One of the most difficult parts about writing the “The Curse of the Nannau Oak” (an illustrated book forthcoming from Lost Art Press) was being so far away from where it all took place. Time and money aside, the pandemic made a trip impossible.
Much of the story could have been written anywhere, but several scenes in the story, I felt, needed the eyes of someone physically there. One scene features detailed plasterwork in a restaurant in Dolgellau, a small town in northwest Wales. The other is a walk the main character, Cadi, takes with her grandmother.
The Nannau estate is about three miles north of Dolgellau. In our book (which I wrote and is illustrated by the brilliant Elin Manon Cooper) Cadi and her family eat in a restaurant in which there is a frightening and detailed plasterwork scene of a large tree on the wall. The waiter tells her it’s the hollow oak of the demon – the Nannau oak. This plasterwork scene is real and exists, as does the restaurant, called Y Sospan. Legend states that the plasterwork has actual branches from the Nannau oak embedded in it. From what I gather, the armorial (another plasterwork scene next to the tree, also featured in our book) was constructed as late as the 19th century, perhaps when the restaurant was used by the Dolgellau Cricket and Reading Club. The tree, on the other hand, was possibly constructed as part of the 1758 restoration of the hall, as the subjects’ clothing in the scene matches that time period. As far as branches from the Nannau oak actually being embedded into the plaster? Who knows! It’s one of the perks, I suppose, of writing heavily researched fiction.
A detailed Standing Building Report commissioned by the Snowdonia National Park Authority was instrumental in helping me describe this scene accurately, and find a place for it in the story, without actually being there.
Later in the book Cadi and her grandmother walk through the Nannau Deer Park. This detailed article (and this entire website, along with the book, “Nannau – A Rich Tapesty of Welsh History” and its author, Philip Nanney Williams) were more than helpful.
I think I’ve watched maybe a dozen total videos on YouTube in my life, a fact that is shocking to my children. But I was thrilled to find the delightful Margaret Hall, who lets viewers walk with her through the Nannau Deer Park. It was the next best thing to taking the walk myself, and being able to listen to her speak Welsh while reading the English subtitles was wonderfully instructive as well.
Still.
I worried.
rough illustration of Coed y Moch by Elin Manon Cooper
Elin at Coed y Moch, illustrated above
But then I found Elin Manon Cooper, who is now my partner on this project and who is producing the most gorgeous illustrations. This summer she went to Y Sospan. And she walked through the Nannau Deer Park. She saw Coed y Moch (a lodge on the Nannau estate); Aran Fawddwy, Aran Benllyn and Cader Idris from a distance (southern Snowdonia mountains in North Wales); and Yr Hen Ardd (the Old Garden, built in the 1790s).
mountains in the distance on the Nannau Deer Park walk
The “V” is this cast-iron gate stands for the Vaughan family.
an entrance to Yr Hen Ardd (the Old Garden), built in the 1790s
“Cadi knew this was land that held secrets and stories.”
Elin tried to find the stone pillar that marked where the Nannau oak once stood, but it’s now in someone’s private garden. While wandering, a deer jumped out right in front of Elin and her family – a magical sight, she says.
“Despite not being able to find the exact spot of the oak it was an incredible place to walk around anyway,” she says. “You got a real sense of time and story all merging, swirling and stretching together.”
With many traditional, big-name publishers, such a close partnership and collaboration between author and illustrator would have never happened. Often, a writer and illustrator never meet or speak. And so to have this experience, I’m grateful.
Tom grew up in Eugene, Oregon. He spent his childhood outdoors knocking around Eugene’s urban forest areas wearing moccasins he made after immersing himself in books on Indigenous American material culture, fly fishing with his dad and cruising around town on his bike with friends. He has an older sister, now a journalist in Boston. His mom dipped in and out of various jobs including full- and part-time caregiving, and working at a marketing firm, an organic food store and University of Oregon’s (UO) Clark Honors College. He remembers watching his dad, an academic librarian who spent his entire career at UO’s Knight Library, tying his own fishing flies and making knives.
The closest public school just happened to be a French immersion school. Learning another language served as a good brain teaser growing up, and now helps him navigate Europe, “in my very enthusiastic French, which may or may not be correct,” he says, laughing.
When Tom was about 8 years old his mom took him to REI. A rock climbing gym across the street had set up a little climbing wall in the store. Tom tried it out.
“And I just got obsessed with rock climbing,” he says. “Until maybe 15 or so, that was my life.”
Bouldering in Wyoming, 1996.
It was the very early days of the Junior Competitive Climbing Association (Tom was member No. 12). He climbed in competitions all over the West Coast, and even went to nationals a few years.
In 8th grade, Tom got into a bad bike crash. With forced time off from climbing competitions he realized how much more fun it was to simply climb outside with friends. He left the pressure of competitions behind and moved on to alpine climbing and backpacking. He helped start a mountaineering club at his high school. And he did several big climbs – Mount Hood, Mount Shasta and smaller volcanoes in Oregon. He also took some big backpacking trips, including a month-long NOLS course in Wyoming when he was 17.
Mount Shasta, 2013.
Tom looks back with a bit of awe at how trusting his parents were, allowing him to head off with friends and adult climbing mentors to climb mountains, take a 12-hour trip to Spokane for a competition or spend the weekend backpacking.
“It was pretty wonderful,” he says. “It showed a lot of trust. I had some really wonderful mentors and learned a lot.”
Dartmouth’s Outing Club & an Education In Timber Framing, Geography & Studio Art
Tom attended Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he was given the freedom to create his own major – part geography, part architectural history, part architectural justice, part studio art. He likes to call it “cities and buildings.” Tom focused on human geography, looking at how the built environment affects people, privileging some and criminalizing others. He took lots of architecture studios. Timber framing and the buildings in New England, so different from where he grew up, inspired him. When Tom asked to forge his own path, the deans at Dartmouth simply asked for a proposal.
“That trust of students still inspires me in my work,” Tom says.
To further illustrate this trust, Tom shares a story. In middle school, he took a class at a cycling center and got really into fixing up old bikes. At Dartmouth, he noticed abandoned bikes locked up on bike racks for months on end. After about a year, he decided to liberate them. His intent? Fix them up for friends. While liberating one such bike a campus police officer showed up. Tom explained.
“Yeah, I can tell that it’s abandoned but you can’t just take it,” the officer said.
Long story short, Tom ended up in a room with one of the deans. He braced himself for consequence but was instead met with curiosity. The dean asked him to put together a proposal for a program for abandoned bikes, and Tom did. It included a budget, storage solutions and how they would be distributed via the college’s cycling club. Tom says the abandonment of hard-and-fast rules for trust, responsibility and accountability in that moment was eye-opening.
Tom largely chose the college due to the Dartmouth Outing Club, “which is this wonderful storied institution that started in 1909,” he says. It’s student driven, and nearly a quarter of the college’s students are members. In addition to networks of trails, shelters and cabins, the Outing Club offers nearly every outdoor program you can think of, from water sports, skiing, hiking and climbing to hunting, fishing and forestry.
“It’s just an amazing organization and a real education because, again, the amount of trust and responsibility the adults gave the students was such a gift,” Tom says. “We were put in charge of pretty significant projects.”
An example: The summer after Tom’s freshman year, he and two fellow undergrads were responsible for rebuilding a long stretch of the Appalachian Trail that ran along the side of a mountain in New Hampshire. Dartmouth provided them withacourse called “Wilderness Chainsaw Use,” taught by the U.S. Forest Service, then simply gave them a truck, tools and list of work. That summer they replaced rock steps, rebuilt water bars and built a bridge.
“It was incredible,” Tom says. “I teach at a university now and that would never happen now. Never, ever. And it doesn’t happen at Dartmouth the same way. There’s much more supervision.”
Roofing a trail shelter in New Hampshire, 2007.
Tom dedicated his time to the Outing Club’s Cabin and Trail division, which was responsible for maintaining almost 75 miles of Appalachian Trail (these days it’s less). Responsibilities included maintaining all the three-sided Adirondack shelters along the trail and their associated privies. During a meeting it was announced that the Cabin and Trail club’s Cabin Maintenance chair was studying abroad and they needed a replacement.
“For some reason I raised my hand not knowing anything,” Tom says. “And I got handed my first assignment, which was to replace two outhouses.”
As luck would have it, a man named Ira Friedrichs showed up at this same meeting. Ira wasn’t a student. An apprentice to Jay White Cloud, a master timber framer in Thetford Hill, Vermont, Ira was simply hoping to meet some people and maybe help out with a few projects. He and Tom hit it off, and Ira suggested they timber frame the privies together. Ira taught Tom Japanese timber framing and over spring break they pre-cut two small timber frames for the privies. Appalachian Trail regulations required the outhouses be wheelchair accessible, which meant each structure needed a 4′-wide circle. Despite using 2x4s and 4x4s, the frames were heavy. One of the privies was to be located a couple of miles in on a flat trail. Tom and Ira lashed the timbers to wheelbarrows and carts, hand carried them, and put them up in a weekend, hanging the walls on French cleats. The second outhouse, however, was on top of a mountain.
“And that was pretty brutal because we had to slog through mud and this dude was trying to help us with an ATV but that kept getting stuck,” Tom says. “So we’re skidding these timbers up and it was a disaster. But we got them up there eventually and we kind of bodged it together and it was fine.”
Timber framing, 2006.
Velvet Rocks Trail Shelter, Hanover, New Hamshire, Hemlock, 2007. Built in collaboration with Ira Friedrichs.
Tom fell in love with timber framing. He and Ira timber framed the Appalachian Trail’s Velvet Rocks Shelter, and the summer after he graduated, Tom designed and timber framed a sugaring house for an organic farm. He felled the trees, worked with a local sawyer to mill them and erected it on site.
“That was just a really neat farm-to-table building experience,” Tom says.
An Open Woodshop
While at Dartmouth, Tom also had access to the Student Woodshop, located in Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts.
“It started in the ’20s and the story I heard was some alumnus said, ‘The men of Dartmouth are getting weak and not learning how to use their hands. I’m going to endow a woodshop so that they can remember what it is to be real men!’ You know, some bullshit like that. But the institution has definitely lasted and it’s just wonderful. It’s an enormous woodshop with wonderful tools and a full-time staff.”
There are no woodworking classes, rather the Student Woodshop is simply an open studio. Tom wanted to build a blanket chest so he checked it out. Staff including Greg Elder, director of the Student Woodshop, taught him how to use the tools, how to think about what’s needed to take rough lumber to square, and how to balance hand work with machine work.
“It was just an amazing privilege to have access to that and that just gave me such a bug,” Tom says.
Occasionally, Walker Weed, former director of the Student Woodshop, would come by to use a machine. Reed was a well-known New England studio woodworker who had been featured in Fine Woodworking, “a good legend and guiding light at that place,” Tom says.
Sugar house, built 2008
Throughout college Tom made a bunch of little blanket and sea chests – a lot of machine dovetails, he says. After graduating in 2007, he sharpened tools at the Student Woodshop a few hours a week, giving him full access to the shop. Then, he started getting commissions. First was the sugaring house for the organic farm. Then Jay hired him to help build a small wing onto his house. And a local guy asked him to build a fly-tying desk.
“I just bit off way more than I could chew,” Tom says. “I made this really elaborate crazy-ass thing. The whole base was basically timber framed with all these big wedged through-tenons. And then the top was all hand-cut dovetails on this stepped, Tansu-looking series of little cabinets, all hand-cut dovetail drawers, and I think I asked for what at the time felt like an impossible price and then of course I ended up making about $3 an hour.”
Patmos, Greece, 2008.
During his senior year, Tom learned about a grant from Dartmouth’s art department: An alum had given money so that students could go to Europe and be inspired by architecture. That sounded pretty good to Tom so he applied and got the grant. After graduation he stuck around Hanover for about 10 months then bummed around Europe for three months, stretching the grant as long as he could.
Archival Clothing
Once back from Europe, Tom returned home to Eugene, where he lived for a few years part-time. He took occasional jobs at Dartmouth and traveled, and when in Eugene he worked as a prep cook in a French restaurant, later moving to the restaurant’s coffee shop where he slung espresso for a while. Around this time he reconnected with an old friend, Lesli Larson.
“She was a very influential person,” Tom says. “She loves old clothing, fishing and outdoor clothes, and she had this great blog called Archival Clothing. And we are just really good buds. We’d go on long-distance bike rides and chitchat about all the old clothing and ephemera that she had.”
Eventually, Tom and Lesli decided to make some things inspired by Lesli’s collection and sell it on Lesli’s blog. They found a sewing contractor in the Yellow Pages – T & J Custom Sewing & Design. The owners, Julie and Terry Shuck, turned out to be “amazing folks,” Tom says, and coached them through the conception-to-reality process.
Tom with Terry Shuck, 2010.
First up was a bag. The Shucks asked for a drawing and material, and explained how the pricing would work. Using what he learned about technical drawing in his architecture studios, Tom drew up some pencil fashion plates and sewed some crude prototypes. With that, the Shucks made 20 bags, and Tom and Lesli put them up on Lesli’s blog. They immediately got snapped up.
“We thought, That’s really fun,” Tom says. “And then we just kept doing that. We did a bigger run of bags and a bigger run of bigger bags and we made backpacks and before you knew it we had a third business partner, one of Lesli’s college friends. And we had a full-on company on our hands called Archival Clothing.”
Tom began to look more closely at product design as a career. He applied and was accepted into the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, to earn a master’s of industrial design degree. His thesis was on the physical infrastructure of home cooking but his real education, he says, had more to do with the success of Archival Clothing.
Prototyping at Pratt, 2014.
“It was really good timing,” Tom says. “I moved in summer 2010, the peak fever of the men’s heritage trend. Everyone wanted Filson stuff and Barbour stuff and wax cotton this and heavy wool that and that has always been Lesli’s thing.”
Living in Brooklyn, Tom was able to go to New York Fashion Week events and meet with stylists. Archival Clothing did a co-op with Barneys New York. The company was mentioned in The New York Times. Tom met Archival Clothing’s Japanese, Scandinavian and other European distributors. He went to shows in Berlin.
At a New York City trade show, 2013.
“It was a really incredible education and I think I might have learned more doing the Archival Clothing stuff than in grad school just because it was so applied and so immediate,” Tom says. “It was just a phenomenal, and sometimes difficult, education in product design, production and sales.”
Tom says if he had his wits about him he would have been a little more consistent, studying domestic manufacturing of soft goods, for example, versus industrial design.
“One of my many foibles is over-enthusiasm that spreads me a little thin,” he says.
From Office to Classroom
Tom and Lesli are still best friends, but after some disagreements with their third business partner, Tom left Archival Clothing. In 2014 he got a job as design director at Best Made Co., where he was immediately thrown into the deep end, being tasked with designing everything from men’s shirting, outerwear and bottoms to steel storage solutions.
“The founder might have an idea for something and then with relatively limited marching orders I was responsible for making it happen,” he says.
He also learned some valuable lessons.
“I definitely had my share of fails where I just overpromised what I thought could happen and I had to learn a lot about being realistic in industry production and maybe not trusting everything that everyone says all the time,” he says. “I’m a very trusting person by nature and that definitely bit me in the ass a couple of times. But it was a great education, some super nice folks and I learned so much.”
About a year in, Tom was feeling burnt out. He was spending 50 to 60 hours a week in the office, in front of a computer. He missed making. So in 2015 he quit and teamed up with a friend, Anthony Zollo, to build custom furniture in New York, France and Sweden. Then, after six years in New York, he moved back to Oregon.
“I was ready to be somewhere with some trees,” he says. “Somewhere I could have a car and get out to the sticks a little bit better.”
Duck hunting, 2012.
Motorcycling, 2017.
Elk hunting, 2021.
Tom was building fences and decks while contemplating his next move when an Archival Clothing contact who worked at UO reached out and said that one of their product design adjuncts had just bailed. They wondered if Tom would be interested in teaching a studio in the upcoming term.
“One thing led to another and in no time flat I was teaching full time,” Tom says. “It was just an immediate fit. It just felt right.”
Teaching Studios, Building, Research & More
Timber framing, 2014.
Cedar Pavilion, Portland, Oregon, 2018.
Teaching wasn’t entirely new to Tom, who had taught a number of timber frameing workshops in upstate New York, Oregon and California. After teaching just one studio at UO, he remembered how much he loved it.
“The students were so inspiring and awesome and the conversations were exciting and challenging – it was just an immediate good feeling.”
And while he always has side projects, Tom has been a career instructor ever since. In some of his classes in UO’s Product Design department, Tom introduced students to woodshop tools, teaching them how to use jointers, planers and table saws, and how to think critically about the tools and materials so they can design accordingly. The goal of these classes is not to crank out expert woodworkers but to teach process and materials, resulting in future designers who are more comfortable navigating different aspects of their career. Tom also taught students how to use industrial sewing machines, how fabric works and how to design bags and garments. Students would sew pouches, cases and totes, learning how to work though different seam constructions and how different materials function in different applications. In advanced studios, students tackled a single subject for the entire 10-week term.
“Last term I taught an advanced studio and I had students design headlamps,” he says. “And it was a great one because there are so many tiny details to attend to.”
The studio starts broad, with concept design and Tom asking questions: Why make this? There’s a lot of stuff in the landfills, do we really need this? Where does this fit in? He taught the students how to think critically about intuitive functioning, how to easily communicate multiple settings and how to make special considerations for niche users, such as runners. Students explored their concepts via sketches, models and technical drawings that become more refined with time.
Because of Tom’s professional background in soft goods, he frequently taught garment and bag design studios. Frustrated with the plastic Janome sewing machines in UO’s sewing studio, Tom helped build out a more legit lab with industrial machines.
This year a tenure-track position at UO’s satellite campus in Portland opened up, and Tom applied and was hired. The campus is home to fourth-year undergrads as well as two-year master’s students studying sports product design. Tom’s focus will be on soft goods, such as garments, shoes and bags.
“I’m really excited about it,” he says. “It’s going to be a big shift. I’ve been dating my partner, Karen, for two years now and we’ve been long distance. She lives in Portland. So I’m very excited to be finally moving in with her. And I’ve got a ton of friends in Portland because I’ve spent a lot of time up there. I’m very comfortable in the city so I know what I’m getting into. It doesn’t feel as scary as a move might be otherwise.”
When applying, Tom put a lot of thought into his proposal for his research project and how it might relate to the UO’s institutional hiring plan, which was focused on health and human performance, as well as environmental responsibility.
“I was applying to this program in sports product design but I wanted to come at my research at a really genuine angle,” Tom says. “I couldn’t say I wanted to design football cleats because that’s not my thing, it’s not my world. I would love to work with a student who is designing football cleats and I think I could do that very well, but myself?”
A love of outdoors has been the straight stitch in Tom’s life, something everything else has stemmed from, sometimes in surprising ways. Tom rooted his research proposal in ultra lightweight backcountry travel design concepts that could translate to other situations, such as wildland firefighting.
“That’s such a high-risk, high-demand, super-necessary job and those firefighters carry so much stuff,” he says. “Even if we could reduce that pack weight by just 10 to 15 percent, that would make a huge difference toward their health and human performance. But it’s all pretty new. I’m starting in the fall and we’ll see how the research goes.”
Designing for Lost Art Press
Tom had been following Christopher Schwarz and Megan Fitzpatrick’s work from afar as an enthusiastic woodworking for quite some time. While working at Best Made Co., Tom cold emailed Lost Art Press and said they were interested in selling Lost Art Press books online and in Best Made Co. stores, perhaps reaching a slightly different audience. The books sold well, particularly Christian Becksvoort’s “With the Grain.”
In 2015, while driving across country in his move from New York City to Oregon, Tom stopped in Indiana and took a class with Chris at Marc Adams School of Woodworking. That was their first time meeting in person. They got along well.
“We both like to bullshit and drink beer,” Tom says.
Tom noticed that Chris was wearing this great French chore coat. He told Chris to hit him up if he ever wanted to make chore coats.
“And that was it,” Tom says. “I’m not good at selling, being pushy with my services. I think that’s all I said. And maybe a year later he hit me up and was like, ‘Hey, let’s make a chore coat.’”
Together they produced a limited run of chore coats at a factory in Oregon. It’s still the favorite item Tom has designed for Lost Art Press.
Measuring a chore coat, 2018.
“They were so nice,” Tom says. “That was the first round where we used this really, really fancy and horrifically expensive Japanese reverse sateen moleskin, which is this really lovely fabric. And the factory did the run and then they changed the pricing on us. Producing clothing is always very challenging. But the sales were great and we produced well over a thousand coats for Lost Art Press.”
These days he and Chris have focused more on workshop accessories, in part because workshop accessories don’t come in different sizes.
“I think it was a surprise for the Lost Art Press folks to see that 5 to 6 percent of the clothes just come right back,” Tom says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, guys. Sizes. Busts and arms and shoulders. It ain’t like a book.’”
Sew Valley in Cincinnati makes the plane and pencil pockets. Tom worked with Megan and Chris to not only make sure each pouch would function properly but that it could also be produced within Sew Valley’s capabilities.
“That’s such a big part of designing, just understanding what machines your suppliers have and therefore what kind of operations they can do with those machines,” Tom says.
Tom also enjoys designing bandanas for Lost Art Press.
“I love doing the hankies just because it’s a different prompt every time,” he says. “Chris and I will generally chat a little bit on the phone and then I get to doodle around and it’s just a fun way to get lost in some illustration and do something that just feels a little free. And the vendor we work with does a beautiful job. One Feather Press makes really nice work, really great printing and high-quality material. They just do a really nice job.”
Tom says the profit sharing Lost Art Press does with its authors and designers is unheard of.
“It’s so easy to work with Chris and Megan because they trust me and that is rare as a freelance designer, to be trusted,” he says. “And they are always down to try something and if it doesn’t work they’re like, ‘Cool. We tried it.’ No one is ever upset when we don’t achieve maximum profitability on something. It’s just a really special organization to work with. Chris walks his values in a way that I’ve almost never seen before. And don’t tell him I said that because he can’t take a compliment. It’s insane. It’s remarkable.”
A Shift
Tom is spending this summer getting his house in Eugene ready to rent and going on a couple of backcountry motorcycling trips in Oregon.
Motorcycling, 2024.
“There’s just so much public land, mountains and desert and forest here in Oregon that it’s just a great way to get around and see some cool country,” he says.
He also has a couple backpacking trips planned, and a trip to Ireland with his family to celebrate his mom’s birthday, who is from an Irish family but has never been. Karen, his partner, is really into fishing, so there will be a lot of that as well. And then Tom will move to Portland. Work starts in August, as he helps facilitate a campus move.
“It’s going to be a big year of change and I think it’s going to be really positive,” Tom says.
“The story of my life is a whole series of failures in lots of ways,” says David Savage, an artist, designer, maker and founder of Rowden Atelier, a furniture design school and workshop in North Devon, England. “You don’t look at how you fall over, but it’s kind of how you get up again, the whole process.”
And David did get up, again and again. Some may call that a solid work ethic, perseverance, moxie. Or, when a young family is in the picture, survival. Perhaps, though, the getting up again is simply the root of being a maker.
David says it took a visit from Christopher Schwarz in 2015 to define the culture of Rowden. It was then that Chris noted a strong line of identity coming from the Arts and Crafts Movement to Rowden students.
That, says David, is what Rowden is. “It’s not the celebration of the flowery wallpaper of Arts and Crafts, but the celebration of who a craftsperson is — the treatment of a maker not just as a pair of hands to manufacture stuff but as a genuine contributing human being making something that’s worth having. The celebration of that is what we do here at Rowden.”
Every time David faced a challenge or failed in some way, the act of starting over came from an acknowledgement of worth. Sometimes it took an outsider. Sometimes the realization came from within. But it was the title of maker, with all its history and meaning, and the innate desire to make something worth having, that pushed David to get up and create, not just a piece of furniture, but a life, and one he deemed worth living.
Art in the Place of Speech
Born David Binnington in 1949, David grew up on the Yorkshire coast in post-war Bridlington. Both his parents were entrepreneurial and relatively prosperous. His mother, a hairdresser, owned several shops in town. And his father, an importer and manufacturer of soft drinks, owned a small factory.
“My childhood and youth were afflicted by a stammer,” David says. “Have you seen that movie, ‘The King’s Speech?’ Then you appreciate a little bit of what it’s like to have a stammer. Being inside that person with a stammer is awful in that you know where the problem lies, you know that words beginning with ‘b’ are a nightmare because you’re blocked with those. You can see those words coming up in the sentence ahead of you so the tension gets even worse. I describe it as being like trying to talk and eat a very droob-ly bacon sandwich at the same time. It’s just awful.”
David grew up quietly, rarely speaking but always listening — a skill that has served him well. “One of the great arts of being a designer is to be a very good listener so you hear what the client is actually telling you,” he says. “Most of us don’t hear. We only perceive a certain proportion of anything. I was a good listener because I didn’t say anything.”
With conversing being nearly impossible, David was drawn to art, which required little to no speech. His dedication and strong portfolio earned him a spot at The Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford in 1968.
“It was unlike a lot of the current art schools in that it was very requiring of you to gain skill in drawing, especially,” David says. “Mid-Atlantic expressionism was the happening thing. So you have studios filled with dry ice and naked bodies. This is the liberated 60’s and everybody is having a gas. They’re all on acid and weed and it’s a blast. But I didn’t go that way. I wanted to learn. Something told me I needed to learn how to do this. I needed to have a skill in order to be expressive. What was being thrown out at that time was the very idea that you needed a skill to be expressive, that skill was an inhibition to expression. I think that’s nonsense.”
The school, originally called the Ruskin School of Drawing, was founded by John Ruskin in what is now the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. (In 1975 the school moved to its current location on High Street.)
“So I went to this very fussy old art school, which was in a brilliant place,” David says. “It was in a few rooms in this fabulous museum. … It has all kinds of things from Egyptian sarcophagi to Samurai armor to Greek sculpture. Fantastic Greek sculpture. So if you’re me and 19 from Yorkshire, this is a mind-blowing experience.”
Much of what David learned wasn’t necessarily taught, but rather absorbed through the skin. “If you want to go out for a cigarette you have to walk from the studios through the Greek sculpture collection to sit right outside the door so it just becomes a part of your day, looking at genuine Greek sculpture from 400 BC carvings.”
David describes the school’s teaching methodologies as old-fashioned: You couldn’t draw the life model until you spent the better part of three months drawing Greek casts. “You were asked to use your eyes,” he says. “You used drawing as a means of looking very hard, because that’s really what drawing is: It’s looking very hard and exercising your eyes and your hands and actually coordinating them.”
Learning how to draw this way has allowed David to see better and that, he says, is the key to becoming a good maker.
“The thing I teach my students now is if you want to be a really good maker you really need good eyes and you need a hand that draws well enough. You don’t have to draw like an artist. You just have to draw well enough.” This, his says, provides you with another tool. “Drawing enables you to work out the inside of that joint and how those two parts come together. You can sketch it out, you can draw it, you can think it out, you can X-ray the joint in your head and sketch it out immediately. It’s a tool.”
This tool allows makers to create their own visual vocabulary, outside of images found online. And this, David says, he learned way back in the 1960s.
A drawing by David Savage.
“When you sit down and you draw something, some of it you like the shape of it,” David says. “It may be a seashell or a bit of a twig or maybe the shape of a woman’s leg. You sit down and you draw it and you put down five or six well-observed honest lines. You don’t need to draw it anymore. That image goes into the back of your head, into your visual vocabulary. It becomes part of your visual vocabulary and you build up that visual vocabulary in your lifetime. And so you sit down 30 years later to draw a table leg and what pops off on the end of your pencil in your complete unconsciousness is something observed maybe 30 years ago. This is part of your visual vocabulary, it’s the stuff you internalized. This is very different from Pinterest or Instagram, which is external, not internal. So I learned to draw, which is a very powerful thing.”
After earning his undergraduate degree David says he had another amazing stroke of fortune: He won a postgraduate place at the Royal Academy Schools in London. Centered smack-dab in the middle of the art world on Cork Street and Bond Street, among all the galleries, was David, “this guy from Yorkshire who stammered a lot,” he says. He was given a grant, a studio and the pick of teachers for three years. “Crikey,” he says. “It was a wonderful experience.”
After graduating from the Royal Academy of Schools in 1974, David teamed up with a fellow student, Desmond Rochefort, and together they created The Public Arts Workshop. It was after living in, what David calls, “the guts of the art world,” he became more interested in something that didn’t exist in Britain at the time — public art. “I didn’t want to get involved with the galleries or selling the commodities of paintings,” he says. “But I wanted to be a painter.”
“In 1939, an organization called the British Blackshirts tried to march through a very largely Jewish area in East London,” David says. “They tried to have this march down Cable Street, and there was a huge riot. They were stopped from marching — the local uprising actually prevented them from doing that march and it became very famous. It was called The Battle of Cable Street. And it was one of those events that prevented the growth of fascism in Britain in the 1930s.”
Beginning in 1977, David raised money and worked on designs for a 70-foot-high mural depicting the battle on an old wall of what used to be Stepney town hall on Cable Street. He had hoped to have two assistants, but there was never enough money for that. So for three years David ran up and down the scaffolding that covered the wall, drawing and painting.
And then, a right-wing organization vandalized it.
“I crashed and burned,” David says. “I was left damaged and with no confidence and thinking, I don’t want to be a mural painter anymore. If I go back to Oxford on a scaffold, it’s going to kill me. So I pulled out. And I’m not greatly proud of that, but I knew that I had to, to stay alive.”
The project was picked up by someone else and completed, as David says he knew it would be. But then he wondered, What next?
The Origins of a Furniture Maker, in the Style of Gimson
David liked being physical. He didn’t mind running up and down that scaffolding — he knew it was good for him. He wanted to use his brain. He wanted to use his hands. “I wanted to use all of me and I was fed up of not making a living out of this.”
In the meantime, he made some furniture. “When I say ‘furniture,’ this is just four bits of wood held up with screws,” he says. He made something for the garden, using pine, screws and glue. This led to a new train of thought: “Maybe I could make things,” he says. “Maybe I could use my hands and my knowledge. I wanted something to use my aesthetic sense and what became particularly inspiring for me was the Arts and Crafts Movement.”
Particularly, Ernest Gimson — trained as an architect he set up a workshop in the Cotswolds countryside where he made what was at the time (he died in 1919) modern English furniture. “I thought that was a role model that I could follow,” David says.
David also looked to Edward Barnsley, another key figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, along with The Edward Barnsley Workshop. And then came Alan Peters, author of “Cabinetmaking: The Professional Approach” and former apprentice of Barnsley. David visited Alan and enrolled in a short, two-week course with him.
“He was instrumental in turning me into a functioning furniture maker,” David says. “It was his example that I very much took to heart. I wanted a workshop like Alan’s. And I wanted to be a craftsman.”
There were other influences. David was inspired by James Krenov’s aesthetic. And John Makepeace’s clear idea on how to run a business. “His example was you needed three legs to stand on and I thought that was interesting,” David says. The legs? Technique, design and business. “And I thought, Hey, that makes sense.”
At this point David was still living in London, living on social security. “They didn’t think very much of my retraining myself but they had a kind of tolerance of it for a little while,” he says. That tolerance, along with the bit of money people began giving him to make pieces, allowed David to learn.
“I read a lot of books,” he says. “I read Charles Hayward, anything by Hayward I could get a hold of. I read back copies of The Woodworker magazine. I was very good at using the library. My local librarian was my best friend and she would get me books from all over the country.”
Around this time David also met someone, a friend of his first wife. “He was a wonderful craftsman and he didn’t want to teach me anything,” David says. “So I said, ‘I’ll come work for you. You don’t have to pay me anything.’ And he thought that was very unusual. So I’d go and spend time in his workshop when I could and he had a very Japanese way of teaching in that he would completely ignore me. And then when he saw me in a desperate trouble he’d throw a scraper blade at me and say, ‘No! No. You do it this way’ and walk away again. But his example was very powerful.”
Upstairs in David’s house was a small studio, which David turned into his workshop. He struck deals. He told family and friends that if they bought materials and paid him enough to buy a new tool, such as a router, he’d make them a piece of furniture. “It was a step,” David says.
His client list, and reputation, grew.
Then, the IRA bombed London. David’s wife at the time had just finished training to become a teacher and was looking for a job. So they looked outside of London and ended up in Bideford, a port town in north Devon.
“Everybody that spoke to us said you’re crazy moving out of London,” David says. “You’re crazy moving away from anybody who might want to buy anything you want to make. And that was true. But it also made some kind of sense. We actually needed to get out of the bloody city and now I know why. It was actually the requirement to be in the countryside.”
(We’re skipping ahead now, just for a moment.) Rowden overlooks a meadow, a lake and trees. It’s not far from the beach, shells and water. David needed to be rooted in the countryside, in the same way Ernest Gimson did. It wasn’t until years later that David made this connection of craft and place — of what’s required, for some, to be a maker.
A Change in Name, Success and Failure
In Bideford, David says a very curious thing happened. His first wife’s surname was Savage. Although not married at the time, they had lived together nearly 20 years and in Devon, while looking for a property to buy, David would tell agents his last name was Savage. “I couldn’t say my own name, because it began with a ‘B.’ Binnington is still a word I would rather not say if I could.”
But Savage.
That was a name he could say with confidence. For the first time in his life, David could finally introduce himself. “And it was a new town so no one knew us,” he says. “And curiously, it kind of unlocked things. If you can say who you are, if you can introduce yourself, then it kind of became slightly easier. So that rather changed things.”
David legally changed his name to David Binnington Savage. And with his new name, his stammer began to lessen.
In 1983 David established David Savage Furniture Makers in Bideford. He found a big building that needed a lot of work, and he rented it. He also began writing for magazines. He would teach himself how to sharpen a scraper or use a hand plane and then, he’d write about it. Between 1983 and 1990 he wrote a monthly column in The Woodworker magazine called “The Craft of Cabinet Making.”
He made furniture for clients in London and assembled kitchen furniture for a builder on a monthly basis. Then a local furniture maker who was teaching students wanted to stop teaching. He asked David if he would take on two students who still needed to finish out their course. David said, “No.”
“And then I went back and started assembling these kitchen cabinets and I thought, Maybe it would be easier than actually doing this.” So he agreed to take on the students, who had only made a bench and an oilstone box in their first six months. “They came and they started to pay me money,” David says. And he taught them things he, himself, had only just learned how to do.
This, too, David realized, tied back to the Arts and Crafts Movement. Over the next few years he established a system where he allowed students, but always had more craftsmen than students in the workshop. This resulted in him being able to choose his best students as employees. “None of this was my great plan,” he says. “It just evolved that way.”
By now David was making pieces every day, and every single piece coming out of his shop was his design, his imagery.
One of his early students and a former PR executive, Malcolm Vaughan, taught David the art of writing a press release and the importance of nice photographs. “It was almost that not a month wouldn’t go by when a piece made by David Savage wasn’t in the magazines,” he says. “One of them went viral and boom! We were making Camelot chairs for everybody and everyone.”
Camelot dining chair by David Savage
The first Camelot chair was for now longtime clients Mary and Derek Parks.
David had made a large walnut reception desk for a corporate client in London. “A few weeks later I got a phone call saying they’ve sold the building [what was then the new Covent Garden site] and I said, ‘Horray!’ But they didn’t want one of my desks.” The new owners wanted a different desk, and David says he was heartbroken. And then mad, when he learned that the desk had gone to the managing director’s country house in Dorset.
“I tried ringing up this woman and I was not happy that it had all gone wrong,” David says. He finally got a hold of the managing director’s wife, Mary Parks. She loved the desk and wanted David to build more furniture.
David was bitter. But a few days later he drove to the Parks’ residence in Chelsey. “Money was pouring out of the whole place, you could see it,” he says. David met Mary and the two discussed design options for a dining room table and chairs. “And then her husband, Derek, walks in and he’s three sheets to the wind, totally pissed,” David says. Derek invites David to his house in Dorset. “And I was thinking, Christ. These people are going to be my clients and I hate it.”
Two weeks later David met Derek at his 15th-century Dorset manner house. “Derek was then a totally different person,” David says. “He was in the process of restoring [the house] in the most exquisitely sensitive way.” But more inspiring to David was this: “He took me around and he introduced me to all his gardeners and his chauffeur and the guy who polished his shoes, and he’s speaking to them, telling me about their children and about who they are and what they were doing. And he blew me away because I got the sense that this guy was operating on a totally different plane from me. He was an extremely high-functioning man. He was able to deal with people in a way that I couldn’t conceive of dealing and I was blown away by that.”
Derek and Mary spoke to David about their wants and needs, and David listened. And that, David says, was the first time he thought, “I can actually do this.”
“If I can find people that want to have really good furniture, I can do this,” he says. “I can do this and I can make a profit out of it.”
David hired a photographer to take a picture of one of the Parks’ dining room chairs and it struck a chord: “That photograph of that chair was in every color supplement of every glossy magazine for the next two years,” he says.
David had made it.
“It’s those kind of steps which are invisible, in that you don’t know you’re going to do that but then you do,” he says. David didn’t intend to build a furniture business, but he did. In 1984 David became a member of the Devon Guild of Craftsmen followed by the Fellowship of the Society of Designer Craftsmen in 1992.
Love Chairs Version 2
Honduras Rosewood Chaise Lounge/ Day Bed
Perseus
The Psychiatrist’s Designer Chair and Desk
He was happy. “Happy as a clam!” he says. “Totally involved. Totally engaged. I didn’t know where we were going but I was making furniture and getting more confidence in dealing with people.”
Then, bankruptcy.
“Things are flying along really well,” David says. “I made a great mistake in buying another workshop.” At the time David and his employees were in a 2,000-square-foot workshop and they were simply out of space. Fifty yards down the road was a 3,000-square-foot workshop — well insulated with three-phase electric. For years it was for sale but David could never afford it. Eventually the price came down to a point where he could no longer resist. He bought it.
“And that was a disaster in that you no longer have one workshop, you have two,” he says. Employees argued over who got to work in the new shop. “It was not a cohesive unit in that everybody could sit around the fire at lunchtime and they could have a conversation. They could have two conversations and that was a nightmare. That was a big mistake.”
Around this time David was coming out of the recession. He had laid off staff, but things seemed OK. Until, “I got in another classic mistake,” David says. “I got a big customer. A big customer that wanted a lot of furniture, really liked my work, his wife really liked my work.”
The customer was a city trader. He had just come from the United States and bought a house in London. “I did a load of drawings and made the mistake of saying, ‘Yes, we can do all of that,’ which mean that I pretty much had one customer for a period.”
The work, which was spread over four or five benches, was intended to be done in three stages. David and his employees completed the first stage and they were paid. “It was the second stage that got me,” David says. “I went up there and he wasn’t there. The house was closed up and he had gone back to America. I couldn’t get a hold of him in any way. I couldn’t get a hold of him through his company. They wouldn’t let me speak with him. So I was left with a pile of furniture I couldn’t sell. No money coming in and bills to pay. My only option was to go bankrupt, which I did, which is a bit of a life-changing experience.”
David closed the Bideford workshop. “I was thinking, What the hell am I going to do now? I’ve got a young family, a baby of 18 months, and what am I going to do now?”
He says the experience was akin to stepping off the conveyor belt of life. “When you’re on the conveyor belt of life you’re moving and this time you can take a step off it and you can observe the conveyor belt and see what is happening.”
Sometimes, though, it takes someone else to push you back on the conveyor belt. And for David, one of those people was a client, Maggie Rose.
The Value of a Craftsperson, Both as Maker and Human Being
David’s tools, benches and furniture in process were all slated to be sold at auction. Maggie called and asked if she could buy the unfinished pieces of furniture and then give them back to David for finishing.
“Then someone rings up and says, ‘I really like those chairs you made for me and I’d really like a desk,’” David says. “And I knew all these craftsmen in all these workshops so I was all set up doing drawings for clients and selling furniture and having it made in various workshops around me.”
This worked for 18 months.
“That was really quite good,” David says. “I hadn’t a workshop but we were actually functioning. We were doing the jobs of meeting clients, doing drawings, taking orders, getting furniture made, getting paid. Everybody was happy. Until my second wife, Carol, said, ‘David, you know that room you’re in in your office?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘Well, you can’t have it anymore.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Because I’m pregnant. I’m going to have a baby.’”
So then David was faced with putting his foot back on the conveyor belt, the one that required a workshop. He was tentative, but knew he had to take the plunge. He wrote an advertisement for the local paper: “furniture maker looking for barns to convert.”
“I wanted to be out in the countryside,” he says. “I wanted the green fields around me. So I found myself at Rowden.”
David met a maker, Nick Chandler, who he employed. For four or five years the two of them worked together, and David calls that time a period of great liberation. Without having many employees to support, David was able to take more risks with his designs.
Solid Ebony and Pearwood Lamp Table
“My wife encouraged me to be more free,” David says. “She was saying, ‘Go on. You can do all sorts of stuff. You’re a crazy artist. That’s what you should be doing.’ And we did all sorts of pieces that are important now, things that are central pieces.”
In the end, bankruptcy, David says, was “an enormous blessing.”
“Change is a wonderful thing,” he says. “It’s always energizing. It’s always a great thing to embrace. Moving out here and working with Nick was a great thing. He was a wonderful guy to spend time with.”
With time, Rowden developed into what it is today: a furniture design school that offers classes in drawing, design, woodworking and business. David is mostly retired, having delegated teaching to former students (with the exception of head craftsman Daren Milman). Fellow furniture designers and makers now on staff include Ed Wild, Jon Greenwood, Jonathan Walter and Lakshmi Bhaskaran.
Although Rowden’s focus is almost primarily on education, David will occasionally make a piece of furniture for someone he knows and cares about — currently that’s a desk and chair in pear wood.
“It’s great,” David says. “It’s a great thing now.”
David’s home in Devon.
David and his wife, Carol, live in the oldest continually inhabited house in the county. It’s since been split into 13 units, and they live around the back “in a courtyard and I think cows probably lived where lived or it was a dung heap,” he says, adding that it’s great fun.
He has two children, a daughter who recently earned a degree in psychology and a son who is in his second year of university. For now, they’re not interested in making.
“When I was quite young it was kind of expected of me that I might follow my father’s direction and I didn’t want to do that,” David says. “So I’ve never in any way laid this on them. I want them to do what they want t to do. So it will be here, hopefully for them when they need it, or hopefully it will provide them income after I’m long gone. But we’ll see.”
And so Rowden exists, not as a factory for employment or as a means to an end, but in celebration of craftsmanship and making things, and a testament to the life David lives.
“I feel extremely fortunate that I’ve lived a varied and challenging life,” he says. “It’s been great. I’ve been having a great time. Yeah, very fortunate indeed. Very fortunate.”
First published in 1987, “The Workbench Book” remains the most complete book on the most important tool in the woodworker’s shop.
“The Workbench Book” is a richly illustrated guided tour of the world’s best workbenches — from a traditional Shaker bench to the mass-produced Workmate. Author and workbench builder Scott Landis visited dozens of craftsmen, observing them at work and listening to what they had to say about their benches. The result is an intriguing and illuminating account of each bench’s strengths and weaknesses, within the context of a vibrant woodworking tradition.
This fully illustrated guide features more than 275 photos of beautifully crafted workbenches as well as complete plans for four benches. “The Workbench Book” explores benches from around the world, from every historical era and for all of the common (and esoteric) woodworking specialties.
This 248-page hardbound edition from Lost Art Press ensures “The Workbench Book” will be available to future generations of woodworkers. Produced and printed in the United States, this classic text is printed on FSC-certified recycled paper and features a durable sewn binding designed to last generations. The 1987 text remains the same in this edition and includes a foreword by Christopher Schwarz.
I met Frank Klausz before I met his workbench. He was seated next to me in the front row during a lecture given by Ian Kirby (Chapter 6). Klausz himself was scheduled to speak about wood finishing the next day. Kirby’s talk centered on his workbench, an example of which he’d brought along. Although the bench had evolved out of Kirby’s own English tradition, from Klausz’s Hungarian perspective it was hardly a cabinetmaker’s bench at all. It had no tail vise and the front vise was of the metal, quick-action persuasion. Klausz fidgeted through most of Kirby’s talk, and at the first break he sprang from his chair and led me to the bench, where he passionately ennumerated his objections.
To understand the depth of Klausz’s convictions, you need to know about his background. Thirty years ago in Hungary, at the age of 14, Frank began his woodworking career in an apprenticeship system that had remained essentially unchanged since the Middle Ages. What was unusual about it, even by European standards, was that Klausz entered into a formal, contractual apprenticeship with his own father. “I paid the highest price for my trade,” Klausz explains. “Once I apprenticed, I didn’t have a father, I had a master.” And a stern master at that. Of the half-dozen workers in his father’s cabinet shop, it was Frank who was taken to task if something wasn’t quite right. Perhaps wary of his own son’s competition, the elder Klausz withheld certain construction tips until the very end of Frank’s apprenticeship. Watching his father work, Frank asked, “How can you do that so fast?” His father replied, “After ten or fifteen years you’re gonna be a pretty good beginner yourself.”
At the end of four years, Frank became a certified journeyman cabinetmaker, on his way to becoming a master (which required one year of work in each of three different shops). Ten years later, Frank and his wife, Edith, packed their lives in three suitcases and left Hungary. Like the journeymen of old, Frank was on the road-except that his only tools were his hands and head, not chisels and saws in a toolbox strapped to his back. By 1969, the couple was living on Long Island, where Frank ran through a succession of jobs – carpentry, casework and so on – trying to find his way back to the work he’d trained to do. It was five more years before he could set up his own shop in a two-car garage in New Jersey. Finally, in 1985, Frank and Edith built the shop they’d been dreaming of.
I went to visit Frank in his Pluckemin, New Jersey, workshop and to meet his workbench in the flesh. My first and most startling impression was of the workshop itself. I had primed myself for an old-world sweatshop, with young apprentices chained to their benches. In Hungary, Frank’s father had two small workrooms-one for the benches and another (unheated, even in winter) for the machinery. When lumber had to be cut from a 20-ft. log, the workers fed it through an open window at one end of the machine shop, across the bandsaw and out again through the opposite window over rollers placed at the sill.
Klausz’s own shop couldn’t be more of the ‘new world.’ The single-story, cinder-block building sprawls a full 100 ft. in length. Painted off-white inside, it is bright and airy, with windows on all sides and large skylights. If Frank had mill a mast for the Constitution, I doubt that he’d even have to open a window.
Frank takes me on a quick tour of the shop to show me their work. While one of his four employees might be building a set of computer cabinets of walnut-faced plywood, another could be restoring an 18th-century English grandfather clock or stripping an office desk. At the far end of the building, we pause for a moment while Frank sprays the handrails for a casket he has built for an elderly client, whose house he has almost entirely restored. In the old country, Klausz explains, there was a cradle-to-grave relationship between the craftsman and his client. As his last commission for the deceased, the cabinetmaker would appear at the funeral, in his Sunday best, to drive the nails into the lid of the box. Clearly, a workbench in this shop needs to be versatile.
According to another old-world tradition, Frank explains, workbenches were passed on from one generation to another. The woodworker was the custodian, not the owner, of his bench – just as he was the custodian of the knowledge of his trade. The workbench took on a life of its own; it became somehow larger than the sum of the men who had planed upon it.
For Frank that chain had been broken. He had brought no workbench with him from Europe, and had to use commercially made benches for years, never having the time to make his own. But, when he found that there weren’t enough benches to go around in the new shop, he decided to build one. “The reason I made one is that you can’t buy one good enough,” he told me. It seemed to Frank that commercially made workbenches were growing smaller and lighter, even as they got more expensive. I also suspect it was Frank’s way of saying he’d come home.
Klausz, with a glued-up tail vise joined with hand-cut dovetails.
There wasn’t any guesswork or design involved when Frank built his bench. He didn’t reinvent the wheel. “It’s a copy,” he says. He had measured two benches at his father’s shop, a third in Vienna and another in Belgium. They were all within an inch of each other. “Apart from little touches like the stops and oil dish, the only difference I found was that some craftsmen treat their benches with loving care and some don’t …. Except for the metal vise screws, my bench is the same as my grandfather’s…. [The design] is so well worked out – if it hadn’t been good, Grandpa would have done something about it.”
When a customer enters Frank’s shop, he encounters the workbench, which also functions as a desk and business counter. Even if the visitor doesn’t comment on the bench, it’s a fair bet he’s noticed it. If Klausz could fit his workbench in his wallet, he would hand it out like a business card – it is his best foot and he puts it forward.
Klausz begins to explain his workbench by underlining a point too often overlooked-location. As the most important tool in the shop, the bench’s placement with respect to work flow (of materials, to and from machines, for finishing and so on) is crucial. Lighting is also important, and ideally should cast no shadows on the benchtop. Hand tools should be readily accessible. Frank’s are kept in a wall-mounted cabinet, only 5 ft. from the shoulder vise of the bench.
Of equal importance is the auxiliary set-up table near the bench, shown below. This low table is the right size (40 in. by 60 in. by 27 in. high) for all kinds of gluing, assembly or finishing. Anything that’s too messy or large for the workbench can be done on the table, leaving the benchtop free for trimming joints and other last-minute tasks. Rather than cluttering the main bench with drawers, Klausz built open shelves and storage bins in the base of the set-up table to hold hardware, small power tools and accessories.
This 27-in.-high set-up table is a versatile companion to Klausz’s bench. It helps organize hardware and portable power tools, and provides a nearby, convenient surface for gluing and finishing. Hardware is stored in 12 plastic bins, and three drawers pull out from beneath the 40-in. by 60-in. particleboard and plywood top.
In my travels I’d seen several variations on Klausz’s workbench, variously referred to as Scandinavian, Danish, Swedish and European. These workbenches all have as a common denominator the ‘dog-leg’ shoulder vise. I thought I had heard most of the arguments for and against this vise; as far as I had been able to discover, the only craftsmen who liked it were those who had trained on it, usually in strict apprenticeships.
I posed the same objections I’d heard to Klausz: The vise isn’t strong enough to withstand heavy clamping pressure. It’s awkward to work around the large corner. The pivoting clamping board often has to be held with one hand to keep it from binding as it’s wound in and out. You can’t clamp a board anywhere on the bench for crosscutting.
Frank’s initial response was a reflex: “If you’re a cabinetmaker, if you do casegoods, frames, if you plane, saw or sand wood, if you do dovetails … I can’t see anything quicker or better.” Later, he explained that the floating clamping board grips well on tapered stock, and one end of a long board (or a door) can be clamped firmly behind the screw while the other end is supported by the portable bench slave, shown at right. But it was only when I watched him dovetail a drawer that I truly began to appreciate the shoulder vise.
Through dovetails are one of the traditional cabinetmaker’s preferred joints, and when Frank cuts a dovetailed drawer he puts the bench through its paces. “Good craftsmen,” Frank says, “not only do things well, but do them with speed…. If you want to make a good joint, you can do it just about as fast by hand as with a machine, especially if you’re doing just one.” With the drawer parts milled to length and thickness, Frank uses a mortising gauge to scribe the thickness of the stock across the ends of the boards. Then he slaps the first piece-the drawer front or back – upright in the shoulder vise.
The quick-action feature of a Record vise is nice, Frank admits, but he rarely has to move the screw on his vise more than a single turn. Because there are no guide rods or screws running below the vise, a long board such as a drawer front can be clamped through the opening, not just gripped in the top few inches of the jaw or along one edge. The work won’t twist and there’s no need to block the other edge of the vise to keep the jaws parallel. (The clamping board pivots on the end of the screw to accept tapered work, and it should move freely without needing to be guided by hand.)
Klausz uses a bench slave (top) to support on end of a long board clamped in the shoulder vise. When he cuts dovetails (bottom) he clamps the board vertically in the shoulder vise, directly behind the screw. There are no guide rods to interfere with the work. He aligns his arm and body with the direction of the cut and, standing above it, he can keep an eye on both sides of the line.
At 33 in. high, Frank’s bench is lower than I’m used to, but the shoulder vise helps to compensate by allowing you to clamp work securely at many different heights. If it’s too high, it vibrates; if it’s too low, it’s uncomfortable. Frank holds the top edge of the drawer front about 4 in. or 5 in. off the bench – a comfortable sawing height – and clamps the board tight. He wheels around to grab a backsaw from the tool cabinet and begins cutting pins – without stopping to lay them out. In about as much time as it took him to rip a bageI on the bandsaw during a coffee break, he defines all the pins at one end of the board with six sawcuts. Once the pins are cut on both ends of the drawer, front and back, the action moves to the other end of the bench. Frank C-clamps the part to be chopped in front of the tail vise – never on it. The force of the mallet blows is transferred directly through the leg to the floor. Whether he’s working on one drawer or six, all the parts are stacked and staggered, one on top of another, so that he has ready access to all the joints. At one point, Frank demonstrates how, during a full day of this work, he would drop to his knees to rest his back (there’s a rubber mat in front of the bench to provide a cushion). This places the work at his chest, instead of at his hip, and gives him a closer view as well.
To chop the pins, Klausz stacks the drawer sides and clamps them to the bench in front of the the vise.
Next, with the parts laid out on the benchtop, he marks the tails from the pins. Then he’s back at the shoulder vise to cut them out. During these operations, the tool tray holds the marking gauge, hacksaw, pencil, square, chisel and mallet-out of harm’s way but easily retrieved. The tray isn’t a repository for yesterday’s project, and Frank keeps it swept clean. Cutting dovetails by eye requires having your wits about you, or it won’t be long before you’re cutting pins on one end of a board and tails on the other. A clean, orderly benchtop is essential.
With the vise snugged tight, Klausz sets the benchdogs with a few smart laps on the end of the board and the head of the dog. A piece of scrap protects the board from the face of the metal dog.
Before the drawer is assembled, Frank planes the machine marks off the inside of each piece. He moves back to the other end of the bench and gently closes the tail vise on a drawer side, using a piece of scrap between the metal dogs and the ends of the board. It doesn’t take much pressure. The benchdogs do two jobs: they grab the wood and, because they’re angled, pull it down. Their down-clamping action is important, especially on thin stock, which will chatter if suspended in midair. To make the most of this feature, Frank taps down on each end of the board in front of the dog, seating it on the bench. He prefers metal dogs to wood because of their strength; they’re more effective at pulling the work down, and he can knock the dogs up an inch or more above the benchtop without having to worry about flexing or breaking them. The dogs can also be reversed and used to pull apart a piece of furniture. For this reason, the dogholes are cut at an 88° angle – any steeper and the dogs might slide out of their slots.
Klausz reverses the dogs in their holes and opens the tail vise gradually to take a chair apart for repair.
“When I plane, I use my body weight and just push down,” Frank explains. “This gives me hours of easy planing, without pushing and shoving.” The bench has to be the right height for this. To demonstrate his formula for bench height, Frank stands next to the bench with his arms at his side and his palms turned down – the benchtop grazes his palms. He is 6 ft. tall and his bench is less than 3 ft. high. Frank planes in two motions – a long, cutting, power stroke and a feathered return as he tilts the plane slightly to lift the blade off the wood and to resume position for the next cut. The bench doesn’t move under the pressure of his strokes.
Sometimes if a piece is small, Frank glues up right on the bench, spreading a cloth to protect the top. But more often, he turns to the set-up table behind the bench. A quick swipe with a wet rag removes any errant drops.
When the glue is dry, he planes the drawer sides by gripping the frame in the front jaw of the tail vise. The other end of the drawer, which sticks out from the vise, can be supported at any height by the bench slave.
To finish the job, Frank planes the top and bottom edges of the drawer flush. He reclamps the drawer flat on the bench between dogs-using the front doghole in the tail vise when he can and keeping the vise opening small. “You want to have the workpiece on the bench as n1uch as possible, not on the vise,” he says. “It puts less stress on the vise itself. The strongest support is up front, over the legs.”
Klausz’s drawer demonstration answered many of my doubts about the shoulder vise: It doesn’t need to be immensely strong, because the screw is always centered behind the workpiece. Whatever inherent awkwardness exists in its design is at least partially offset by this convenient feature, which cannot be found on any other conventional front vise. The clamping board rarely binds in everyday use, because generally it is adjusted in small increments, and it’s the only vise I know of that clamps non-square stock as easily as square stock.
This flip-up padauk stop is all that is needed to hold most boards for crosscutting.
I had one final reservation, though. There’s no easy way to clamp a board for crosscutting anywhere on the bench. “You don’t have to,” Klausz says. All that’s necessary is a small stop, and he flips up the pivoting bench stop at the right end of the bench and pushes a board against it to demonstrate. Its location on the right end of the bench is also more convenient for a right-handed worker than crosscutting off of the left end.
If my own reservations about the bench were mainly resolved, it was clear that Frank had none at all. “If you’re a cabinetmaker, you should have a bench like this,” he said.
The following is excerpted from “Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown,” by Christopher Williams. It’s the first biography of one of the most influential chairmakers and writers of the 20th century: Welshman John Brown.
The book’s title of “Good Work” was an expression John Brown used to describe a noble act or thing. He once mused he wanted to create a “Good Work” seal that could be applied to truly beautiful and handmade goods – like the “Good Housekeeping” seal of approval.
“Good Work” is the kind of woodworking book we live for at Lost Art Press. It’s not about offering you plans, jigs or techniques per se. Its aim instead is to challenge the way you look at woodworking through the lens of one of its most important 20th century figures. And though this appears to be a book on chairmaking, it’s much more. Anyone who is interested in handwork, vernacular furniture, workshop philosophy or iconoclastic characters will enjoy “Good Work.”
Author Chris Williams spent about a decade with John Brown in Wales, building Welsh chairs and pushing this vernacular form further and further. This book recounts their work together, from the first day that Chris nervously called John Brown until the day his mentor died in 2008.
This book is about a man, a chair and a set of ideals. It’s a journey of enlightenment, inspiration and heartbreak as I experienced it. There are many facets to John Brown’s life and his life less ordinary, but my story concentrates on John Brown the chairmaker. Other important voices will be heard throughout, each will give an account of the time they spent with John Brown, or JB as he’ll often be referred as. His daughter Molly Brown has beautifully illustrated the book; each illustration tells its own story, be it a chair, landscape or Celtic cross, all relevant to what John Brown held dear. I’m indebted to Lost Art Press, which secured the rights to 19 of John Brown’s wonderful columns from Good Woodworking magazine. These essays will give you a flavour of his writing and philosophical approach to life in the years after writing his book “Welsh Stick Chairs.” But before we dive into that, here’s some brief housekeeping to fully acquaint you with the country that gave birth to both the man and chair.
Wales: The name given to us by the Anglo-Saxons. They were one of the many who tried to conquer our land. The Romans, Vikings and Normans all left their mark, yet we are still here as a proud nation. Wales is known to its indigenous people as CYMRU. Sadly the name Wales and its people, “The Welsh,” have stuck. And for the broader subject of this book, we’ll stick with this term.
Wales is a small country that along with Scotland, England and Northern Ireland make up what is known to most as Great Britain or the United Kingdom. The country lies on the western seaboard side of the UK. Its population is approximately 3.1 million people. Its topography is mostly mountainous, with a coastline of more than 2,700 km. Its coal, iron and slate industries are now shadows of their former selves. Agriculture is now one of our main industries, particularly sheep farming in the hills and dairy farming in the lowlands. Tourism also is a large part of the Welsh economy. People are drawn to its spectacular coastline, mountains and abundant castles.
Wales is a bilingual country. The Welsh language has survived despite centuries of persecution by the English and the powers in Westminster. It is now spoken by more than 560,000 people; for many it is still their first language.
John Brown in his younger days.
During Britain’s recent history, huge swathes of people emigrated to the New World. The Irish, Scots and English all colonised enormous areas of the British Empire. The Welsh mostly stayed at home, yet small numbers went to Patagonia, North America and Australasia. As a result, Wales is little known on the world stage. The Irish identity, for example, remains a huge part of life in the New World. The Scottish are known for whisky and kilts, but the Welsh… we seem indifferent to many.
If anything, we’re known for the Welsh male voice choir and rugby. This frustrates me, even more so when people see a map of Great Britain and they deem it “England.” It definitely is not! The Welsh are the original inhabitants of Britain, which is known as YNYS PRYDEIN, or “The Isle of Britain” to its indigenous people. There are myriad books on the history of Wales and its people, but this book is about one Welshman in particular and a chair.
“John Brown” was born in Wales, yet spent half of his life in England. He returned to his homeland of Wales as a middle-aged man with an English accent. Culturally different, Wales must have felt alien and different to the Wales of his childhood in the industrial valleys. After a few moves he settled into the predominantly Welsh-speaking area of Cilgwyn in rural North Pembrokeshire. His flamboyant character must have stood out in that parochial community. Twenty years would pass before I would meet him in person, but during those years in that most beautiful corner of Wales he regained his sense of Welshness. For those early years other voices will be heard in this book, for that story is theirs to tell. What I write is from my personal experience and perspective.
One of John Brown’s so-called “primitive” chairs (left) and his Cardigan chair.
John Brown once told me that he felt like an outsider because of his English accent, yet he was born in Wales and was a Welshman. He would have been deemed a “Saeson” – an Englishman in many Welsh-speaking communities. It’s an arbitrary distinction. Yet, this sense of identity based on how we speak raises much passion in Britain. It was a conundrum for John Brown, no doubt. I do know that at least he never suffered the remarks that many have endured for having a Welsh accent. Britain is a diverse country with wonderfully different dialects and accents. Yet, why is it that unless you speak with a posh, plummy English accent you are immediately deemed as stupid?
John Brown was a maverick, and he knew his cultural history. He was the most well-read man I ever met. The knowledge that he amassed was staggering, and it had to be vented at times. John Brown relished getting his strong opinions over and out. These rants became quite the norm for me. I couldn’t call them debates, as I would have had to say something. I learnt to say nothing, as I was young and naive. Yet, perversely, I learned much from them.
During one of these rants, he said something that touched a nerve. We were having a pot of tea. I was taking a sip when he announced: “Your average Welshman is an arsehole!” I nearly spat out the contents of my now-gaping mouth. Myself, Welsh born and bred, and definitely Mr. Average. I listened tentatively to his sermon until he got to the crux of his outburst: Why did the Welsh let everyone walk all over them? Why couldn’t the Welsh voice be heard? These frustrations are why he had written the book “Welsh Stick Chairs.” He’d found a culture rich in history and a chair that would become an obsession. He was intuitive and foresaw his beloved chair being annexed as some form of English regional chair. For John Brown, this couldn’t happen.
I forgave his outburst as he was correct. We don’t need any experts other than ourselves. “Welsh Stick Chairs” is a wonderful source of information. It’s a brief history of Wales, a chair and one man’s obsession with it, all encapsulated into a small book that became a cult object. It planted a seed that has been sown around the world. Its message is different for all who have read it.
How to Enter Wales Just before entering Wales from England on the M4 motorway you have to cross the Severn Bridge. The bridge spans 1.6 km over the River Severn, and on reaching the other side you’re soon greeted by a road sign that reads “Croeso i Gymru,” which translates as “Welcome to Wales.” From this point on, every road sign in Wales is bilingual. This particular location is relevant and poignant to this story. During a passionate conversation (or lecture), John Brown told me how he wanted to see a giant sculpture erected of a Welsh stick chair on entering Wales, similar in scale to Anthony Gormley’s “Angel of the North” near Gateshead in Northern England. He thought that the humble Welsh stick chair should become the cultural icon of Wales. That particular conversation holds me to this day. Read on. I hope that at the end of the journey (this book) you’ll realise that it’s OK to dream of giant chairs and to let your imagination run riot with this (or any) aesthetic in chair design. I’ll try and explain….
Whilst travelling by car to Wales from the south or west of England you can see the Severn Bridge looming from several miles distant, its huge white towers slung with miles of wire, supporting the carriageway beneath. As a child it always excited me to see the old Severn bridge whilst on my return home from family holidays in England. It’s a milestone in that I knew I was nearing my homeland and friends. Decades later I still get that feeling when I first see the bridge, but my thoughts are now different. So here we go….
Slowly my daily mind drains away, transcending into something more ethereal in nature, a vision begins. I’m looking at a colossus – a primitive chair, six long sticks piercing the clouds, four eccentrically raked legs rooting it to the Welsh soil, its form hoary with age and its colour patinated dark by the elements. Its silhouette screaming “I’m Welsh” against a brooding skyline. It looks outwardly from Wales. A sentinel for the past, present and future. A voiceless yet powerful symbol. This surreal moment holds me for several minutes. Its finale is when I tip my imaginary cap to John Brown as I see the road sign welcoming me back to my homeland. The moment passes and reality returns. I usually think about chairs and JB from then on until I reach home. Melancholic, maybe. Yet, this won’t be the last you’ll read about giant chairs as they prove to have an important role in the tale that will unfold.
John Brown’s book “Welsh Stick Chairs” is a classic. It gives us insight into a craftsman’s life. The book’s section on building a chair, with its beautiful black-and-white photos of the chair’s construction, had a huge impact on me. This inspired me to build chairs, yet there are no plans in his book. This subject of plans is an integral part of this book – integral because there won’t be any plans, but the subject will crop up constantly for good reason.
Why no plans? John Brown wrote in a Good Woodworking magazine column, “It is never so valid building from other people’s plans as seeing an object in your imagination and then making it. I would like to see purveyors of plans go bankrupt.”
I’d hate to see his words being taken out of context. He then went on to write, “There are, of course, many exceptions.” This might sound extreme, but it’s fundamental to the way JB felt about chairmaking. He fully understood the origins of the early chairs and their makers. No two chairs were identical, so how could a plan work? How could he ever make the same chair twice? This would become sacrosanct to his philosophy as well to me personally.
John Brown signed his chairs with a Celtic cross.
JB would happily and freely give advice on tools and workshop practise, including plans for tool chests, workbenches etc. in his monthly columns. Yet, plans for chairs weren’t up for discussion. As you read this book I hope you’ll be inspired and realise that the lack of plans isn’t a negative! This isn’t meant to alienate you, I promise! I hope that you’ll embrace it as a different way of woodworking and design. Reread “Welsh Stick Chairs.” Read this book over and over, become a monk for a while, let this mantra invade your veins. This approach worked for me! So first let me give you some insight into how this works.
When I was in my late teens I built my first chair. I didn’t own a set of French curves or anything in particular to aid me in drawing a fair curve. I hadn’t thought about buying a plan (even if one was available). I can well remember using a bin lid (trash can lid) to draw in the back curve of a chair seat, as well as using a coffee mug to draw the curves on the front corners of the seat. Once I had the curves looking fair I was away. It was my first tentative step into a new world of chairmaking. I felt at times that I was almost plucking shapes from the air. Did I have insecurities about what I was doing? Definitely! What I made was in truth a mediocre chair. It was, without doubt, a fundamental part of my learning, and it helped me think outside the box. I hope that you will get this message, accept it and fully immerse yourself into a journey of self-discovery as a free thinker and maker. It’s OK if your chairs don’t look like what you see in your mind’s eye – embrace it! Your work will become better for it.
If, at the end of the book, you feel that you’re in need of a plan, please know that there’s a plethora of wonderful books out there on the subject of chairmaking. If you’re stuck on the Welsh chair aesthetic, Christopher Schwarz’s excellent book “The Anarchist Design Book” has a chair plan of an American Welsh Stick Chair.