I’ve had very limited time in the workshop this year,” he says. With schools closed, he has been helping his wife, Alice, home-school their 9-year-old son, Flannery. Since March, Bern has had just two or three short days a week to work in the shop; a curfew has kept him from staying into the night.
The settee is a commission, the form and joinery – Nakashima meets Wegner, with staked legs (both curved and tapered), steam-bent spindles, a hand-scooped seat and stretchers that swoop up to support the arms – a new paradigm in the Chandley repertoire. There are more jigs than usual, as well as more machines, including a PantoRouter. There’s not a single right angle. Even though he’s getting paid well for the piece, the pay won’t cover the investment required to puzzle out the making. “But because it’s a new design,” he reasons, “it’s going to give me a whole lot of other chairs.” The sculptural piece of seating will become a mainstay of his build-to-order portfolio, so he’s putting in the work to make all of the processes readily repeatable. “I want them all down pat,” he says, because efficient production is important to how he makes his living.
Family & Starting Out
In July Bern turned 50. “Aging has never been something that has particularly preoccupied my thoughts,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “I’ve always felt birthdays were a good excuse to draw in close the ones you love and that the warmth of their returned love is a reflection of the happiness I’ve achieved in life. I don’t care how old I am each time I feel it, just that I’m feeling it. It is life affirming.
“Today as I turn 50, in this time of physical isolation, I count myself incredibly lucky to spend the day on remote learning with my son Flann Brian Chandley, Grandson to Brian Frederick Chandley, my beautiful Dad, who we lost just a little more th[a]n 6 months ago today. Every time I think of him I’m flooded with longing to see him and speak with him. We miss him an enormous amount. He was and is, along with Mum, my greatest inspiration to be as good a person as I can be. As I look at my son, as he looks at me, as we talk to each other I’m aware of how lucky I am to have had such brilliant role models. Dad’s in my thoughts daily but I feel him especially close today.”
You can chart how important Bern’s family is to him in his voice. Nothing in our conversation makes him more animated than the stories he tells about family members, each anecdote filled with detail and color. Most of his ancestors came to Australia from Ireland. Some arrived against their will, he notes, referring to the British practice of exporting convicts to penal colonies in the late 18th century. Others came as farmers looking for opportunity. Farming remained central to the family for generations. Bern’s father, Brian, was one of nine children born on a farm near the port city of Geelong (pronounced “Ja-long”) in the state of Victoria, about 50 miles southwest of the capital, Melbourne.
The family lost the farm during the Great Depression and had to move into Geelong to look for employment. His paternal grandfather, Bill Chandley, went to work at a factory. Bern has fond memories of Bill, who was “already quite on in years” by the time Bern came along. Bill had one leg that was longer than the other, due to a bout of polio he suffered as a child. The family didn’t own a car, so he got around by bus. “He knew all the bus drivers in Geelong by their first name. He rode on a bus with a little airline bag and his rollie (handrolled) cigarettes. He was a very warm, lovely fellow,” Bern remembers, then adds in the kind of detail especially important to a child: “My nana” – her name was Nellie – “made a sponge cake for everyone’s birthday.”
Bern’s mother was a nurse-midwife, his dad a diesel mechanic fitter and turner. “You call them engineers over there,” he offers, “like toolmaking – working with heavy machinery.” Geelong being a port town, many businesses were involved with shipping.
In 1986, at the age of 16, Bern left school to start an apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner. “I’m from a big working-class family,” he says. “I’ve got a million cousins who are all tradesmen. I’m one of four kids; my older brother was the first in our extended family to go to university.”
It was meant to be a four-year apprenticeship, with time alternating between coursework at trade school and work for a boss who ran a house framing business. At school Bern studied building methodology – stairs, joinery techniques and traditional handwork with dovetails and mortise and tenons – not because there was a market for that kind of work (there wasn’t), but because the curriculum hadn’t been updated in years, for which he gives thanks. On the job, they framed houses; Bern has vivid memories of building pitched roofs in eucalyptus, “big, tall, straight-grain trees used in construction.” The roofs would then be topped with weatherproof corrugated steel. That way of roofing is long gone, he says; these days builders simply install trusses.
Bern finished his apprenticeship early, at the age of 19. Typically an apprentice would stay on with the boss who’d sponsored the training, but these two didn’t get along. “He was a bit of a hammer thrower,” Bern says – “a good carpenter, but always the most hated person on the site. The day I finished my apprenticeship, I quit-slash-he fired me. We had a big fight on the site.”
After a few more carpentry jobs he was ready to leave Geelong. His older sister was training to be a nurse in Melbourne, so he moved there. For two years he worked as a hospital orderly, an experience he found fascinating. “I was suddenly confronted with life and death. I was still a silly young bloke. I had to come to terms with people dying on a regular basis…and form an understanding of it…. Nurses are amazing. They’ve just got to carry on, no matter what.” He worked in the emergency room. “You’re on the front line,” he says. “There are some horrific injuries. People were thrashing around, semi-conscious, and you had to hold them down.” Part of his job was to help the nurses wrap cadavers in plastic and take them to the mortuary. “It knocked the immaturity out of me, which I’m very thankful for.”
In his 20s he did some traveling around Europe. On his return, he found his way into building sets for television, theater and American movies that were being filmed in Melbourne. Each gig lasted almost a year. One of these productions was set in the Second World War; when the crew couldn’t find a specific piece of period-authentic furniture, they brought him a picture and he figured out how to make it. “I was just knocking the [props] out, out of MDF and pine,” he says; the painters on the set “were magicians” who made the stuff look like it was built of mahogany.
“The thing with set building is, it’s very good for problem solving. The designers are notorious for giving you the easy measurements” while leaving the challenging stuff involved in curves and angles for the set builders to work out. “Depending on the job, there could be nary a right angle. ‘Star Wars’ had the most curves and angles. That’s space ships for you!” He points out that this was before CNC routers, so you couldn’t just pop what values you had into a computer. “You had to work it out yourself. You had to be very inventive.”
He’d always had an interest in furniture, so Bern filled the time between jobs with furniture commissions, taking on “anything and everything” – tables, cabinets, built-ins, carpentry jobs. He realized that making furniture was what he really wanted to do and started his own business, getting work by word of mouth. Without a shop, he built things in his backyard, or in the client’s. “I got it done,” he says. He persevered and learned from his mistakes.
Between 2005 and 2016 he shared space in group shops, a good way to build up a business when you don’t have the capital to tool up on your own. Needless to say, it could be trying; people had different priorities and interests. The others were building furniture part-time, whereas he was running a business. Eventually he concluded he needed a space of his own.
He got to know his wife, Alice Byrne, as a friend in 2006. It was summer, and Bern was in Paris. Alice happened to be there, too; her boyfriend, Alan, had been awarded a traveling scholarship. An oil painter, she’d been in Paris seven years before as the scholarship’s inaugural winner. She and Bern spent some time together visiting galleries. “I was smitten,” he says, “in the sense of ‘I’ve really got to meet a girl like Alice.’” After about a week, Bern went on his way, not knowing whether he’d ever see her again.
But shortly after he got home to Melbourne, Alice’s brother George called with news that Alice was back. Alan wasn’t with her; he had returned to Sydney. Soon after, Bern and Alice went on a first date, a pub meal and dancing – with George. They’ve been together ever since, and were married in 2009.
Alice put her painting aside when she got pregnant, concerned about the health risks of solvents. After Flannery was born, in 2011, Bern was the family’s main breadwinner. Alice went back to work outside the home part-time when Flann was 2; she manages an art supply shop that does both retail and wholesale work, along with specialty painting services such as framing and stretching canvas. Although she still has a studio space, she has largely put that work aside while raising Flann.
The Move to Chairs
Like many of us, Bern started out in “bespoke” (custom) work. In retrospect, he sees custom work as “a bit of a trap you can fall into. That’s the best way to burn yourself; if you haven’t built something before, you’re not ever going to get paid enough to sort out all the preliminary stuff before you make it. But it’s the best way to learn a lot.”
He stuck with custom work until about 2010, building tables, cabinets, whatever a client might want, while working part-time for a fellow woodworker, Alastair Boell, who had a school, the Melbourne Guild of Fine Woodworking. Alastair was eager to have Bern teach, but Bern had always hated public speaking. “It kind of terrified me.” He gave it a try. He’s glad he did. When Alastair invited Peter Galbert to teach a class on North American Windsor chairs, Bern assisted and found himself smitten with the joinery. Pete, Bern says, is “egoless. Very comprehending, very inventive as a maker… a very inspiring teacher.” In fact, so inspiring “that from that moment all I wanted to do was make chairs.”
Pete encouraged Bern to visit the States and teach at his school in New Hampshire. They made it happen. He taught one class in 2018 and two in 2019 on a chair of his own design that he calls the “No. 14 Chair” – “after Thonet,” he laughs, “because I’m shit at naming things.”
He still makes other forms when he’s really keen on a particular piece, but chairs have become his livelihood. Here we return to the topic of efficiency. “You have to have your own product,” he believes; that way, you’ve got the jigs and processes in place. People order one (or 14!) of that thing “and you can just go straight to work, without thinking” – at least, in principle. He admits “that’s easier said than done.”
He now teaches chairmaking classes at his shop in Thomastown, an industrial area on the northern outskirts of Melbourne. With block walls and a concrete floor, it’s around 2,000 square feet in a gray brick building surrounded by old factories. Teaching has changed the nature of his business, injecting a welcome bit of variety. He keeps classes small, with no more than four students at a time, so that people with different skill levels can all keep up, and he tries to design each class so that students at any level of experience can get something from it.
Teaching has also proved a stabilizing influence in economic terms. “It’s more lucrative than general chairmaking,” he says. “It can afford you that little bit of extra time.” He’s come to regard a few teaching gigs through the year as “economic pillars” around which he can schedule the rest of his work and hopes the higher income from teaching will allow him more time to develop new designs. In Bern’s view, a good chair design combines durability, structural integrity and comfort. “I love designing chairs. Developing them is the most fun you can possibly have.”