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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 18^th 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.”

— Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work” and “Kitchen Think”

Interviewing furniture maker Michael Puryear feels a bit like listening in on a geography or sociology class delivered by a laid-back professor with the mellow voice of Richie Havens and a warm, easy laugh. When asked where he grew up, Michael starts further back than most, with the culture of slavery in the southern states – specifically, Virginia, which was home to many of his forebears.

“Those families in the tidewater area did not grow cotton,” he begins, differentiating the area’s history from the widespread stereotype. Slavery existed, for sure, but in varied forms, each tied to a particular region and the agricultural products that would thrive there. The primary crop in tidewater states was tobacco, grown on smaller farms with fewer slaves, many of whom lived in the same house as their masters. Sea island slavery was another form, this one off the coast of Georgia and North Carolina and based on the cultivation of rice and indigo, which these slaves’ ancestors had grown in Africa. Sea island slaves lived in villages they organized themselves and spoke Gullah, the language of their African heritage. Their owners were generally absentee, living in Charleston and Savannah; while there were overseers, the slaves were “pretty much left on their own to do the work.” Finally, there was Antebellum slavery, focused on the growing of cotton in the hot, wet climate of more central southern states with well-drained soils.

Why start with slavery? As Michael says in a quote on the Smithsonian website, he wants “to acknowledge and honor the contributions of African American slaves to this country. Like my own ancestry this heritage began before the founding of the United States. African Americans have fought with honor and loyalty in every war of our nation. They have significantly contributed economically, socially, culturally and politically to American culture.”

From the South, we jumped far to the North, with more eye-opening history. Although Michael’s father’s side of the family has its North American roots in the tidewater area, his father was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and grew up in Philadelphia. Michael explains the move. His paternal grandfather, Moses, was a Baptist minister in Africville, a major terminus of the Underground Railroad.

His paternal grandmother, Elma Clark, died as a consequence of giving birth to her second child, Ruth. Moses remarried and continued to live in Africville with his children; they were still living there on December 6, 1917, when a Norwegian steamship loaded with supplies for a World War I relief effort collided with a French vessel carrying munitions to France, killing almost 2,000 people and injuring some 9,000 others, most of them Halifax civilians. In addition, the blast caused a tsunami that demolished a nearby branch of the Mi’kmaq First Nation. The horror of the explosion was magnified as locals imagined it was the result of a bomb – this was, after all, during a war. Hospitals were overwhelmed by injured people, and even as would-be rescuers headed to the area from Canada and the United States, they found themselves unable to get through as a blizzard covered Halifax and its environs with more than a foot of snow. Michael says his father, Reginald, who was 9 at the time, recalled seeing dead bodies frozen on the ground.

How had I never heard about any of this? 

Michael’s grandfather moved to Toronto, where he died, likely of a heart attack, leaving Reginald and Ruth orphaned. The children were sent to live with an aunt in Pittsburgh. As a single mother who worked as a domestic, their aunt already had her hands full, so she arranged for them to attend a boarding school, St. Katharine Drexel School, outside of Philadelphia. Michael’s father went on to high school at the Saint Emma Military Academy in Virginia, and rose to the rank of captain. While there, his best friend introduced him to his sister, Martina Morse. And so began Michael’s immediate family.

The couple made their home in Washington, D.C., where Martina’s family goes back at least four generations. At a time when the highest level of employment an African-American could hope to attain was working for the Post Office or being a teacher, Michael says, “that’s what my parents did” – his father worked in the Post Office; his mother taught school, following a tradition on her side of the family.

Michael was born in 1944, the third of seven children. Early on, they lived in an apartment in the city’s southwest quadrant; the last two of his siblings were born after the family moved to a house on the city’s northeast side. “It was a very nice house,” he remembers – a detached house built in the 1920s with a gambrel roof, hardwood floors and unpainted chestnut trim. There was a garage under the front porch, and a basement, all in “a very nice neighborhood with big yards” around a park-like area that drew opossums and other wildlife. The family of nine lived with a single bathroom, which didn’t even strike them as worthy of notice, though Michael is now especially appreciative of the cooperation and mutual respect this must have required.

“When we moved there, we were the third Black family on the block; the other two were doctors. We were the first one with young kids. The neighborhood became predominantly Black with white flight. When we sold the house, we sold to the first white people moving back to the neighborhood.”

From first through third grade, Michael attended a segregated public school. After the family moved, he switched to an integrated Catholic school, where he almost had to repeat fourth grade – other students were already taking notes, writing in cursive and doing multiplication and division, all of it foreign to him. He persevered and caught up.

His favorite subjects were social studies, geography and science. But some of his most valuable learning experiences came from his parents, who took the children to cultural institutions such as the Smithsonian. “That was an amazing place to go and see the diversity of what man does and the differences in cultures and the natural world. It was really a refuge for us. We would go on our own, when we were old enough, and just spend hours looking in the museum.” He and his siblings also got library cards as soon as they could print their names. “That was also a very important part of my education. Those things [museums and books] created a sense of curiosity, an awareness of something larger than ourselves.”

Their parents also took them camping. “We were the only African-Americans we came across that camped. It wasn’t really an issue, other than that awareness.” These family trips sparked a lifelong love of the outdoors. “One of the most important things to me, as a consequence of growing up, is my awareness and interest in nature,” he says. Later, with his wife, Sarah Wells, he camped, went backpacking, kayaked (they built their own boats), made long-distance trips by bicycle (once riding the entire length of Newfoundland from south to north) and did an extended trip in Europe. He has also been to the Arctic twice with his brother Martin.

He credits his upbringing with instilling a sense of individuality, but adds that “growing up in a close-knit family, we had a sense of responsibility to others, as well. My mother demanded of us a certain level of behavior that I think was even more so than parochial school. I feel fortunate in my growing up. I think my parents basically did an amazing job of giving us what we needed to survive.”

After high school, Michael studied at Howard University for two years but dropped out because he was “floundering.” He points out that he was paying his own way, “the deal my parents made with us. They paid for our grade and high school, and we were expected to pay for our college education. In those days, that was possible. Most of my siblings got scholarships. Howard University was subsidized, so its tuition was reasonable.

“I felt like I was wasting my time and money” he goes on. “I didn’t have a sense of direction, of what I should be doing. There was an expectation that we would all go to school, so when I dropped out, I felt like I was letting my parents down.” He was surprised and grateful when they accepted his decision and said he could live at home, but “’You have to pay a little rent,’” they told him. He got a job as a page at the D.C. Library. “It was seamless,” he says with appreciation. “My guilt was stronger than their reaction.”

Military Service

Two years later, in 1965, he was drafted into the Army. The Vietnam War was in full force. Because he did well on the entry tests, those in charge wanted him to become an officer. He had his own opinion. “I knew that would be a mistake; I knew as a draftee I would only have to be on active duty for two years, and if I had become an officer, I would have to have an active duty period of four years. That wasn’t a very good equation, as far as I was concerned. I was actually against the war. It was before there was a lot of counseling about being a resistor.” Besides the lack of guidance for those who might have sought conscientious objector status, he felt a sense of responsibility to his parents to fulfill his duty as a citizen.

During basic training there were so many draftees that instead of barracks, Michael’s unit slept in tents set up with six cots apiece on concrete pads left over from the World War II. “It was better,” he thinks, “because you were not under the constant eye of the sergeants.” He volunteered to be a truck driver, which got him out of kitchen patrol and guard duty.

He recognizes he was fortunate. He was trained as a medical lab tech doing biochemistry and toxicology in St. Louis, which kept him from going to Vietnam. The job wasn’t on a military base, and the hours, from 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m., with no weekends, were easy. All in all, he says, “it was very un-military!” He never even wore his dress uniform, because they wore whites at work.

After two years, he’d satisfied his military obligation and returned to his job at the library in Washington, D.C., where he ended up working for 11 years, advancing from page all the way to supervisor of circulation.

He traces his career in furniture making back to this job at the library. “I was always interested in design, in shape and form,” he explains. “I was teaching myself photography at that point; it was form that was very much part of the images I was making. I became aware of the Shakers and the Scandinavian furniture movement. There were books there! I started reading books about woodworking.”

At this point he brings the conversation back to the neighborhood where he grew up: it was populated by homeowners who worked office jobs for the government, but most of them worked on their own homes, and neighbors helped each other. When his father was painting their house, Mr. Morris around the corner pitched in with his ladder. Michael’s father had been trained as an electrician in high school, which made him a real neighborhood asset. “It didn’t seem like a big deal,” Michael remarks. “You figure out how to do [something], and you do it.” He and his older brother, Martin, agree that attitude gave them the confidence to pursue their interests in art and craft. The family had a workshop in the basement and access to a range of tools – chisels, planes, screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, most of them manufactured by Stanley, from the tool chest their mother had given their dad when they were first married. (“It was probably from Montogmery Ward,” Michael adds.) “I used to hang out with [Dad] and other neighbors who were handy. I was like their buddy. They would tolerate me. I would be like a go-fer. That was very important to who I have become.”

At some point while working at the library, Michael became aware of James Krenov and Wharton Esherick. “What they were doing was very interesting to me,” he remembers. Working at the library was “a great job, with nice people. But there was something about it that felt like, ‘I wanted to live what I call an integrated life.’”

He went back to college on the GI Bill and got a degree in anthropology.

Life in New York

“I’d been doing photography and had some recognition. Looking at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, there were Penn and Hiro and [other] well-known photographers.” When his girlfriend at the time transferred from American University to Pratt in New York, Michael thought he’d move to the city with her and become a photographer. He quickly found he “didn’t know anything about running a business. You can have all the skill you have, but if you don’t know how to run a business, you’ll fail.”

He had a landlord who was a plumber; the landlord happened to be working on a kitchen for a client. The brownstones in north Brooklyn were just starting to be converted from rental apartments back to single-family homes. Michael did the kitchen with his older brother. Word got around as people on the block saw him working; they asked if they could hire him. Then a friend who taught college and had invested in four brownstones asked Michael to renovate them all, which gave him significant experience.

But as much as he enjoyed the work, he says he found “being a contractor was much more about the headaches – the estimates, the crew, material procurement, subcontractors…” He decided to move away from general contracting to work of more pointed scope. Kitchen cabinets were a start; he’d built some before he even had a shop, in the basement of the house where he’d been living. But with kitchen cabinets, he said, “the only creative aspect of it was the facades.” (Ouch.)  

The first piece of furniture he made and sold was a desk for the friend with the brownstones. With time, he got more commissions and the work became increasingly interesting. “At a certain point,” he says, “I decided to call myself a furniture maker.” He ended up working as a furniture maker, sharing a shop with friends at Brooklyn Model Works, whose company did props and special effects for advertising and film. He learned on the job; with each succeeding piece, he’d add “one aspect that I had not done before” to develop new skills. Again, books were invaluable – Charles Hayward on joinery, “Cabinetmaking & Millwork” by John Feirer, the “Encyclopedia of Furniture.”

In 1976 he met photographer Sarah Wells, who would become his wife. Sarah and a friend moved into a loft on the Bowery; as Michael’s relationship with her developed, he moved in with them. A couple of creatives making a home together in a New York loft may sound enviable today, but Michael is quick to bring that fantasy back to reality: “It was pretty rough. We were heating with a wood stove.”  In 1980 they were bought out by the restaurant supply business across the street. “That was the first example I knew of a loft being turned back into a commercial space,” he laughs.

They moved to a loft in Chelsea that became home for the next 25 years. Sarah did photography for artists, collectors, galleries and museums. (Two examples of books illustrated by her photographs are “Against the Grain: Bentwood Furniture From the Collection of Fern & Manfred Steinfeld” and “The Newark Museum Collection of American Art Pottery”.) “People loved her,” he says. “I always considered that she was so unjudgmental. She didn’t have strong negative responses to people. So we would have community dinners – we had a tradition of having a Thanksgiving dinner in our loft where we would have 25 people. You couldn’t ask for a better life, in a way, other than that you had to always think about being evicted!”  

Michael flourished as a furniture maker. In the late 1980s he was accepted to the first show he ever applied to – at no less than the Smithsonian Museum of Craft. Encouraged, he started doing more shows – the Philadelphia Furniture Show, the Philadelphia Museum Craft Show and the Ace Craft Show in Evanston, Ill. – and kept at it for about 20 years. “These were considered the top shows,” he notes. “They were run by women’s committees – well-to-do women. So the clients, the people who came, were of that class.” But despite the well-heeled visitors, he found that he and his fellow furniture makers made surprisingly few sales at the shows. “Furniture has always been a tough sell,” he reasons. “People don’t buy it just on a whim, the price point and being a large item they had to have the space and need. All my furniture-maker friends, we talked about how it was the stepchild of the craft show, while people doing ceramics, fabric and jewelry sold well. People felt free to buy [those things].” Furniture, on the other hand, required a major investment – “more than most people would do at the drop of a hat.” Over this entire period, he thinks he sold two or three pieces off the floor at shows. Instead, he says, the value of doing shows “was more about talking to people,” checking back with them later and developing a reputation based on word of mouth once people had seen his work in person. His one effort at advertising  in magazines was in Metropolis early on; while that didn’t directly bring in any business, it brought him name recognition.

Meanwhile, he and Sarah shared a life rich in outdoor experiences. They took off a month every summer and went on a trip; they took a week-long back-country ski trip in the winter. “There was not a lot of money involved, but we used to be amazed how much we could do with so little money. It felt like the integrated life I wanted to live.” They backpacked in the Canadian Rockies and the deserts of the Southwest, kayaked the coast of Maine, skied New England and Canada, traveled up the Amazon while in Brazil and studied Tai Chi in China. They were paying $800 a month for their loft in Chelsea, and New York State Loft Law kept the monthly payment at that rate for 25 years.

After Sarah died of cancer in 1998, Michael stayed on in the loft. A new owner bought the building as an investment. More and more of those moving into lofts were not artists but well-paid professionals who coveted the spacious live-in studios in old industrial buildings. Michael understands. “They wanted some of that, too!” Unable to recoup his investment with rents so low, the building’s new owner asked Michael if he’d be willing to be bought out. Finally, in 2005, he was ready to move.

Making a New Life

At first he thought he’d find a place in Brooklyn, but rents were “skyrocketing,” while his income was not. His brother Martin had moved from Chicago to the Catskills; Michael was familiar with the area because he and Sarah had spent time there. He figured he could run his business there just as well as in the city. It took two years to find the right place, in part because he needed shop space, but he eventually found an 1870s farmhouse in Catskill Park. Though the property around the house had originally belonged to the farm, it had been subdivided and developed with houses.

The barn would serve fine as a shop, though it needed major renovation – insulation, electrical wiring, heating and more recently, plumbing. At 24′ x 36′ with 10′ ceilings, it’s smaller than his former shop in Brooklyn, which had about 1,000 square feet and (my heart!) a 15′ ceiling, “but it works,” he says; “I really like it.” And while Michael doesn’t have any domestic animals at present, he shares his piece of earth with bears, deer, foxes, woodchucks, rabbits and skunks, as well as lots of wild birds. “I’m pretty happy here. I have what I need. As you get older, you don’t really need a lot more.”

Michael’s work has slowed since the 2008 recession. For a few years he was part of a group called the Hudson Valley Furniture Makers, with young and older members. The group’s activities in person together “kind of fizzled,” though he says they’re all still friends.

He still gets jobs from time to time, such as a bench for Brockport College near Rochester. The college gave lumber from some trees on campus to six New York furniture makers who would design and build benches for the school. In 2015 he was a visiting artist at Australian National University in Canberra. And he would have participated in the 2020 World Wood Day event in Japan, had it not been cancelled, along with so much else, due to the pandemic.

On the other hand, as a furniture maker who lives and works alone, he says the pandemic hasn’t affected him as badly as it has many others. For fun he bikes, goes fly fishing or skis. He visits friends at a distance and thinks “there’s no point in railing against it, because you can’t do anything about it.”

He also continues to teach. His first teaching job was at Penland in 1995; he taught there again in ’96, ’97, 2002 and 2006. Since then, he has taught at Arrowmont, Anderson Ranch, Haystack, Parsons, the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship and SUNY Purchase. He’s now teaching a series of classes at the Hudson River Maritime Museum’s wooden boat school called “Foundations of Woodworking,” which covers understanding wood, the use and care of tools and joinery, and culminates in a project. “That’s a lot of fun, because it’s people who aren’t seeking a degree. They just want to learn stuff. I’ve always liked teaching, because, one, it clarifies your thinking about what you do, and the other thing is that I just like working with the people. They’re so grateful, so appreciative. And a lot of them are discovering things about themselves they didn’t know.” Classes have just started up again; he’ll start teaching in late September. On top of this, he teaches boatbuilding.

Boatbuilding? I asked. Isn’t that a specialized subject?

“There’s something about reading,” he chuckles. “I taught myself photography from reading. I taught myself woodworking from reading. It’s the curiosity that’s the important part.”

See a Smithsonian interview of Michael Puryear here.

See American Craft magazine’s article about Michael.

– Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work”

“Highland Woodworking is unlike any other woodworking store I’ve ever been in on the whole planet,” Chris Schwarz told me, explaining why he thought the business and the family behind it would make an ideal contribution to this series. “It’s this wonderful, family, homey…” here he trailed off, as though in a happy dream, before resuming the narration of his reverie. “It’s just kind of overwhelming, like a candy store. If every town had a Highland, woodworking would be as popular as golf.”

Having seen pictures of the store’s façade, a drool-worthy architectural confection in century-old brick, a clay tile roof overhang supported by curly corbels, tall divided-light windows spanning nearly its entire front, I found his description almost compelling enough to plan a drive to Atlanta. Then I remembered we’re in the middle of a pandemic.

Chris discovered the place in the 1990s through the company’s black and white catalog, which they mail to a list that has grown to more than 100,000 addresses. If you know anything about Chris, you won’t be surprised to learn that he was attracted to the catalog not just by its promise of great tools, but by the warmth of its hand-drawn illustrations, a striking anachronism in the digital age. “They were one of the few people that had a full range of hand tools,” he says. “In the ’90s it was hard to find anybody who had more than one or two brands.” In fact, he adds, they had pretty much “EVERYTHING. And they were always supporting small makers, such as Independence Tool.”

It was Highland Woodworking that introduced Chris to Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, before the internet, when he called in his orders by phone. Though he still hadn’t seen the place in person, it felt familiar, largely thanks to the employee bios in the catalog. One year, Popular Woodworking assigned him to cover the International Woodworking Fair (IWF), which takes place in Atlanta. He played hooky one afternoon and made the pilgrimage. “I was speechless,” he says. “There was a suitcase on the floor; Roy Underhill was there, demonstrating. “I just couldn’t believe it. It exceeded my every expectation.”

Charmed by everything he’d seen, he got to know the owners, Chris and Sharon Bagby, and their daughters, Kelley and Molly. Their zaniness appeals to him – their willingness to do stuff “that’s off the beaten path,” as he says, proceeding to invoke a SawStop demonstration video in which Roy Underhill uses fried chicken, a good Southern staple, instead of the classic hot dog to trigger the stop. “They’re solid fried-gold people. It’s a funky neighborhood. They’re the bedrock there. The neighborhood has grown up around them.”

How could the Bagbys be so good at running a hardware store for specialty tools when neither of them was a woodworker? Jimmy Carter has taken classes at Highland Woodworking; Sam Maloof taught there. Here’s a glimpse into the business that should provide at least some clues.

Chris Bagby provided the following introduction:

“In 1974 Chris and Sharon Bagby, then recent Georgia Tech graduates, became managers of a King Hardware branch store on Piedmont Avenue in Atlanta. By coincidence, this particular King Hardware store happened to be the lone southeastern dealership for the Shopsmith combination woodworking machine. As the Bagbys worked to find ways to dramatically increase Shopsmith sales at the store, including introducing the sale of hardwood lumber, the store began to attract a growing community of woodworkers.

“In 1977 the Bagbys and their staff published a four-page woodworking newsletter they called “Wood News.” Response to it was enthusiastic. They published two more issues before deciding in the spring of 1978 to resign from King Hardware and start their own hardware store, Highland Hardware. Chris was 28. Sharon was 26.”

“At that time Shopsmith had begun opening its own retail stores nationwide and told the Bagbys they were not interested in making Highland Hardware a Shopsmith dealer. However, the couple soon connected with the Garrett Wade Company of New York, the U.S. importer of Swiss-made Inca Tools, and in 1978 began selling Inca tablesaws, bandsaws and planer-jointers. Highland Hardware became a local Atlanta retail source for Record and ECE hand planes, Marples chisels, Tyzack handsaws and many other fine woodworking tools purchased wholesale from Garrett Wade. They also continued to sell hardwood lumber and established a small millwork shop in the basement of the store.”

I spoke with Molly, 34, the younger daughter, who provided most of what follows. Both she and Kelley, who’s 10 years older, work for the business – Molly in Atlanta; Kelley, from her home in Massachusetts.

The business started out as an old-fashioned mom and pop hardware store selling the kind of stuff you need to fix a washing machine or plant flowers in a barrel – screwdrivers, nails, plumbing supplies, gardening tools. As time went on, they had more and more requests from woodworkers looking for specialized tools, so they brought in hand saws of higher quality, along with chisels, planes and more – now, as Chris Schwarz can attest, much more. Along with a full range of tools by Lie-Nielsen and some 400 distinct manufacturers, they also sell products by Festool and SawStop. Early on, when Home Depot, Lowe’s and Ace Hardware branches were proliferating across the country, selling really good woodworking tools was especially critical in setting the small, friendly store apart and giving them a competitive edge.

They moved the business to its present location (across the street from the original one) in 1984, more than doubling the store’s square footage. This time they set down roots, buying the property instead of paying rent. In 1995, just over a decade later, they did a large-scale renovation, adding 8,000 square feet of space, including a large classroom where seminars and hands-on woodworking classes are now taught. Also included in the renovation was a new shipping and receiving department, complete with loading dock and office space for management. The following year they launched their website; before long, the online business was hard to keep up with. They increased their shipping department and added more warehouse storage.

“Before long,” Chris Bagby continues,

“Highland Hardware published its own small tool catalog as the company evolved to become an importer of fine tools in its own right, and began to develop a wide following nationwide with a reputation as a leader in woodworking education, offering weekend classes throughout the year. In 1992, the company decided to merge the newsletter into the catalog and thereafter began publishing three catalogs a year. “Wood News” as a separate entity was no more, until 2005 when it was resurrected on the web as Wood News Online , where it continues to be published monthly.”

(You can read the 1981-82 catalog here, thanks to John Cashman, who sent me this document.)

Molly shared one of Sharon’s memories of working at the cash register. “She looks up and sees a man with an earpiece and sunglasses and gets a little worried. And then she looks to the left of him and sees it’s Jimmy Carter!”

Chris adds another Carter story:

“Back in the early ‘80s when we were still hand applying labels to our annual tool catalog mailings ourselves, Kelley [who was only about 6 or 7 at the time] came to the one with President Carter’s name and address on it. On a whim she wrote him a little note and stuck it in the catalog. A few days later she received a personally handwritten reply from Mr. Carter, thanking her for the note. We framed it and I think it is still hanging on the wall at Sharon’s house.”

President Carter first visited the store in March 1981, a couple of months after he left office, adds Chris.

“He arrived with a dozen Secret Service agents and shopped for some glue, a book and a few other things. While touring our store, he saw where we taught woodworking classes in the basement. He told me that if we were ever able to host Tage Frid for a seminar, he would like to attend.

“The next day I wrote to Mr. Frid (whom I did not know personally) and told him that President Carter would like to come to Highland to attend a class taught by him. Mr. Frid was interested, and indeed came to Atlanta to teach a weekend seminar that Mr. Carter attended on both days. As part of the event we arranged for us all to have dinner together at a nearby restaurant.

“Tage Frid went on to teach a seminar at Highland every year for 11 years. He and President Carter remained friends until Frid’s death in 2004.”

Today, Highland Woodworking employs about 20 people, most of whom live in Atlanta or the greater metro area. Three work in shipping. Sharon, says her daughter, is a “jack of all trades”; she dabbles in almost every aspect of operating the business, including purchasing, receiving, accounting and answering the phones. Several managers run all aspects of the website, SEO, catalog production, marketing and social media. A products manager searches out new stuff at conferences and tool shows, and orders stock from vendors. A dozen or so, most of them part-time, work the sales floor helping customers, showing them how to use tools, answering the phone, taking orders and providing technical support.

That’s a lot of employees for a mom and pop business. I asked Molly why they stay. “It’s a very laid-back work environment,” she answers. “My parents kind of just run the store in their own management style, and I think that has helped [with] employee retention, because it’s not super-corporate, not super-reliant on ‘human resources’ and a strict schedule with meetings and everything.” They provide full-time employees with health insurance.

Chris, Kelley and Molly share the marketing. All work remotely much of the time. Though Molly now lives in Atlanta, she used to work from Queens in New York City. Chris dials in from wherever he happens to be. (It might well be a spot along the Appalachian Trail, which he has hiked three times.)

Highland Woodworking holds tent sales and promotional events to celebrate anniversaries; these sound more like giant parties than the usual stuffy corporate affair. The most recent was in 2018, when they toasted their 40^th year in business. Molly produced the event, bringing in Nick Offerman and Tom Lie-Nielsen to join Roy Underhill, who’s based closer by. The trio proved a big draw. “We weren’t expecting as big of a crowd as we got with Nick Offerman,” she says. Nick was there to sign copies of his latest book “Good Clean Fun.” “It was a very steady crowd to come meet him, the whole day, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.”

One of the company’s strengths since its inception has been classes in a variety of woodworking skills. “Part of the reason we have so many staff on the sales floor is we want to be able to answer your woodworking questions,” Molly notes. “Our staff have the knowledge to be able to answer whatever question you ask about.” She mentions Phil Colson as an example; he started working for them in 1985 (he’s also Molly’s godfather, which says something about how close this family is with its employees) and teaches woodturning in addition to his other work at the store.

Sharon and Chris tried to retire – she in 1994, he in 1998. They also got divorced in 1994. But when the economy crashed in 2008 and the store took a hit, both came out of retirement to get the place running again. Says Molly: “they haven’t had time to retire since.” They’re great friends and work well together.

With the onset of the pandemic, they closed the retail storefront. Most of the business, even before, came from online sales, which have only increased, rivaling the pace during most years’ holiday rush. To save local customers the delay and cost of shipping, they offer curbside pickup. Unable to run classes in-store, they’re moving at least temporarily to an online model. (You can learn more here.)

“We’re blessed to have attracted a core group of longtime employees who know their stuff and enjoy sharing what they know about any of the tools we sell, in person during normal times and otherwise by phone,” adds Chris.

Of our 18 current staff members, 12 have been with us for over 20 years each. Phil and Sidney have both worked here since 1985. Only one of our current employees has been here less than 5 years. For all that they faithfully contribute, our employees are the main reason we have been fortunate enough to attract generations of loyal customers from all over the country since 1978. We are very grateful.”

– Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work” and “Kitchen Think”