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Throw a spanner in the works, and even the smoothest-running machinery will come to a stop. Most of the time you can diagnose the problem, make a quick repair and get back to business with minimal delay.

But when the spanner takes the form of a pandemic, not so much. You can moan and groan, lament lost income and opportunities, retreat into a funk. If you’re lucky, you may reach a point where you recognize yourself as weirdly liberated from the everyday grind and be open to new directions.

This is how I found Australian woodworker Bern Chandley when we spoke at the end of September. Ordinarily a prolific and highly focused designer-builder of contemporary chairs, Bern, based in Melbourne, has spent much of his time over the past few months laboring over a single piece of furniture: a small settee in blackwood. “I’ve had very limited time in the workshop this year,” he says. With schools closed, he has been helping his wife, Alice, home-school their 9-year-old son, Flannery. Since March, Bern has had just two or three short days a week to work in the shop; a curfew has kept him from staying into the night.

The settee is a commission, the form and joinery – Nakashima meets Wegner, with staked legs (both curved and tapered), steam-bent spindles, a hand-scooped seat and stretchers that swoop up to support the arms – a new paradigm in the Chandley repertoire. There are more jigs than usual, as well as more machines, including a PantoRouter. There’s not a single right angle. Even though he’s getting paid well for the piece, the pay won’t cover the investment required to puzzle out the making. “But because it’s a new design,” he reasons, “it’s going to give me a whole lot of other chairs.” The sculptural piece of seating will become a mainstay of his build-to-order portfolio, so he’s putting in the work to make all of the processes readily repeatable. “I want them all down pat,” he says, because efficient production is important to how he makes his living.

Family & Starting Out

In July Bern turned 50. “Aging has never been something that has particularly preoccupied my thoughts,” he wrote in an Instagram post. “I’ve always felt birthdays were a good excuse to draw in close the ones you love and that the warmth of their returned love is a reflection of the happiness I’ve achieved in life. I don’t care how old I am each time I feel it, just that I’m feeling it. It is life affirming.

“Today as I turn 50, in this time of physical isolation, I count myself incredibly lucky to spend the day on remote learning with my son Flann Brian Chandley, Grandson to Brian Frederick Chandley, my beautiful Dad, who we lost just a little more th[a]n 6 months ago today. Every time I think of him I’m flooded with longing to see him and speak with him. We miss him an enormous amount. He was and is, along with Mum, my greatest inspiration to be as good a person as I can be. As I look at my son, as he looks at me, as we talk to each other I’m aware of how lucky I am to have had such brilliant role models. Dad’s in my thoughts daily but I feel him especially close today.”

You can chart how important Bern’s family is to him in his voice. Nothing in our conversation makes him more animated than the stories he tells about family members, each anecdote filled with detail and color. Most of his ancestors came to Australia from Ireland. Some arrived against their will, he notes, referring to the British practice of exporting convicts to penal colonies in the late 18^th century. Others came as farmers looking for opportunity. Farming remained central to the family for generations. Bern’s father, Brian, was one of nine children born on a farm near the port city of Geelong (pronounced “Ja-long”) in the state of Victoria, about 50 miles southwest of the capital, Melbourne.

The family lost the farm during the Great Depression and had to move into Geelong to look for employment. His paternal grandfather, Bill Chandley, went to work at a factory. Bern has fond memories of Bill, who was “already quite on in years” by the time Bern came along. Bill had one leg that was longer than the other, due to a bout of polio he suffered as a child. The family didn’t own a car, so he got around by bus. “He knew all the bus drivers in Geelong by their first name. He rode on a bus with a little airline bag and his rollie (handrolled) cigarettes. He was a very warm, lovely fellow,” Bern remembers, then adds in the kind of detail especially important to a child: “My nana” – her name was Nellie – “made a sponge cake for everyone’s birthday.”

Bern’s mother was a nurse-midwife, his dad a diesel mechanic fitter and turner. “You call them engineers over there,” he offers, “like toolmaking – working with heavy machinery.” Geelong being a port town, many businesses were involved with shipping.

In 1986, at the age of 16, Bern left school to start an apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner. “I’m from a big working-class family,” he says. “I’ve got a million cousins who are all tradesmen. I’m one of four kids; my older brother was the first in our extended family to go to university.”

It was meant to be a four-year apprenticeship, with time alternating between coursework at trade school and work for a boss who ran a house framing business. At school Bern studied building methodology – stairs, joinery techniques and traditional handwork with dovetails and mortise and tenons – not because there was a market for that kind of work (there wasn’t), but because the curriculum hadn’t been updated in years, for which he gives thanks. On the job, they framed houses; Bern has vivid memories of building pitched roofs in eucalyptus, “big, tall, straight-grain trees used in construction.” The roofs would then be topped with weatherproof corrugated steel. That way of roofing is long gone, he says; these days builders simply install trusses.

Bern finished his apprenticeship early, at the age of 19. Typically an apprentice would stay on with the boss who’d sponsored the training, but these two didn’t get along. “He was a bit of a hammer thrower,” Bern says – “a good carpenter, but always the most hated person on the site. The day I finished my apprenticeship, I quit-slash-he fired me. We had a big fight on the site.”

After a few more carpentry jobs he was ready to leave Geelong. His older sister was training to be a nurse in Melbourne, so he moved there. For two years he worked as a hospital orderly, an experience he found fascinating. “I was suddenly confronted with life and death. I was still a silly young bloke. I had to come to terms with people dying on a regular basis…and form an understanding of it…. Nurses are amazing. They’ve just got to carry on, no matter what.” He worked in the emergency room. “You’re on the front line,” he says. “There are some horrific injuries. People were thrashing around, semi-conscious, and you had to hold them down.” Part of his job was to help the nurses wrap cadavers in plastic and take them to the mortuary. “It knocked the immaturity out of me, which I’m very thankful for.”

In his 20s he did some traveling around Europe. On his return, he found his way into building sets for television, theater and American movies that were being filmed in Melbourne. Each gig lasted almost a year. One of these productions was set in the Second World War; when the crew couldn’t find a specific piece of period-authentic furniture, they brought him a picture and he figured out how to make it. “I was just knocking the [props] out, out of MDF and pine,” he says; the painters on the set “were magicians” who made the stuff look like it was built of mahogany.

“The thing with set building is, it’s very good for problem solving. The designers are notorious for giving you the easy measurements” while leaving the challenging stuff involved in curves and angles for the set builders to work out. “Depending on the job, there could be nary a right angle. ‘Star Wars’ had the most curves and angles. That’s space ships for you!” He points out that this was before CNC routers, so you couldn’t just pop what values you had into a computer. “You had to work it out yourself. You had to be very inventive.”

He’d always had an interest in furniture, so Bern filled the time between jobs with furniture commissions, taking on “anything and everything” – tables, cabinets, built-ins, carpentry jobs. He realized that making furniture was what he really wanted to do and started his own business, getting work by word of mouth. Without a shop, he built things in his backyard, or in the client’s. “I got it done,” he says. He persevered and learned from his mistakes.

Between 2005 and 2016 he shared space in group shops, a good way to build up a business when you don’t have the capital to tool up on your own. Needless to say, it could be trying; people had different priorities and interests. The others were building furniture part-time, whereas he was running a business. Eventually he concluded he needed a space of his own.

He got to know his wife, Alice Byrne, as a friend in 2006. It was summer, and Bern was in Paris. Alice happened to be there, too; her boyfriend, Alan, had been awarded a traveling scholarship. An oil painter, she’d been in Paris seven years before as the scholarship’s inaugural winner. She and Bern spent some time together visiting galleries. “I was smitten,” he says, “in the sense of ‘I’ve really got to meet a girl like Alice.’” After about a week, Bern went on his way, not knowing whether he’d ever see her again.

But shortly after he got home to Melbourne, Alice’s brother George called with news that Alice was back. Alan wasn’t with her; he had returned to Sydney. Soon after, Bern and Alice went on a first date, a pub meal and dancing – with George. They’ve been together ever since, and were married in 2009.

Alice put her painting aside when she got pregnant, concerned about the health risks of solvents. After Flannery was born, in 2011, Bern was the family’s main breadwinner. Alice went back to work outside the home part-time when Flann was 2; she manages an art supply shop that does both retail and wholesale work, along with specialty painting services such as framing and stretching canvas. Although she still has a studio space, she has largely put that work aside while raising Flann.

The Move to Chairs

Like many of us, Bern started out in “bespoke” (custom) work. In retrospect, he sees custom work as “a bit of a trap you can fall into. That’s the best way to burn yourself; if you haven’t built something before, you’re not ever going to get paid enough to sort out all the preliminary stuff before you make it. But it’s the best way to learn a lot.”

He stuck with custom work until about 2010, building tables, cabinets, whatever a client might want, while working part-time for a fellow woodworker, Alastair Boell, who had a school, the Melbourne Guild of Fine Woodworking. Alastair was eager to have Bern teach, but Bern had always hated public speaking. “It kind of terrified me.” He gave it a try. He’s glad he did. When Alastair invited Peter Galbert to teach a class on North American Windsor chairs, Bern assisted and found himself smitten with the joinery. Pete, Bern says, is “egoless. Very comprehending, very inventive as a maker… a very inspiring teacher.” In fact, so inspiring “that from that moment all I wanted to do was make chairs.”

Pete encouraged Bern to visit the States and teach at his school in New Hampshire. They made it happen. He taught one class in 2018 and two in 2019 on a chair of his own design that he calls the “No. 14 Chair” – “after Thonet,” he laughs, “because I’m shit at naming things.”

He still makes other forms when he’s really keen on a particular piece, but chairs have become his livelihood. Here we return to the topic of efficiency. “You have to have your own product,” he believes; that way, you’ve got the jigs and processes in place. People order one (or 14!) of that thing “and you can just go straight to work, without thinking” – at least, in principle. He admits “that’s easier said than done.”

He now teaches chairmaking classes at his shop in Thomastown, an industrial area on the northern outskirts of Melbourne. With block walls and a concrete floor, it’s around 2,000 square feet in a gray brick building surrounded by old factories. Teaching has changed the nature of his business, injecting a welcome bit of variety. He keeps classes small, with no more than four students at a time, so that people with different skill levels can all keep up, and he tries to design each class so that students at any level of experience can get something from it.

Teaching has also proved a stabilizing influence in economic terms. “It’s more lucrative than general chairmaking,” he says. “It can afford you that little bit of extra time.” He’s come to regard a few teaching gigs through the year as “economic pillars” around which he can schedule the rest of his work and hopes the higher income from teaching will allow him more time to develop new designs. In Bern’s view, a good chair design combines durability, structural integrity and comfort. “I love designing chairs. Developing them is the most fun you can possibly have.”

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

Editor’s Note: Apologies if you received this post twice. We had some technical problems with this entry (our fault and not Nancy’s).

In her profile on the Brigham and Women’s residency alumni web page, Dr. Ouida Vincent had some fun with the pro forma question “DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE MEMORY FROM RESIDENCY?”

“Spending the night out with co-residents at the ’70s disco,” she answered, punctuating her response with a single word: “Polyester.”

This disarming response will come as no surprise to those who know Ouida, whether in person or from Instagram, where her warmth, humor and sense of adventure are on regular display. “Headed to Handworks by way of MSP,” she wrote in May 2017. “Please say hello… I’ll be the BWWDL” – as she’d previously described herself, the “BLACK WOMAN WITH DREAD LOCKS” – because (let’s be real) how many Black women (or men) with dreads would you typically expect see at a gathering of hand-tool woodworkers in rural Iowa?

When we spoke, on a crisp Saturday morning this fall, she’d just returned from delivering sourdough cinnamon rolls to her mother. It was a short walk up the hill by her house; she was still in her pajamas, under a Carhartt jacket.

Along with thousands of others, Ouida (pronounced WEE-da) took up sourdough bread baking in April, when the pandemic prompted so many to plunge themselves into baking that stores could not keep yeast on the shelves. It wasn’t her first experience with baking; at Cornell she did a medical school rotation on the Navajo Reservation in 1989, staying with a family who baked wholewheat bread or cookies every day. Inspired by their example, she took up baking herself when she returned to med school. Although her first few loaves were “like hubcaps,” she kept at it and quickly improved. She baked every weekend until her professional work became too demanding.

Ouida approaches sourdough baking with the analytical rigor of a scientist and the enthusiasm of one who bakes for love, not money. Her Instagram feed is full of boules and batards – some whole, some sliced in half to reveal herbs, olives or “crumb.” An early September entry that shows the kind of springy texture I can only dream of producing reads like notes on an undergraduate’s experiment:

“[W]hen I want to check oven spring, I look at how the holes are oriented and if the entire loaf from bottom to top was involved in ‘spring.’ You can get three patterns[:] no spring (dense loaf) that may or may not have risen any, spring primarily on the outside of the loaf with a dense (yet hopefully done) interior and spring that involves the whole loaf. The holes will be elongated in the direction of spring and will glisten.”

She brings the same studious curiosity to woodworking. Ouida sees a piece of furniture she likes and figures out how to build it. Her office and home are furnished with pieces of her own making. And when she decided a proofing box would be a boon to her sourdough baking, she puzzled out what it would take to fabricate one.

These days, Ouida, whose day job is clinical director of a hospital on the Navajo Reservation, is “in a mask 10 hours a day, five days a week.” Anyone who pays attention to national events will be aware that Native Americans have been affected terribly by Covid-19. Ouida adds, “Even when there is a vaccine, I will wear my mask (even after getting the vaccine). This is about public health.”

Ouida was born in Nashville, Tenn., the fourth of five children. When her mother and father married, her father brought three from a previous marriage and her mother brought her; they had one son together. Her name is common in the South. “My mother told me that she heard the name and wanted me to be remembered, so she gave me the name.” Then comes the zinger: “You can imagine what kids and substitute teachers did with [it].”  

She can’t remember a time when she wasn’t fascinated by making things and figuring out how to fix them. Her older brother David was “a real Mr. Fix It” from the start, Ouida says; she followed him around and learned from his example.

After her parents split when Ouida was 10, her mother moved Ouida and her younger brother from one place to another, wherever she could find work, usually in college financial aid offices. Ouida would have signed up for shop class in school, but as a girl born in 1963 she wasn’t allowed to. That changed when her family moved to Virginia Beach, Va., in 1976; she enrolled in shop class and small engine repair. She and her classmates learned to strip down and rebuild two-stroke and four-stroke engines, restoring them to working order; they also had to frame the corner of a house, complete with functioning plumbing and electrical service.  

When they moved to Alabama in 1979, Ouida found herself barred from shop class once again. Undeterred, she decided to go ahead and build things on her own, though she found that was more easily said than done, with few tools and no shop. While working on a body for an electric guitar she asked the shop teacher at school if she could use the band saw. He asked her to prove she knew how – a challenge she met in short order. He gave her permission to use the shop facilities when classes weren’t in session. She’s been building ever since.

Given her facility for learning new skills and diagnosing problems, it’s not terribly surprising that Ouida, who excelled academically, found her way into medicine. She graduated from Cornell Medical College in 1990 at the age of 27, then did a residency at Brigham and Women’s in Boston. “My uncle was an Ob/Gyn. It was really the first medical career I was exposed to. I was briefly attracted to general surgery, but the general surgeons I was exposed to seemed not to have personal lives. I was ultimately attracted to the combination of surgery and diagnostic medicine that obstetrics and gynecology offers.”

She originally hoped to do a medical student rotation in Alaska, but when she inquired, she learned that all rotations there were filled – she would have had to apply at least a year in advance, rather than a few months ahead of the starting date. “When I walked in to talk with one of our deans, she was opening a letter from alumni who had taken jobs in Shiprock, N.M. They had space for students, so I went. The year was 1989. I fell in love with the medical community and knew I wanted to return,” though she adds “I didn’t plan on making a career out of it.” 

In 1998 she moved to Gallup, N.M., and became Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology. When her real estate agent heard about her interest in woodworking, she mentioned there were classes at the local branch of the University of New Mexico. Ouida signed up for a course in cabinetmaking. The college had a well-equipped machine shop, but no hand tools. As she deepened her experience of working with machines, she learned another valuable lesson – “the frustration of power tools!” Even though the college had a full-time staff person charged with repair and maintenance, “there was always a machine down.”

Ouida’s work responsibilities grew, leaving her with less time for classes, yet she continued to pack in as much woodworking as she could. One of her early projects was an 8’-high x 3’-wide media cabinet. Another was a hutch based on an article in Fine Woodworking; it’s in her office today.

In 2006 she bought a property in Colorado, attracted in part by a dilapidated barn on the site. “This is my woodshop,” she remembers thinking when she first saw it. Termites and rain had done their worst; contractors she called for estimates to rehabilitate the structure said it wasn’t worth saving, that she should build something new. “But I wanted to work in a barn,” she says. Eventually she found a contractor who was willing to fix it up for her.

Ouida slowly taught herself to use hand tools. She learned a lot from Chris Schwarz’s videos on hand tool basics and watched the Popular Woodworking series “I Can Do That.” She made a desk of ambrosia maple and cherry for a friend; the hand-cut dovetails were “so gappy that I made the gaps the same size and backfilled them with filler of a different color.” She persevered and improved. The same went for sharpening. “The first time I sharpened a plane blade it took six hours,” she says. But she found the more she worked in hardwoods, the greater her appreciation of the need for sharpening and the better at it she became. In the end, she says, “the wood became my best teacher.”

Around 2011 she made some shop stools based on a video by Mike Siemsen. When “The Anarchist’s Design Book” was published, she built one project after another from it – a boarded bookcase, staked desk (now in her office), six-board chest and staked chair. “I would have made more from that book,” she says, “had Peter Follansbee not published his book and completely derailed my life! I’ve literally done nothing but carve since 2019.”

Ouida is well aware of the sacrifices her mother made as a single parent. She also deeply appreciates her maternal grandmother’s support, calling her “a constant figure in my life until she passed away in 2001.” She cites one incident in particular, which culminated in the United States Supreme Court case NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, to illustrate the impression her grandmother Dolly made.

Dolly Thompson was from Mississippi and had a ninth-grade education. “It was in the Jim Crow South,” Ouida points out by way of context. Even though the population of Claiborne County, where they lived, was majority Black, all the political seats were held by White people. Her grandparents owned a funeral home and were solidly middle-class. But when they traveled cross-country to attend mortuary conventions, they always had to think about where they’d be allowed to stay at night.

It was common in that time and place for Black people to be called names (if their presence was even acknowledged) and forbidden to use public restrooms or sit at lunch counters. Tired of being treated as second-class citizens when they were upstanding members of the community, Ouida’s grandmother (her grandfather died in 1962) and many of her fellow community members, working with a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), decided to “talk with their dollars.” They organized a boycott of White-owned businesses, setting up a supply house of their own called Our Mart to keep fellow citizens supplied with hardware, food, clothes and other everyday needs. They funded the project by selling shares.

Several of the White-owned businesses joined forces and sued for damages – in a majority-Black county, their businesses couldn’t survive without the now-missing income. When the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in the White businesses’ favor, Ouida’s grandmother and her fellow boycotters took the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the NAACP.

The whole thing, she notes, came about “simply because that group of people wanted better treatment.” Although this was her grandparents’ experience, Ouida understands it’s not that far removed from our own time — she belongs to the first generation to grow up outside of Jim Crow. And it’s easy to see how Ouida, with these determined and hardworking role models, became the kind of woodworker who doesn’t flinch at challenges, but sticks at a task until she has mastered it, having lots of fun along the way.

Summing up our conversation, she reflects that “the reason I’ve continued doing [woodworking] is the stimulation it provides.” She trained as a surgeon, but her work for the past several years has been in administration. She misses the contact with tools and materials. Bread making helps fill the gap; woodworking goes even further. “Now I get to hold instruments in my hand that use fine motor skills., similar to using a scalpel,” she adds. No wonder she can’t stop carving.

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

From the vantage point of 2020, it’s jarring to recall a time before you could Google the length of a human colon while taking a bathroom break, share shots via Zoom in real time with friends in another hemisphere or ask Siri for the latest update on the Kardashians. (Then again, why would you want to do any of these?) Has Facebook really been around for just 16 years? Instagram no more than a decade? In fact, the internet itself only became publicly available in 1991.

In the primitive age that preceded this era of often-superficial connection, woodworkers and their fellow artisans had other ways to communicate and show their work to potential buyers. Some published paper catalogs sent to thousands of prospective customers by U.S. Mail. Some bought ads in newspapers and magazines where they might also be lucky enough to have their products featured. Others displayed their work in what we now call brick-and-mortar galleries, in exchange for a cut of the price – often as much as 40 percent. But one of the most affordable ways to show and sell work was at art fairs and craft shows.

After a strong start to 2020, shows, conferences and in-person performances of all kinds have been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, demanding that those whose livelihoods depend on such events find new ways of teaching, entertaining and selling their wares. Given how challenging such pivots can be, Vicki and Lance Munn have found a silver lining of sorts in the timing of their unexpected retirement in late 2019. For 40 years, they’d supported themselves by making furnishings, from Japanese-style vases, wood-framed mirrors and wall-hung artwork to freestanding cabinets, desks and tables, all of which they sold at shows throughout the Midwest and on the East coast.

Lance and Vicki met in 1969. Lance, who’d been drafted, was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, where Vicki had a job in the post exchange. Lance was lucky to avoid deployment to Vietnam; he served in the States as a member of the military police. “The Army made him grow up,” says Vicki. “All of a sudden you’re not special. You get your head shaved, you wear a uniform. You’re only what you are inside, not the projected image others see.”

After completing his term, Lance moved home to Indianapolis to live and work with his parents, who were in the restaurant business. Vicki earned a degree in political science at Kansas State University-Manhattan while continuing to work part-time at the post exchange. She lived in her employer’s basement. (“At the time, I didn’t realize I was poor,” she says of the arrangement.) She graduated in 1971, packed up her belongings in cardboard boxes, shipped them to Indianapolis on a Greyhound Bus and took a plane to join Lance. Shortly after, they were married.

At first they each worked two jobs, a logistical feat considering that they shared a car – and it was more than 20 years old. Lance returned to college while working part-time and graduated with a degree in biological science from Purdue University. Meanwhile, Vicki worked her way up to office manager in her job at an electrical supply office. When she asked for a raise in keeping with her increased responsibilities, her employer told her the job was only worth the $100 a week she was already getting – not much on which to build a future. With no prospect of advancement, she gave her notice. That would be her last regular job until 2020.

While renting a house on the western outskirts of Indianapolis, they decided to put in a garden. They saved up for a Troy-Bilt tiller; once they’d bought it, they realized they owned a potentially valuable asset, so they ran a classified ad for tilling services in the local paper. Business took off, and before long they needed a pickup truck to move the tiller. “Now we’re in the hauling business,” Vicki remembers thinking. They added moving services to their repertoire and trucked junk to the recycling center for people who were clearing out garages. When winter brought a major ice storm that downed trees, blocking streets and closing the city, they invested in a chainsaw and worked to clear limbs.

Around this time a friend who’d moved to Hawaii sent them a gift of some puka-shell necklaces. Where others saw a cool bit of jewelry made of natural objects, Vicki and Lance saw opportunity: They invested in some shells and made their own necklaces to sell at art fairs. At one show they spotted some wooden planters backed with mirrors – another item Vicki suggested Lance could make. “We had tools,” she says, “because we did everything for ourselves.” The planters sold even better than the jewelry. That was their start in wood.

Their son, Peter Brian, was born in 1977, followed by their daughter, Kelly, two years later. It was time to look for a piece of property to make their own. They searched in Brown County, an area some 60 miles southeast of Indianapolis known for its forested hills and history as a home to artists since the early 20^th century, but found nothing affordable. They looked on the outskirts of Bloomington, home to the flagship campus of Indiana University, which draws students and faculty members from around the world. Also unaffordable. From there they set their sights farther to the south and west, in Greene County, where for $40,000 they found a property of 50 acres “with an old farmhouse at the top of a hill and a garage that stood at a slant.”  The owner was willing to sell on contract, which clinched the deal. They made the down payment in cash, because that was how people paid for purchases at art shows in the ’70s. “I think they thought we were drug dealers,” Vicki laughs. “We had no business sense at all.” It was 1979. Vicki was 29, Lance 31.

A major show in Indianapolis’s Broadripple neighborhood was coming up in May. They plugged their tools into an outlet in an old shed on their new property and worked in the yard to prepare. Shortly after, they had a 40’ x 40’ pole barn built for a shop. They still weren’t making furniture, but looking back, it’s clear they were headed in that direction as they ventured into simple wooden table bases topped with Italian tile. They learned about wood movement from their mistakes; before long they had to decide between making a fast buck and doing things right. “We read Tage Frid, we read Fine Woodworking, we read books,” Vicki says. “We never considered ourselves artists; we wanted to be the best craftsmen we could.” They named their business Viclan Designs.

Early on, thinking that a business should have employees, they hired a few to work in the shop. Before long they concluded they were chasing their tails. Having employees proved exhausting; as Vicki says, “it was like I’d gone through five divorces and 10 DUIs without ever having had any of them myself.” On top of that, Vicki and Lance were gone all the time; it looked like their children were going to be raised by a babysitter. It made more sense to let the employees go and do everything themselves.

They added more shows every year, packing up their booth and stock for sale and driving – first, to Ann Arbor, Louisville, Cincinnati and Toledo, in addition to selling at shows closer to home in Broadripple and at Bloomington’s Fourth Street Festival, then increasingly far afield. Things improved. “Lance and I together are such a good team,” Vicki says. “People would buy stuff from us because they liked us. People want to meet the artists. The internet is not the same as talking to the artists and touching things before you buy them.” When Peter was a baby, she put him in a crib under one of the tables in the booth, but having two small children at a show was too much, so Lance did some of the shows by himself while Vicki and the kids stayed home.

As anyone who has tried to make a living by doing art and craft shows can attest, their schedule was grueling, their income totally undependable. “Shows are fickle,” as Vicki puts it. They always worked hard, but there were years when they made no money beyond basic expenses.

Building the Business

They made improvements to the shop as they were able, starting with a loft for storage, then adding another 600 square feet at the back. Later they added 300 square feet more for lumber storage. In 1990 they built a new house to replace the dilapidated farmhouse. They’d started with antique equipment – a chain-fed rip saw from the 1930s, a ’40s overhead router – driving to auctions and buying what they could afford. Their first piece of new equipment was a wide-belt sander they purchased in the mid-1980s; they took out a loan to pay the $10,000 cost. For their anniversary around 2014, they bought each other a Powermatic band saw – an unusual anniversary gift, but they enjoyed buying things for the business because it made their lives easier.

The more they learned, the more sophisticated their work became and their sales improved. Vicki traveled to Japan in 2000; Peter’s girlfriend, a Japanese-American, was teaching English there and invited her to visit. “It was my 50^th birthday present,” she explains, adding that Lance took the opportunity to go fly fishing in New Zealand. During her month in Japan, Vicki happened on a thousand-year-old pagoda. “It was red,” she exclaims, which prompted her to wonder “Why can’t we do red?” They started to experiment with aniline dyes.

Experience had taught them the importance of having smaller, affordable pieces to sell at shows. “If you have an item that sells, that gives you the freedom to make other things that you want to.” For a while they made Craftsman-style picture frames. Vicki was drawn to the Japanese art of floral arranging called ikebana. Ikebana vessels became one of their business staples; she made them until she was sick of them, then kept on making more. She cut out the basic shape at the band saw, then moved to the edge sander. “I’d put on my headphones and step up to the edge sander and go “fifty dollars, fifty dollars, fifty dollars. I know a lot of our artist friends would say ‘how can you do that?’ And I’d say ‘it pays our phone, it pays our gas…’ When you’re selling something for $50 it’s an easier sale then something for $5,000. Pretty soon, as we got into the better shows, we could [afford to] make cabinets.”

As time went by, the Munns found they could sell more substantial pieces. “Mostly we looked at ourselves and thought ‘how can anybody pay that?’ But as [we did] the better shows, we always seemed to pick up someone who would buy more than one piece, and then they’d call and [ask for custom work]. We made things for people that they couldn’t find. Often in later years we would sell more by order than from the booth.”

Among the unusual features of their work are the wooden pulls they made for doors and drawers.

Lance had made a pull like those on the olive-tiger maple cabinet (in the image with the band saw) for some doors in their house. “I always loved them,” Vicki says. “At first when we got into the cabinets, we offered two types of pulls…smooth and gnarly.” She notes that they “would invariably have the wrong pull on the cabinet the customer wanted in the booth,” a situation that will be familiar to most of those who build to order. “Finally, gnarly won out. [Making those was] a very dirty job on the bullnose of our edge sander. Lance did an excellent job of making matched sets of pulls. I was never able to get two the same.”

Business & Aging

Today Vicki is 70, Lance 72. For most of their years in business, Viclan Designs was organized as a sole proprietorship, but when Lance was old enough to qualify for Social Security, their accountant advised them to incorporate so that their joint income wouldn’t disqualify them for the Social Security they were due.

When I asked about economic downturns such as the Great Recession, which devastated many furniture makers, Vicki said they’ve always come through relatively unscathed. Some of their artist friends maintained that Vicki and Lance charged too little for their work, but as Vicki says, “We always felt we need to make a living at this,” so they made sure they had pieces that were all but guaranteed to sell.

Having started with so little, they spent 40 years investing in their shop and business and were rewarded not just with higher income, but opportunities to grow as designers and craftspersons. With loyal customers who returned yearly to buy from them at shows around the Midwest and on the East coast, in addition to commissioning custom work, they were enjoying a successful season in 2019 and building up stock for the upcoming Fourth Street Festival – Vicki was a longstanding member of the show’s organizing committee.

In the small hours of August 5^th, they awoke to the sound of someone banging on the front door. “We have no neighbors,” Vicki remarks, recalling the shock. It was the sheriff, asking “Does anybody live in that building?” He was pointing to their shop.

“The roof was already [falling] in,” Vicki says. A stranger who happened to be passing on the road a half-mile away had spotted the flames and called 911. By then it was too late – the building, the tools, the lumber, the completed pieces ready for the upcoming show and their two shop cats – all gone.

The shock was devastating. They wracked their minds, trying to figure out what had happened. It was August; the woodstove had been cold for months. Nor had they been staining, she was relieved to realize. In their early days, when they worked in the garage at a rented house, they used Danish oil; after working late one night they’d dumped the rags in their garden cart and pushed it out on the driveway. The only thing left of the cart the next morning was the wheels. After that, they’d always been extremely careful with finishes, storing rags in a firmly shut can and finishes in a metal safety cabinet. An inspector suspected the fire had started in the electrical wiring.

Although they’d insured the shop in their early years, the cost of coverage had gone through the roof. First it was $4,000 a year, then $5,000. Pretty soon the premium had increased to $10,000, partly because they heated with wood and used solvent-based finishes, partly because their location was so remote and the local fire department was all-volunteer. They’d decided they would just have to be careful.

Friends organized a fundraiser. “That saved us,” says Vicki. “It enabled us to pay off our bills. We had just gotten lumber on Friday, a delivery of cherry, and the fire was Sunday.” Not only did they still have to pay for that lumber; they also had to return deposits to customers who had commissioned pieces to pick up at upcoming shows – Cherry Creek (in Colorado) and Ann Arbor (in Michigan). “We had some customers who wouldn’t even take their deposits back,” she says, her voice breaking. (Among them were the patrons for whom Vicki and Lance made the olive-tiger maple cabinet in the photo of the band saw.) “It makes you feel good about yourself and thankful for other people.”

“We lost our cats, our bicycles, our kayaks. And all of the little things. We paid off our bills, returned our deposits, and got a grant from CERF (the Craft Emergency Relief Fund) and bought tools.” The maximum grant available through CERF is $3,000. “To us it was $3,000-worth of tools. We didn’t have that money.” This time, they bought smaller tools – a Festool sander, a Domino mortiser, a track saw – that enable them to work on projects around the house, but not the kind of furniture they used to make.

Their daughter offered Vicki a part-time job in her medical office to help her parents make ends meet. They also receive some Social Security income. “We’re not doing anything great, but we’re happy. We’re pleased to have more time for our granddaughter, Piper,” Vicki says, adding “we miss the shop.”

After decades of not having a dog because they were on the road for so much of each year, they adopted a couple of Labrador puppies, Kiki and Tuck, in July.

They took down their website, because most of their inventory was destroyed. “We were in shock for a long time. Then came COVID. But life is getting more normal. If it weren’t for the fire, we’d still be working in the shop…. We have just a few things left that we are showing at By Hand Gallery in Bloomington. Basically, we are starting a new life in our seventies.” 

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