Editor’s note: In today’s chair chat we discuss a chair that is so beautiful it makes Chris write poetry. We are unsure about its heritage, but it could be from Wales. Or further east. As Chris was smoking his ham, we found that we love this chair to bits, despite its possibly fake tits. Oh, did I mention to beware the salty language? Sorry!
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True Grit: An Interview with Helen Welch of the London School of Furniture Making
Chris Schwarz suggested I invite Helen Welch to be interviewed for the Lost Art Press blog. “She is a “[bleep]ing badass,” he wrote. “A tool nerd. Funny and sharp as hell.” So I wrote her by email. She sent back the following reply.
“If nothing else (other than saving lives), this lockdown has given us all a chance to do stuff we wouldn’t normally do. Things I’ve discovered during this time:
“I hate sourdough.
“I do not like to work from home. A one-bedroom apartment is no place to make the kind of mess I enjoy in the workshop.
“Practicing my golf swing indoors has aged the fixtures and fittings.
“The homemade wines I made two years ago are now drinking well. A rare case of serendipity.
“Danish is a very odd language but I’m enjoying the challenge.
“Videoing myself is a special kind of torture, only topped by having to edit the damn thing. Gruesome. Likewise Zoom, Skype etc.”
Then she said sure, she’d be happy to do the interview.
I knew I was going to enjoy our phone call.
Most woodworkers familiar with Helen know her through the London School of Furniture Making, which she founded and has operated since 2013. “It’s nowhere near as august as the London College of Furniture,” she laughs, acknowledging the similarity between the two names. Woodworking schools pride themselves on a range of qualities, from their size and diversity of course offerings to their cultivation of individual students’ skill in artistic design, or their faithfulness to particular historical traditions. The London School of Furniture Making is tiny, with just four benches, which allows Helen and her fellow instructor, Sam Brown, to give each student an extraordinary level of attention. Course offerings are varied in terms of topic and duration, aimed primarily at amateur makers. Short courses build specific skills; project courses offer opportunities to put them into practice. Beyond this, students can pay a daily fee to come in and simply use the benches and tools, as well as pick her brains. If the London School of Furniture Making were to claim a special niche, it might be that these characteristics make learning there unusually customized and accessible.
Helen started the school after decades of work in the trades. She was born and raised in North London, where her father sold film (the kind for cameras in the pre-digital era) at Boots, a nationwide pharmacy chain. Her mother had a variety of jobs that included work in a perfume factory but spent most of her career in retail sales at John Lewis, one of Britain’s best loved department stories. Helen’s older brother, Maurice, is a passionate photographer who’s all about electronics and gadgets.
At the age of 11 Helen made a conscious decision to go to a girls’ school. “I didn’t want to have to fight for my teachers’ attention,” she explains. By the time she entered sixth form (senior high school in the United States), the school had become co-ed. In 1984, as she was preparing to take her A-Levels in biology, chemistry and business studies, she says, “all my fears about being overlooked came to fruition. I was simply exhausted from the struggle, so I left.”
Later that year she returned to the school to attend a careers fair, most of the offerings at which were “not interesting, just banks and boring things, not what I envisaged doing…” But as she wandered around the booths, a couple of people at a tiny stall in a corner called out “Come chat to us! If you’re not doing anything, why don’t you come and work in our woodwork-cum-training college?” Why not? she thought, and jumped right in.
The business was a collaboration of four people – two men and two women – who shared a shop in the north London area called Kentish Town. “Splinter Group was a training center which carried out woodworking jobs in the local community,” she told me. “I was paid £25 per week as part of the government’s Youth Training Scheme.” The shop was a large space with an eight-bench hand tool room and a separate machine shop, all on the first floor (which we in the States refer to as the second floor) of a Victorian-era light industrial building. The work entailed a mixture of teaching/learning and making. “If it was wood, they did it. They would bring their trainees on site as well as building in the shop.” While working there Helen made a set of stairs; a complicated play frame for a children’s play center; a table and shelves, and a toolbox for the tool set they gave her. “I remember thinking it was quite a good mix of skills and different woodworking projects. It gave me an idea of what was possible — there are all sorts of things I can make with these skills.”
After about six months at this cooperative shop, Helen spent a year doing a variety of work, “including making some fake French antiques for a guy I met in a pub.” She worked in building maintenance for a local women’s center and ended up applying for an apprenticeship in carpentry and joinery with Camden Council, where she spent three years – one year in building maintenance and repairs; one year of renovation and restoration on jobsites; and one year in a joiner’s shop making windows and doors. She earned her City & Guilds Certificate in carpentry and joinery in the late 1980s, specializing in (of all things) building forms for cast concrete structures, a skill she hasn’t used since. As soon as she had the certificate, she left the council job. “’This is a three-year prison sentence which is now up,’” she remembers thinking – “three years of misogyny and racism. I have very few happy memories [of that time]. It was tiresome, but I worked hard to not let it scar me.”
Helen took a job as a building inspector for the Building Control Department in Camden and then Islington, where she worked for five years. As someone who had worked in the trades, she says, “I realized there was a split between the people who came in from university and those from the trades. I quickly made friends with the ex-carpenters and the ex-plumbers. We were more collaborative when working with the chippies (Brit-speak for carpenters) on site, whereas some of our colleagues just wanted to read the letter of the law. [The work of building inspectors] is more of a problem-solving exercise,” she says, alluding to the kind of considered and constructive approach that anyone in construction or remodeling appreciates. She sums up that experience as “five years of interesting developments in my understanding of construction and the legal side [of that business].” But in the end, she felt “I was too young to be trapped telling people what to do. I missed being back in the workshop making things.”
So she took herself off to the London Metropolitan University (formerly the London Guildhall University/London College of Furniture, and before that, Shoreditch Technical Institute) to study guitar making. “I had a fantastic three years there,” she says of that time, which allowed her to develop her skills at a far higher level. She graduated from the program thinking “Wow, this is amazing – and there’s absolutely no career in it!”
Being a determined individual in need of income, Helen started making built-ins and doing carpentry. She had no shop; she worked in people’s homes. “[It was] me, my van and tool kit. Me constructing things on site. It worked for a good number of years.” Her business came exclusively by word of mouth. Her customers were mostly married couples with a couple of kids, “quite well-paid people in their mid-30s who’d just bought their first proper house and wanted to have some built-in cupboards.”
She supported herself by means of this work, without a shop, for about 10 years, starting around 1994. She had a typical complement of trim carpentry tools: a portable Festool table saw (made up by fitting her track saw into a table), a jigsaw, planer, power tools, and used a couple of “trestles” (sawhorses) topped with a sheet of plywood for a bench. “Not a lot of hand tools,” she says, then throws in: “When I think about it now I wonder how did I manage to last 10 years doing that? Eight-by-four sheets of MDF. Hateful!”
As a side gig ever since completing her training in lutherie she taught part time at London Metropolitan University, City and Islington College, Women’s Education in Building and The School of Stuff, to name a few – some evening classes, sometimes one day a week. She enjoyed teaching but she still had no intention of doing so in her own set-up.
Around 2004 Helen finally got a workshop in a space shared with a fellow who went by the name Bob Smoke (not his real name); he made props and designed special effects for film and television. Although she describes it as “an enormous hangar of a place which was freezing cold in winter and hot in summer, never comfortable,” the new work situation gave her the opportunity to retrieve her better equipment from the storage unit where she’d been keeping it, and to make more interesting things than painted built-ins. Jobs still came entirely through word of mouth.
By 2010 she’d decided it was time to commit to what she calls “a proper workshop.” She looked around. For £600 a month she could get a place that wasn’t much bigger than the living room in her apartment. But for £750 she could get something much better: a shared workspace in a complex of industrial warehouses built around the 1970s in Tottenham, North London, that’s home to 15 cabinetmaking businesses. She went to see the couple of guys who had the space to let, Alistair Williams and Joe Ridout – they run a furniture and cabinetmaking company – and she ended up renting the space. Since then, she says, “I really haven’t looked back.” When they moved into a bigger unit she asked if she could take on a couple of students as a new venture – “something sustainable that makes me feel like I’m having a good time…something that will not give me sleepless nights and leave me feeling resentful to[ward] customers.” She found that there were lots of people eager to learn, people who valued her flexible set-up. Her fledgling venture grew, and she decided it was going to be a school. Happily, Joe and Alistair were and still are very supportive.
Most students find her through the school’s website. Classes have been cancelled since mid-March. She’s spent her time at the shop alone streamlining things and improving ergonomics – much-needed improvements to what she calls the previous “controlled chaos,” while also “playing with my tool kit, as opposed to the school’s. I’m a tinkerer.” The last thing she made was a solid silver plane, just for fun. “I wanted to try my hand at jewelry, working with precious metal clay.” After firing you end up with 99 percent pure silver.
Most other businesses in the building have been carrying on as usual. For those doing custom furniture and cabinetmaking, there’s plenty of space to keep the recommended distance from others; for teaching detailed hand skills, not so much. She hopes to resume classes in June.
— Nancy Hiller, author of Making Things Work
A Review of ‘Hands Employed Aright’
Ray Deftereos, a self-described “hand tool evangelist from South Africa,” began learning about and working with hand tools only two years ago. This, in part, makes him an ideal person to host “Hand Tool Book Review,” a “podcast for woodworms.”
When starting out, Ray says he found it difficult to find good books about working with hand tools. So he read about 100 of them, and is reviewing them regularly. His reviews (so far he’s completed 18) are a joy to listen to –– carefully and professionally crafted, they’re thoughtful and concise, and as an avid learner himself, Ray understands what elements a book must have to further his skill. His pleasing voice is an added bonus.
Ray’s 17th book review was of Joshua Klein’s “Hands Employed Aright: The Furniture Making of Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847).” Ray calls it “a reference book that will continue to provide benefit for years to come.”
Regarding the book’s physical qualities, Ray says, “I wish a podcast could let you feel the texture of a book. But I guess we’ll have to settle for words.” And later: “The end product is a rich book that has to be physically seen to be truly appreciated. There’s a wonderful texture, layout and composition to the book that makes it suitable as a prized coffee table book. To get your non-hand-tool friends on the right path of course, just leave them waiting for a few minutes with the book front and center, and let the book do the talking.”
But Ray is quick to note that “Hands Employed Aright” is much more than a beautiful coffee table book. Using the phrase “investigative archaeology” more than once, Ray points out the usefulness of the book to both the beginner and experienced craftsperson. While the beginning of the book is a fascinating look at Jonathan Fisher’s life, Ray says the “back section is perfect for mulling over when starting a new project” and that inspiration can be found for a “range of projects” with folk who have a “range of experience.”
Ray also enjoyed Joshua’s careful cataloguing of Jonathan Fisher’s tools. For those still building their tool kits, it can be difficult to decide what is necessary. “I suggest that in time this book will become one of the classics alongside Benjamin Seaton’s tool chest in terms of being an incredible insight into what a typical tool kit might have contained,” Ray says.
Beyond tool and project inspiration, Ray says Jonathan Fisher’s daily journal writing “leaves an incredible record that is probably the most complete of any pre-industrial woodworking that will ever be uncovered. That said, it’s probably going to be a source of new revelations for a long time to come as the historical record is translated and compiled. And yet … perhaps the honesty of the record is what makes this book a moving read.”
Jonathan Fisher is deeply humble and human, something Joshua clearly portrays through the book. These attributes are also present in Jonathan Fisher’s woodworking. “Paging through the pieces I felt a part of sweet connection with the past,” Ray says.
Joshua “interrogates the details so thoroughly,” Ray adds. “I think that often hand tool use is romanticized as being slow or old-fashioned. The author does a lot to dispel these perceptions by showing how building furniture in this manner can be very efficient, if done with a pre-industrial mindset.”
Ray adds that this is one of the first books he’s read that celebrated the idea that tear-out on the inside of a piece is acceptable. “Like the concept of reference faces, this is a concept that becomes mundane the more you practice it,” Ray says. “But it seemed radical, the first time I encountered it. … In your hand-tool journey, I suggest that this book will help you learn from those who came before us, people who had no access to band saws or electric planers or shop assistants as they’re romantically called today. And from their experience, there is a wealth of knowledge to be gained.”
In the beginning of this particular episode, Ray says future podcasts will discuss books on workbenches, tools, wood and finishing.
You can listen to this podcast and Ray’s others, here. You can purchase “Hands Employed Aright,” and download a free preview, here.
Thank you, Ray, for taking the time to read and review Joshua’s book –– and for sharing your hand-tool journey with so many.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
Cincinnati’s Shop of the Crafters
When you think of American Arts & Crafts furniture, the names Stickley and Limbert are probably the first to spring to mind, but in my neck of the woods, I think Onken. Well, not really – but I do think immediately of the Cincinnati company he bought in 1904, The Shop of the Crafters.
Unlike the many shops of the turn of the 20th century that offered close copies of Stickley designs, The Shop of the Crafters incorporated German influences (not a surprise in Cincinnati, which had at least six German-language newspapers in the 19th century) and Hungarian influences, thanks to the lead designer, Pál Horti. Many of the designs incorporate inlay in contrasting woods and metal, which lends a touch of refinement. Though some of it is, to my eye, a bit on the overwrought side, the marketing language of the 1906 catalog tells me I must be a philistine:
“The Crafter movement seeks to obliterate over-decoration, purposeless, meaningless designs and to install instead, a purity of style, which will express at once, beauty, durability and usefulness.
“Working in harmony with this idea Professor Paul Horti has introduced a touch of inlay work of colored woods or metal, that enlivens the strong simple lines of Mission furniture.
“Professor Horti’s dining room at the St. Louis Fair and his designs for the decoration of the Hungarian sections in the Palace of Fine Arts Building, Manufacturers’ Building and Mines and Metallurgy Building were so wholly delightful in their originality as to have exerted a far reaching influence on the general, crafts’ movement. His work with the Shop of the Crafters of Cincinnati has contributed to the distinction it enjoys for productions that are pure in style and of artistic beauty. Your attention is directed to the special pieces referred to, which you will find on the following pages.
“In fine cabinet work and finish the Shop of the Crafters particularly excels. The wood is selected church oak; the workmanship shows the highest skill and the true craftsman’s thought for durability and service. The different finishes are mellow and lovely, bringing out, not concealing the natural beauty of the wood.”
I do have a couple of Shop of the Crafters pieces on my “to build” list (including the Morris chair that Christopher Schwarz built in the June 2000 issues of Popular Woodworking – it’s the No. 413 shown at top).
There are several interesting online sources for more information, including:
• The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County offers a download of the company’s 1906 catalog
• The Hagely Museum and Library (Wilmington, Del.) offers a download of the company’s window and other store displays
• The Met offers a digitized catalog of the company’s 1912-13 Dining Room Furniture
There’s also a 2017 book, “Oscar Onken and The Shop of the Crafters at Cincinnati,” by M.J. McCracken and W. Michael McCracken, that shares the history of Onken and his designers, as well as catalogs, photos of the pieces and the entire first issue of The Lantern, a short-lived promotional magazine on the company and its philosophy (Chris wrote about it here).
And when it’s safe to travel again, plan a visit to Cincinnati, and save time for a few hours (at least) at the Cincinnati Art Museum, where there’s a good collection of Shop of the Crafters and other Cincinnati-made furniture.
— Fitz
Chair Documentary Free for a Short Time
If you are into chairs and history, make time very soon to watch this 90-minute film: “Chair Times: A History of Seating – From 1800 to Today.” The Vitra Design Museum is streaming it for free right now, and I don’t know how long that will last.
The film is a beautiful tour through a portion of Vitra’s historical collection of chairs, which spans more than 200 years of commercial production. The film, which is in German, French and English (with English subtitles), covers the work of many of the important designers and innovators – particularly in the 20th century.
Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman emeritus of Vitra, is the host, and he and his guests examine the chairs and discuss what is important or interesting about them (it’s like a very refined Chair Chat).
Many of these chairs are not to my taste at all. There is a lot of tubular steel and plastic that receives a lot of praise. But the enthusiasm and deep knowledge of the people in the film make it a joy to watch (even if you would stab an inflatable plastic chair to death just on principle).
Vitra produces many beautiful chairs. It also makes delightful miniature versions of historical chairs that are astonishing in their detail (I’ve seen several in person). These miniatures are used in the film and are also worth seeing.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Thanks to Matthew Johnson for the tip on the film.