We have just sent our latest book, “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now” by Drew Langsner, to the printer and have opened pre-publication ordering. If you order the book before it arrives in the warehouse in early November, you will receive a free pdf of the book at checkout. The book is $39 and a whopping 404 pages.
Here’s a little bit of information about this new green woodworking title.
In 1978, Drew Langsner released his book “Country Woodcraft” to the world, and it sparked a movement – still expanding today – of hand-tool woodworkers who make things with mostly green wood.
The 304 pages of “Country Woodcraft” showed you how to split wood from the forest and shape into anything you might need, from a spoon to a bowl, from a hayrake fork to a milking stool, a pine whisk to a dining table.
After more than 40 years, Drew has revisited this long-out-of-print and important book to revise and expand it to encompass what he has learned since “Country Woodcraft” was first released.
The result is “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now,” which has been expanded by 100 pages and has been updated throughout to reflect what Drew has learned since 1978. Among many other additions, it includes greatly expanded sections on building shavehorses, carving spoons and making green-wood bowls.
The original book’s text is intact, and the old photos are in black and white. Throughout the book, Drew has added text, which we set in a slightly different font, to explain what he does differently now after 40 years of daily work on the North Carolina farm he shares with his wife, Louise.
In many ways, the book is a delightful conversation between the younger Drew, who is happy to chop down trees with a felling axe, and the older Drew, who now uses an electric chainsaw and band saw to break down stock to conserve energy (and likely aspirin). New illustrations and color photos throughout show how Drew works now.
The most significant additions to the book include:
A detailed section on how to make your own sloyd knife from a piece of steel and block of wood – everything you need to know about shaping and heat-treating the steel. Plus how to fashion and attach the handle.
An extensive discussion of the different forms of shaving horses – the core workholding tool for this sort of work – and complete plans for the shaving horse that Drew prefers, the Z-Mule.
An enormous section on spoon carving, which is almost long enough to be a book in and of itself. Drew shows beginners how to make their first spoon and delves into more advanced techniques, including steam-bending blanks with Curtis Buchanan.
An almost-as-large section on carving bowls, which features many examples for inspiration.
A large chapter on the workbenches that are ideal for country woodcraft, including plans for the design that Drew prefers: a simple strong table with a laminated plywood benchtop.
What is also fascinating about “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now” is how much Drew has absorbed and adapted from the instructors at his Country Workshops school (which he retired from). You can feel the influence and interplay between woodworking greats such as Jennie Alexander, John Brown, Dave Fisher, Wille Sundqvist, Jogge Sunqvist and on and on.
If you are interested in getting started in green woodworking, “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now” is an ideal place to begin. If you have already gotten started in spoon carving, this book can take you into areas of the craft that are surprising, delightful and useful (check out the pine wisks).
About the Physical Book
“Country Woodcraft: Then & Now” is 404 pages, printed on #80 matte coated paper for superior image reproduction. The pages are sewn and taped for durability. The whole thing is wrapped by thick boards covered with cotton cloth. This is a permanent book. Like all Lost Art Press books, “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now” is produced entirely in the United States.
One unusual aspect of the book is its shape. The pages are 10.5” wide and 8.5” tall, and the book is bound on the short side of the page, what some people call landscape binding. This unusual binding was what was used on the original 1978 edition and we wanted to use that same binding in the modern edition.
This unusual binding, plus the large number of pages and upgraded paper (the original was printed on thin, uncoated paper) made this an expensive object to manufacture. However, Drew and Lost Art Press decided we wanted this book to have an accessible price for beginners and students. So we set the price at $39 and have agreed to take a smaller profit.
In the coming days we’ll release a free pdf excerpt of the book. We don’t know which of our retailers will carry this book (we hope all of them). So please check with your favorite retailer.
Table of Contents
Safety First! Understanding Then and Now Forward – Then Forward – Now Acknowledgments Introduction – Then Introduction – Now
Part I: THE FOUNDATION OF COUNTRY WOODCRAFT 1. The Basic Tools 2. Materials 3. Felling 4. The Woodshed 5. Sawbucks
Part II: THE WORKSHOP 6. Shaving Horses 7. Clubs, Mauls and Mallets 8. Frame Saws 9. Tool Handles 10. Wedges 11. Workbenches 12. A Spring-Pole Lathe
Part III: AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS 13. Hay Rakes 14. Hay Forks 15. Wheelbarrows 16. Swiss Milking Stool 17. A Shoulder Yoke 18. Land Sleds 19. Bull-Tongue Plow 20. Spike-Tooth A-Harrow 21. Field Drags 22. Pokes
Part IV: HOUSEHOLD CRAFTS AND FURNISHINGS 23. Brooms 24. Bark Boxes – Louise Langsner 25. White Oak Basketry – Louise Langsner 26. Spreaders, Spoons and Ladles 27. Half-Log Bowls 28. Trestle Tables 29. A Handy Bench 30. Pine Whisks
Appendix 1. Mortise-and-Tenon Joinery Appendix 2. Oil Finishes Appendix 3. Riving Thirds Appendix 4. Axe Primer Appendix 5. Stumps with Legs Appendix 6. Uses of Usually Useless Wood Appendix 7. Annotated Bibliography Appendix 8. What I’m Doing Now
After four years of honest labor, I am happy to announce you can place a pre-publication order for our newest book: “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years, 1936-1966.” This massive book (474 pages) compiles Hayward’s best columns about the craft during his tenure as editor of The Woodworker magazine in the United Kingdom.
The book is $34 and can be ordered here from our store.
Hayward’s columns cover an enormous swath of woodworking philosophy, from discussions of our insecurities about our skills to the regenerative power of time at the bench. Hayward writes from a unique perspective: He was a traditionally trained woodworker, World War I veteran, professional woodworker, draughtsman, photographer, writer and editor. He steered The Woodworker through World War II (without missing an issue) and was a comforting voice for woodworkers through the most tumultuous portion of the 20th century.
We’ve taken his best columns during the 30 years he was the editor and reprinted them in “Honest Labour” for you to enjoy and think about. Each column occupies a single spread in the book – just open the book to any page and you will find a complete column. And each is illustrated with drawings from that particular year of The Woodworker – many of the drawings from Hayward’s own hand.
“Honest Labour” is the fifth and final book in The Woodworker series, which was a multi-year, multinational project to preserve the hand tool knowledge that almost disappeared in the 20th century. “Honest Labour” is the same trim size as the other Woodworker books in the series, printed on the same paper and features the same tough binding. The only difference is the cotton cover cloth. We chose a deep scarlet instead of the green to differentiate this volume from the others.
The book is currently at the printer and should ship in early May 2020. We hope our retailers will carry this book, though we have no control (obviously) over their stock choices.
In the coming weeks we’ll publish an excerpt for those of you who are on the fence or unsure this book is worth your time and effort.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. I know we have been releasing a slew of stuff this week – pinch rods, linocut prints from “Good Work” and now this book. It was completely unplanned and is what happens when you run a publishing company with the “it’s done when it’s done philosophy.” Sometimes that means you have nothing. Sometimes it means you have too much.
It was November 13, 1942, and his mother was living with another woman and her small child in Los Angeles, California, while his father was working as a psychiatric social worker in the army, stationed in Texas. After the war his parents divorced, and his mom remarried.
Drew’s stepfather was a classical violinist and his mother was a serious pianist. Drew also spent many afternoons with his father, an art historian, visiting artist studios, galleries and museums.
He and his half-brother, who was 8 years younger, spent their childhood in West L.A., which Drew says was then a nice place to grow up in. A self-described quiet and shy child, Drew struggled with rote memorization at school and never yearned for a paper route in order to buy things like most of his friends. He preferred making things, and his parents always made sure he had access to art supplies.
“Nobody had much money in our family at the time so I was always encouraged to do art things and try making stuff,” he says.
Instead of having him study for his bar mitzvah, Drew’s parents signed him up for weekly art lessons with Adalaide Fogg and Mary Gordon, liberal progressives who painted, made jewelry and prints, and supplemented their income by opening up their studio to provide lessons for children.
After high school, Drew enrolled at San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge) to study anthropology. He had always been interested in the topic and while the school wasn’t his first choice the anthropology department there had recently hired Dorothy Lee, “a really brilliant woman who was fed up with teaching at Harvard to be the department head,” Drew says. Lee was interesting, connected easily with young people and eschewed standardized, formal education. Drew thrived and in two years took enough courses minus one to satisfy an anthropology degree.
Drew disliked the San Fernando Valley and was falling in love with San Francisco. (This was San Francisco in the 1960s after all.) So he transferred to San Francisco State, which he loved – except for the anthropology department. In one class Drew stated an ethical objection to a field method used by anthropologists. The instructor, who was the department head, suggested that it would be a good idea for Drew to consider work in a different field. Drew managed to pass the course and earned his bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 1964.
While at San Francisco State, Drew had fallen in love with the university’s dark room and ceramic studios. And in 1966, he earned a master’s degree in painting and sculpture. Although there was a woodshop on campus, there were no instructions on how to use the tools, Drew said. And while Charles Haywood was writing in the U.K. at the time, Drew had never heard of him and publications like Fine Woodworkingdidn’t exist.
“Interestingly, while I was in the art department at the graduate level at San Francisco State University, I had no idea that they had an industrial arts department,” he says. “I literally didn’t know it existed.” Turns out John Kassay, who later went on to write “The Book of Shaker Furniture” in 1980 and “The Book of American Windsor Furniture: Styles and Technologies” in 1998, was teaching on campus at the same time Drew was a student. “It wasn’t until 30 years later while on the phone with him one day that I found out he was teaching right where I was,” Drew says. “For me it was all learning on one’s own and sometimes woodworking was part of it and sometimes it was not.”
In graduate school Drew became friends with a guy who grew up in a “real all-American middle-class kind of family,” he says, which was quite different from the way Drew grew up. The dad in this family had a little woodworking shop, complete with a table saw, and together, father and son were building a boat. Drew would visit this family often, and says he learned a lot about woodworking while helping build the boat.
1960s San Francisco
After graduation Drew, who at this point owned a small table saw, started a small business making stretched canvasses for professional and more well-off artists. He also started to make some sculptures and, as funds would allow, would occasionally buy a new tool from Sears.
Drew loved living in San Francisco in the 1960s, and that decade proved formative.
“It’s part of my story,” he says.
He was involved in civil rights and anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, and drawn to people who were producing the Whole Earth Catalog.
“Back then we would walk everywhere,” he says. “We would walk across San Francisco. I lived in a neighborhood, it was pretty much a slum, and we would walk to China Town and say, ‘We have $3 for dinner. What can you make us?’ And they would make us dinner. It would show up. And there were all kinds of stuff happening in various arts and it was all accessible. It wasn’t a pricey play to live like it’s become.”
Around this time Drew met his wife, Louise. He had heard about a woman named Ann Halprin who ran a modern dance studio. He and Louise met at one of the studio’s summer workshops on experimental dance theater. “A couple years later we were living together and then a couple years after that we were getting married,” he says.
Around this time Drew and his friend, Jay Beckwith, began building adventure playgrounds for kids, essentially sculptures for kids to climb on. “We were using our art-school mentality to cut up existing structures with funny angles and put it all back together in a totally different configuration,” he says.
One night, while watching a friend of a friend’s slideshow from a trip to Nepal, Drew says he felt an attachment to the landscape and Nepalese people, and how closely they were living to an outdoors life. At the time, a lot of young people were traveling to India and Nepal, and Drew and Louise decided they wanted to do the same. Drew, a fan of Bernard Rudofsky’s “Architecture Without Architects,” wanted to take photographs of people and write a book about the vernacular architecture they found along the way. Louise also became interested in the book, with a focus on finding out more about the people they met and how they lived their lives.
“I was a little kid who marveled at the building of the Hollywood Freeway and I even thought I’d be an industrial designer someday but somewhere in my teenage years I became more interested with what you could make with your hands without a bunch of machines and big bucks and spending a lot of money,” he says.
The two saved a little money, “way too little,” Drew says, and began driving east. Along the way they spent a summer at the Lama Foundation in New Mexico, then continued on, visiting Louise’s parents in Chicago and dropping off their old Chevy truck in New Jersey on a farm owned by an artist friend of Drew’s father. And then they flew to England, intent on reaching Nepal.
A Year in Europe + an Apprenticeship in Coopering
Initially Drew and Louise wanted to do their entire trip on public transportation and by hitchhiking, thinking that would put them closer to the people they wanted to meet.
“But we found out we were lousy hitchhikers,” Drew says, laughing.
So they traveled by bus and train. Their first big stop was Greece – winter was coming, so they decided to stay put. Drew took a train back to Munich, bought a used police motorcycle and brought it back to Greece. The motorcycle, it turns out, was a lemon and although Drew says they spent half their winter in Greece trying to fix it they enjoyed their time in places they were stuck.
Once the weather began to warm they took a ferry to Turkey but soon they realized their motorcycle wasn’t going to make it. Back to Munich they went (tax regulations made it impossible to sell or even give away the motorcycle in Turkey) where they found some American soldiers willing to buy it. They saw a “for sale” sign on a Volkswagen Beetle, “a really good one,” Drew says, and they bought it. By now they had given up on Nepal and instead had their eye on Scandinavia. “We thought we could explore some rural parts of Western Europe, starting with the Swiss Alps,” Drew says. And that’s where they met Kufermeister Ruedi Kohler.
Ruedi was one of the last traditionally trained Swiss coopers and he made wooden, open buckets for use in Alpine dairies. “They were really quite beautiful and very specialized to the area where he lived,” Drew says. Drew and Louise bought a bucket and put it in the back seat of their Volkswagen. Every day, as they headed up to Norway and Sweden, Drew looked at that bucket and wondered how Ruedi made it. “I knew enough about making stuff to realize I couldn’t do it,” Drew says. “And I had no idea how he did it with his tools.”
Drew and Louise drove around for several weeks, considering a permanent move to Norway. Ultimately they decided against it but before moving back they had an idea: Maybe Drew could apprentice with Ruedi. “Ruedi seemed to be really kind and definitely very skillful and he lived in this beautiful log chalet in a kind of obscure corner of the Alps,” Drew says. “And I thought maybe he would take on a student.”
Ruedi agreed and Drew began a 10-week apprenticeship in single-bottom coopering, working six days a week. Because of the language barrier, Ruedi would simply show Drew how to do something, Drew would try, then Ruedi would show him again, over and over, until Drew improved. Drew wrote down questions on a little pad of paper and every once in a while a local schoolteacher who knew rudimentary English would come by and translate Drew’s questions and Ruedi’s responses.
“I still have never found anyone as skillful as Ruedi,” Drew says. “And he turned out to be even nicer than we had thought – his wife and family also.”
Planting Roots in North Carolina
Once Drew’s apprenticeship ended, he and Louise were ready to move back to the U.S. Although they loved the San Francisco Bay area they wanted to experience a different kind of environment, something less urban – but they weren’t sure where. So they picked up their old Chevy at the farm in New Jersey and began driving it back across the country.
While in Greece a publisher from Harmony Books, a division of the Crown Publishing Group, who Drew and Louise meet at the Lama Foundation, sent them a letter stating interest in publishing their book. So once back in San Francisco Drew began writing, processing film, making prints and even working on the book’s layout. Louise worked on it, too.
It was the beginning of the Foxfire books era and having spent a year traveling in rural Europe, both Drew and Louise knew they wanted to live in a less material world. They considered Vermont, but didn’t want to be involved with its winters. Other places they deemed nice were too expensive.
While at the Lama Foundation they had met a guy who owned 100 acres in North Carolina who had the intention of starting a craft community. Drew and Louise happened to run into this guy again and he said they were welcome to stay in a small house on the property while they looked for a place to live. So, they did.
“We got everything done with the book,” Drew says. “Winter was over and we took that old Chevy truck back across the U.S. to exactly where I’m sitting right now.”
The guy’s plans fell through, and Drew and Louise, who had fallen in love with the seclusion and beauty of the southern Appalachian mountains, bought his 100 acres. And although they eventually built a new house, they’ve never moved off the property.
Initially they had no idea how they were going to earn a living but they were confident they’d figure it out. “We always figured things out,” Drew says.
While they never wanted to farm for a living they were interested in small-scale farming and making a bit of income off of it. Drew was interested in farming using draft animals, and they wanted to grow their own food. “We just wanted to experience it,” he says. “We wondered what the possibilities were, what we could do.”
In 1977, Wille Sundqvist visited which, in part, prompted Drew and Louise to start a craft school focused on traditional woodworking. “But I don’t want to talk about Country Workshops,” Drew says. “Too much has already been written about Country Workshops.”
That’s fair. Still folks equate the name “Drew Langsner” with two things: “Country Woodcraft,” the book he first released in 1978 completely reviving hand-tool woodworking in the modern world, and Country Workshops. In 1978 Drew and Louise opened their home and farm to students to learn about traditional woodworking. Instructors at Country Workshops included Wille Sundqvist, Jögge Sundqvist, Jennie Alexander and John Brown. Peter Follansbee, who spent time learning and teaching there, had this to say on his blog when he learned Drew and Louise were closing it down, 40 years after they opened: “Many green woodworkers in America and beyond can trace their roots to Drew & Louise, even if they don’t know it …”.
Although it may seem like it, Drew says it’s not always easy for him to connect with other people. “I’m not that gregarious or maybe kind,” he says. “But I’ve always been attracted to that kind of thing. One of the best things that ever happened during the 40 years of Country Workshops had to do with meeting the people who came as students and as teachers.”
During the last 20 years of Country Workshops Drew organized and hosted 17 international craft tours where people not only looked at craft work but met craft people – in their homes. “It seems to be something that Americans want to do but a lot of other people don’t understand that attraction at all,” Drew says. “They don’t particularly care if this potter has three kids who all play musical instruments or they’re just cuter than hell. They just want to get in that guy’s studio, buy some stuff and go. People like myself and a lot of the people that I took on those craft tours, we wanted to spend the day with the potter and meet his wife and see what his house was like and check out their neighborhood and have a meal with them. And we often succeeded in doing something like. It was my love of anthropology pasted into craft.”
Country Workshops shut down for good in 2017.
“During a lot of years Country Workshops, particularly, was a struggle but because of the people we were dealing with it was a pleasure,” Drew says. “A really good ride. And we survived. We did five years longer than I had ever thought and we were able to put together enough savings so that we’re able to live out here and not worry much. Instead we worry about the country and the world.”
A Love of Learning – And Sculpture
Today a typical day for Drew starts with a shower then reading, first some news and then 20 to 30 minutes of something more serious. “I’ve become much more interested in what I sometimes think of as getting the education I should have been paying attention to in high school and college,” he says. “I’ve been doing some, not heavy-duty, but definitely serious reading the last 10 years – philosophy and various things to do with the arts and history and thinking and stuff like that. I’m liking that a whole lot.”
Next comes exercise, something he’s been doing for years but given some recent health setbacks he’s now more focused.
“I make my own breakfast,” he says. “Then I take a walk, which is something that Louise has been encouraging forever but is more important now that the cardiologist has prescribed it.” He typically walks around their property for an hour, including down to the mailbox and back, which is two miles.
“Then I usually fool around for a while and we have lunch,” he says. “And then I try to do some outdoor work on something and usually there’s chores or things that need to be fixed and then before supper I try to get in a couple hours in the shop working on my sculpture projects. I have a hard time working on that stuff until I’ve cleared my mind of what needs to be done around this place which is too big.”
When the weather’s good Drew spends time working with the young forest that’s developing on the edge of their fields – lots of pruning, thinning and weeding. And then there’s always firewood work and work on the driveway and other light farm work.
“I just don’t worry about what I can’t do anymore,” he says. “Louise, she hasn’t made peace yet with the fact that she can’t keep up with getting rid of the bittersweet and the poison ivy. I do what I can, I get help when I can and I don’t let that bother me.”
In the evening he does more reading.
Prior to the pandemic Drew would try to sail one day a week on a nearby lake. He and Louise also enjoyed spending time with their neighbors, and visiting their daughter, son-in-law and grandson in California. Now those visits are FaceTime.
Drew has been spending a lot of time with his “Bhuto Dancer II” (which he talks about in “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now”), a sculpture made from a fallen remnant of a scrub apple tree.
“Right now I’m involved with the real painting on it,” he says. “It’s no longer just flat white and it’s been a really tough one to paint to get things right. I didn’t have an exact vision at all how it’s going to be once painted. I’m getting there, I’m almost there. And then I have some other old pieces of wood that were hollowed out that I’m saving. There are some that are real easy to work on but the one I want to do next is another one that is very unique. It’s a hollow log with dried fungus all over the surface which I’ve stabilized with lots of glue and epoxy. I have a form and what I’m trying to do is work with it to the point where the observer doesn’t think it’s a piece of a tree anymore. It’s an experience that you have visually and tactilely that has actually nothing to do with how it started as a tree except that it can only be thought of as that as it is a tree that grew that way. And that’s that.”
Drew has made many small sculptures, including bowls, and several big outdoor ones.
“My hope for the future is that I get some kind of exposure and success with these things,” he says. “And so far I’ve had absolutely none. And I’m unwilling to try to market myself as an artist. I’m hoping to be discovered.”
‘I Like Life When it’s Good’
When talking about a life philosophy, Drew says he simply tries to be honest and fair.
“Just the golden rule,” he says. “I don’t like to see people get cheated and I don’t want to have anything to do with that kind of thing. And I want to participate as much as I can and try to feel. I like life when it’s good. It’s a struggle. This year, of course, was an extra tough one with two big medical things plus America and Covid. But I’ve done pretty well.”
Drew dealt with both prostate cancer and quadruple bypass surgery this year. His bloodwork has been very promising where the cancer is concerned. Heart health, he says, never ends. Drew’s father died from a heart attack at age 56. And while Drew has lived a pretty heart-healthy lifestyle the last 30 years, he knows he carries those genes.
“A phone conference with my doctor ended with him saying I want you go and get a stress test this afternoon,” Drew says. “I foolishly put it off for a week but I did it. And at the end of the test the evaluating doctor said, ‘I have some bad news for you. You flunked the stress test. The doctor and I want you to go to the hospital right now.’ By the next morning I was getting woken up from four bypasses. So that’s something.”
Living 50 miles from the nearest hospital, Drew says he was very fortunate the doctors ordered him to go to the hospital when they did.
For years Drew says he was involved in organizations trying to change politics in their area, environmental pursuits and peace pursuits.
“I still support those things as much as I can but now I just want to live,” he says.
In the meantime Drew is approaching life with the same anthropologic curiosity he’s had since he was a college student.
Right now he’s reading a 500-page biography of Francisco Goya, the painter. He’s excited to finish “Bhuto Dancer II.” He loves listening to music late at night – mostly jazz, but also some blues and rock-and-roll – often with headphones.
“It’s so easy for me and Louise,” he says. “There’s so many things that we’re interested in that are so fascinating to learn about. Just seeing how plants grow, what goes on. Did you see the popular movie ‘My Teacher the Octopus?’ Our world is just full of that fabulous kind of stuff. I don’t want to get dragged down by the things that are dragging us down.”
You can order “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now” (Lost Art Press) here. “Green Woodworking” and “The Chairmaker’s Workshop” are available from Drew personally, here. Simply include a note with the title(s) you wish to buy, and your mailing address. Payment is accepted via PayPal.
Imagine this: You’re a teacher of woodworking. Your students are kids. The school where you teach is in a big city, and most of your students live nearby. It’s March 2020: Your school, along with much of the rest of the world, shuts down in response to the pandemic. But your job is to go on teaching. What do you do?
This is the reality that hit Yoav Liberman three months ago. His students and their families were in lockdown, confined to their homes in New York City, which has suffered some of the world’s highest numbers of infection and death from Covid-19. Instead of teaching face-to-face in a workshop at Manhattan’s Rudolf Steiner school, as he has for the past eight years, he was expected to teach remotely, via computer screen. “How do I participate in this in a meaningful way?” he wondered, aware that his students lacked access not just to workbenches and woodworking tools, but also to lumber. With parks closed, and few trees on the streets, “even getting them a branch would be almost impossible.”
Fortunately for Yoav’s students, their teacher has a lifetime’s experience of turning challenges into opportunities.
Yoav was born on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, Israel, and has one younger brother, Dan. His dad, Eliezer, was a machinist, handyman and maritime officer who worked as chief engineer on a merchant ship. Thanks to his position, Eliezer could bring his family along in the summers; Yoav recalls two-month voyages from Haifa to the Mediterranean, then on to America and Canada. It was the late 1960s. Ships were small. The world was not connected as it is today. “Those voyages are a very important part of my childhood memories,” he says. They might stop in Athens, where they’d pay a quick visit to the Acropolis, then in a day they’d be in Florence. Another day would pass and they were in Marseilles; then they’d cross the Atlantic. In addition to providing a dazzling introduction to different landscapes and architectural styles, those vacations opened Yoav’s eyes to the world of engineering and mechanics. “I was seeing the world not from a luxurious point, but from a merchant ship perspective,” he explains – and as often as not, he was immersed in the guts of the ship, because it was his father’s job to keep things running, through storms as well as calm seas.
When Yoav was 6, his father died, an experience that had a powerful effect on the course of his life. Aside from the emotional wounds caused by such a loss, especially at a young age, he and his family were forced to learn a multitude of new skills. His mother (today, a retired school teacher) and grandfather were now responsible for fixing things around the house. Yoav has a vivid recollection of watching his mom mix epoxy. “In other homes the only glue that people used to use was silly contact cement, [but] my mom kept two epoxy tubes that my dad got from one of his trips to the USA and taught her how to use.”
“I was not such a good student in elementary school,” he says. “My mom said that I ‘withered inward’ after my dad died. Without any academic achievements to be proud of, I was destined to attend a vocational high school, which actually ended up as a godsend. With a curriculum that included machining, plastic and polymer studies, robotics and electronics, and most importantly, technical drawing, I was in heaven. At home I [built] scale models of ships and planes, and in school I leaned over a metal lathe to turn a hammer head or held an acetylene torch to build a small garden stool.”
Like all able-bodied Israeli citizens, Yoav did a compulsory stint in the armed forces – in his case, the navy – then considered going on to higher education. He didn’t want to study pure engineering, but he wanted to do something involving art that would also be functional. There were no furniture making programs in Israel at the time, so he thought “I’ll just try architecture. You design buildings and furniture, get training that’s lofty in terms of art and principles of design but also down-to-earth training in materials and construction.”
The summer before he started his studies at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), he worked for a family friend who had a woodshop. The work was low-level and mundane, but that shop launched him on his lifelong project of collecting wood scraps and other materials that most people throw away.
Yoav completed a five-year program in architecture at Technion. It was the early 1990s, before widespread publishing on the internet. His teachers were architects, not woodworkers. To get his woodshop fix he subscribed to Fine Woodworking and devoured the content. As his interest in woodworking grew, so did his collection of tools.
After graduation he “gave architecture a chance,” as he puts it, by working at a couple of small firms. But he spent his spare time building and restoring furniture. While he enjoyed some of the sketching and 3-D work in his architectural apprenticeship, he was put off by the layers of mediation between the clients, the work and himself. “You’re so remote,” he explains. “There are so many hurdles to jump over. So much red tape. Some are completely justified, [though] as a junior architect you’re even more remote. But working on furniture is so in tune. [You’re] so in touch with the material and the processes. It’s fulfilling.” An invitation to teach a class in furniture refurbishing and design at a small DIY center in Tel Aviv proved pivotal. “I was much more interested in that than in working in front of the computer to compile square footages for a building my boss designed.”
During his apprenticeship Yoav had also taught architecture, drawing and design as an adjunct professor at a community college. He kept that work going and began writing about furniture for a DIY magazine in Israel, as well as teaching classes in furniture refurbishing.
In the late ’90s Yoav’s (now-former) partner moved to Cambridge, Mass., to begin work toward a doctorate at Harvard. While visiting his partner, Yoav discovered the Worcester Center for Crafts; he made some inquiries and showed them his portfolio. Impressed, they accepted him as an artist in residence and sponsored his student visa. “It was a dream,” says Yoav. “The magazines were from New England, and many of the people [whose articles] I read were working in the Boston area.” It felt like destiny.
Yoav moved to Massachusetts in 2000. He lived in Cambridge and commuted to Worcester. His job: to build a meaningful body of work. He worked long days, grateful for access to the school’s resources and the opportunity to think about things he wanted to build. He also took classes in turning, jewelry making and glass. Looking back, he says, “I was in Candy Land.”
His collection of salvaged materials grew; he was constantly thinking about how to save stuff from being destroyed or thrown away. Reclaimed materials became the hallmark of his work. The city of Worcester contributed to his stash: He scored a bunch of heart pine beams from a mill that had been demolished for a highway. The firewood bin at the craft school provided riches, too. As Yoav saw it, “I was happy not to allow this material to be lost to the landfill but regain respect from its users or viewers for as long as the furniture I built would last.”
He sought out other teachers and found his way to the Powderhouse Woodworkers – Mitch Ryerson, John Everdell, Judy Kensley McKie and Nathan Rome, who had set up a co-op in an old millwork building rented from Tufts University; there was a communal machine space and kitchen, with open studios. Each member of the co-op had his or her own style. Yoav worked with John and Mitch; he particularly admired John for the complexity and variety of materials with which he worked and calls him “a virtuoso in using bronze and copper and stone and ebony.” Yoav wrote an article about John for Woodwork magazine.
Yoav apprenticed with the group on and off for about six years. Asked how he made a living, he replies: “My partner got a stipend from Harvard. We lived in a grad dorm. I was riding my bike to my mentors’ studio. We survived on his stipend plus my savings and some family support. We were very frugal. Officially I was a student, so I was not supposed to work.” (He has since been granted a green card.)
Those years overlapped with other work. After finishing his residency in Worcester, Yoav found himself without a studio, but he was offered an artist in residence/tutorial position at Harvard’s Eliot House, which had a shop in the basement. There he would mentor students from Harvard who wanted to learn woodworking He created a program of instruction and launched an annual furniture show, took students on field trips and invited fellow woodworkers and speakers, such as Tom Lie-Nielsen and Albert LeCoff, to give presentations. The affiliation with Harvard opened other doors; he was invited to write a blog for American Woodworker; he wrote articles for Woodwork magazine; he pursued his own furniture projects. This was toward the end of 2009.
For four years he also taught three-month stints in furniture design, sometimes with cardboard as the primary material, for college interior and industrial design programs in Israel.
Around 2010 he was accepted to an artist in residence program at Purchase College. It was a prestigious position that came with a studio, stipend, room and board in exchange for teaching one class and spending the rest of his time on his own work. He calls the experience “formidable” and says that during those four months he built his most important body of work to date.
Just as that residency was drawing to a close, he met James, a psychologist in private practice, who is now his partner. “James is also a wonderful bread maker, knitter and gardener,” Yoav adds.
When American Woodworker was bought by Popular Woodworking, Yoav met Megan Fitzpatrick. He’d been thinking about writing a book about building furniture with reclaimed wood; Megan was enthusiastic and had Scott Francis, her books editor, get in touch to discuss possibilities. “That was an affirmation by two people I appreciate,” he says. “If she thinks it’s a good idea, I will put the time into it.” He wanted the book to include work by others as well as his own – people from all over the world, in different disciplines. “The purpose is to let us pause a little and think, how can we utilize any sort of discarded material that has still so much potential? Sometimes the potential exceeds that of virgin-cut wood.”
Yoav spent two years working on the book, “Working with Reclaimed Wood,” which was published in 2018. By then he had made a home with James in the greater New York City region, adopted their son, Asher, who is now 5, and was working at his current job as a teacher of woodworking in the city. Ordinarily, he commutes four days a week.
So here’s how Yoav faced his reality this past March.
He started with a process of elimination: What kind of woodworking-related activity can you do with your hands when you don’t have access to woodworking tools? He thought back to the design classes he’d taught in Israel, where students built pieces out of corrugated cardboard. It’s made from wood. It’s a readily available material – in fact, with so many parents confined to home and ordering products online instead of shopping in stores, there’s been an excess of cardboard to dispose of. And all you need to work with cardboard are scissors. (If you really want to go wild, Yoav adds, you could splurge on a $5 utility knife.)
His next challenge was to come up with a project that would be appropriate for each of the grades. He consulted the students’ other teachers. Fourth-graders were studying local geography; in Manhattan, that means skyscrapers. So Yoav decided to have his fourth-grade students make the Empire State Building. He found some plans of the building online, made a cutting list and templates, then sent the kit to parents to print out. Now the kids are making the building, right down to the spire and antenna. (You can read Yoav’s blog post about the project here.) He meets with students for half an hour a week via Zoom; sometimes he tutors individuals. “It’s such a shift in teaching,” he says, acknowledging the irony of the situation. “[Ordinarily] we say ‘No screens, no electronics!’”
The fifth-grade students are making animals – panthers, a dolphin, a penguin, a whale. Each student brings her or his own interpretation of the material to the project. For example, one wanted to sand the edges but had no sandpaper; she used her mother’s nail file instead.
Ninth-graders are tackling more complicated designs. They started with a box-jointed cardboard box. (Did you get that?) After that they moved on to furniture. Yoav has encouraged them to use notched designs, which can be elegant. Other designs involve layering the cardboard for stability. Origami, he notes, provides yet another way to think about using cardboard as a furniture-making material.
As they near semester’s end, Yoav has been teaching the older students (and some of their parents, who couldn’t resist getting involved) to carve simple designs in basswood purchased online – decorative patterns, animals, letters – with a carving knife. Constantly thinking about how to keep them from cutting their fingers, Yoav recommended that they invest in mesh tape. “You sit in front of a camera,” he explains; “the student is miles away from you.”
Odds are, he’s inspiring a new generation of makers who will design and build innovative furnishings out of this abundant waste material, cardboard.
As with methods of building cabinetry, there may well be as many potential takes on designing the kitchen for a particular house as designers who might be hired for the job. My own starting points include the clients’ preferences and the architectural context.
This kitchen is for a 1959 ranch originally built for a middle-class family. While decidedly modest (not shouting Hey, I’m cool! Look at me!), it incorporates some classic mid-century modern features. There’s an asymmetrical façade and stepped roof with generous overhangs at front and back. Inside, the kitchen cabinets are set into bulkheads. There’s streamline casing on windows and doorways. The floors are a mix of plain- and rift-sawn oak. The layout is split-level, with public rooms (living room and kitchen) on the main/entry floor, a short flight of stairs going up to the three original bedrooms and a full set of stairs to the walk-out basement, which has a laundry room, bedroom (added several years ago) and storage.
I don’t have access to pictures of the original kitchen, but in this case the missing information is immaterial. The clients didn’t want to recreate the kind of retro kitchen typical of local mid-century modest ranches.
Instead, as I’ve described in previous posts (here and here), they hoped to integrate the kitchen at least somewhat with the living room, as well as make it feel warmer and lighter. Replacing the hard, cold tile floor with oak run continuously from the living room will make a huge difference in perceived warmth. Skylights will bring in more natural light, and replacing the barely functional dark cabinets with clear-finished white oak will further enhance the warming and lightening effect.
I give clients all the pros and cons I can think of concerning every detail, from hinges to toekicks, and then I give my own opinion, assuring them that the decisions are ultimately theirs to make. I also think it’s important at least to broach the subject of resale appeal in kitchen design discussions. (Whether or not you have this discussion, you can be sure your clients’ family or friends will bring it up; at least if you’ve already run them through it, they will be better able to stand their ground in the face of know-it-all second-guessers.) Real estate agents and other pros have reams of advice, but I find the overwhelming majority of it useless (not to mention boring; who wants to live with a room designed for the lowest common denominator?). You can’t read the minds of future buyers. The fact is, an awful lot of people — perhaps the majority, these days — are determined to redo the kitchen when they buy a place, even if the existing kitchen was recently done; it’s a way of making their own statement. So if you’re jonesing for a kitchen based on the original cabinets of your 1915 bungalow, or your heart is set on a vision of teal, aquamarine and green…well, you can probably tell where this is going.
Cabinet design
Jenny and Ben have three children and really use their kitchen, so when considering materials, I put durability at the forefront. White oak faces would be fairly bullet-proof, and the grain’s a champ at distracting the eye from scratches, dents and other signs of wear. I suggested straightforward lines for the cabinets in the main preparation area. But wanting to distinguish the cabinets from the ubiquitous take on mid-century style produced by the more commercial shops in our area, I suggested a few tweaks: Instead of fully recessed kicks, we’d have a more “carpentery” design, with stiles going to the floor to accentuate the cabinets’ structure. Using adjustable European hinges and drawer slides, I could fit the cabinets with inset doors and drawer faces while staying within the budget. For optimal durability, I’ll have the cabinets sprayed with conversion varnish by my finishing subcontractor.
When it came to designing the shallow cabinets for the opposite wall, which forms the transition between entry area and living room to kitchen, I couldn’t bring myself to repeat the same design. I wanted these cabinets to be less “workerly,” more appropriate to this liminal space. I have a vivid memory of a stacking set of small, circular wooden boxes my parents had in the early 1960s; they may have been Japanese. I was mesmerized by their form and finish — enamel paint in mid-century versions of yellow, red and green, each with a rounded black rim. This built-in — part kitchen, part entry area — seemed an ideal place to incorporate such an aesthetic.
Milk paint
I suggested milk-paint for this cabinet because it lends itself to so many textural finishes. For the carcases, blocks of different colors will be framed by narrow solid lippings painted black. Full-overlay doors and drawer faces will have black edges. The kick will be fully recessed and painted black. The clients will choose a mix of colors and finish effects — perhaps single-color, perhaps layered — and I will have the whole thing sprayed with topcoats of conversion varnish for durability.
Cabinet hardware and counters
The door and drawer pulls (in the picture at the top of the post) are from Schoolhouse. Hanging open shelves over the sink area will retain the openness between the kitchen and living room while adding extra space for storage and decorative objects. The counters will likely be a dark gray soapstone.