This post is a continuation from a series of posts following a “read-along” or book club of sorts. This week, I’ll be discussing a third chunk of “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” by James Krenov, up to page 69. Next week, we’ll read up to page 78, and you can leave comments and questions about pages 70-78 in the comments section below, which I’ll answer and incorporate into next week’s post. This is a short passage, but it makes the most sense for dividing up the reading. There’s a lot to talk about in those two passages!
We are halfway into Krenov’s first book – and only just getting into what this book was about. Up to now, we’ve been wrestling with his words, but he was a cabinetmaker. So, maybe we should look at some of his work.
After all, Krenov was as much a cabinetmaker as a writer. It’s a funny thing to say, to split his identity one way or the other. By 1976, he’d been writing since he was just a teenager and had published several stories and travelogue. He’d only been working with wood for 18 or 19 years. In some ways, Krenov was a writer all along, but it’s clear that his life focused on and rallied around his craft once he discovered it. “Cabinetmaker Laureate” is the term I’ve been using for a while, and I think it’s apt. I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff.
So, let’s look at some furniture. I particularly like the three pieces that were detailed in last week’s reading, which is why I wanted to draw your focus to his work in this part of the book. They span his career up to this point, they’re aesthetically varied, they’re stunning work and I have some great details and even “fact-checking” for each of the three.
The “Violin Cabinet” (date debatable) in Oregon pine, larch, pearwood and beech.
The first of the three is the “Violin Cabinet.” Now, usually, I follow the name of the piece with a date – so perhaps I should have written “Violin Cabinet” (1969), which bears the date Krenov assigns the piece in the book. But look at the image below:
Okay, there’s a lot to unpack in that image. First, on the far right (and cropped off on the far left, maybe) is a bizarre piece I’ve never seen of Krenov’s, a “cabinet on a shelf” form – news to me. And speaking of “news” – in the distance, there are two trios of near identical pieces, in scale and form. Was he making multiples? Once again – news to me. The “No-Glass Showcase of Lemon Wood” (1962) is centerstage out on the floor, and on the left, we can see the “Violin Cabinet.”
The reason I present this photo to you: it was taken in 1965, at Krenov’s first solo show, “Liv i Trä” (Life in Wood), in the Hantverket gallery in central Stockholm. You may recognize the plain walls and nondescript carpet – many of the photos of Krenov’s work in his later books, especially those in “Worker in Wood,” were taken at the gallery, because Krenov held several shows here over his time in Sweden.
But again – the photo is from 1965. You can see the “Violin Cabinet” there on the left wall. There’s even a violin inside it, though I doubt it’s the Guaneri that Krenov mentions in “Worker in Wood,” where he provides some more details about this piece. So, the date is wrong, only off by a few years, maybe five. Not a big deal.
But, knowing that the cabinet is from before 1965, more of its features and peculiarities begin making sense. The simple shaping, almost completely rectilinear, was more common in his “early years” (I might define that time period as before his first solo show in 1965). He also used many more softwoods in these years – this could have been his interest at the time, and he may not yet have found the access to the exotic woods that would dominate his “middle years” (the 1970s or so, in my book). The pulls are simpler, and very smooth, with none of the carved facets his later work would have.
So, while the date hardly matters for the sake of “truth,” knowing that this is actually among the earliest work in the book helps us look for a few trends, and understand a bit of how his tastes and practices matured.
The piece is crisp. Larry Barrett noticed in his reading that the reveal around the doors was askew in one photo, but I’m sure it was either age or the angle – the photo above shows how svelte and careful the shaping and polishing was on this piece. Douglas fir is not as soft as pine – but getting such nice burnished edges, what Krenov would refer to as “friendly,” is not so simple. It’s a favorite piece of mine, in spite of it being so simple. Perhaps it’s because it fulfills a purpose so neatly – I need a place to put my violin, here it is. The fine-grained softwoods complement the spruce top of the violin, which is perfectly displayed above shelves for its accessories. It makes me wish I played the violin, so that I could make a cabinet like this.
“Chess Table” (1970), playing surface of pearwood and Rio rosewood, body of secupira and drawer of maple.
The second piece covered in this section of the book is the “Chess Table” (1970). I have no arguments for that date. But, this time there are more details about who designed the piece, not its date. In fact, this is the only piece I know of where another designer worked with Krenov to make a piece of furniture.
Craig McArt was a central figure in Krenov’s career. McArt encouraged Jim to write a book, got his first essay published in Craft Horizons in 1967, and suggested him as a teacher to RIT in 1969 (and again in 1972). McArt had first met Jim in Stockholm in the 1966, while on a Fulbright scholarship to study abroad. McArt worked with Jim in the summer of 1966, in Krenov’s basement workshop. While he was there, he worked on a number of small furniture pieces, including a small piano stool for one of Georg Bolin’s pianos. But, toward the end of his residence in the shop, Krenov asked McArt to design a few pieces. Maybe it was just as an exercise, but McArt was much more technically capable a designer than Krenov was, or wanted to be.
By McArt’s memory, Jim never tried any of his other designs – except for a chess table. None of McArt’s drawings or plans exist any more for this piece, and he didn’t specify which details might be his influence or Krenov’s in this piece – but, this is the only example I know of where Jim solicited any outside design help or work. It’s a vague detail – but nonetheless singular and novel.
A later “Chess Table” made in 1978. Krenov made this piece again so he could detail its construction and process for his third book, “The Impractical Cabinetmaker.”
There’s a lot to say about the piece, but I think it’s easiest to focus in on the piece as an example of Krenov’s ability to show intention with every decision. There are so many little details. He sorted through the little squares before joining them and find those with the darker tones or color variation and arranged them accordingly. Look at the play surface above. Sapwood in the pearwood squares is arranged just so along the outer edges, the lighter rosewood pieces are in the middle, and so on. Now look at the wedges on the four tenons poking through the top. Two are dark, two are light, again echoing the playing surface.
What’s nice about this isn’t the gimmick – “The wedges are different colors! Cool!” What’s sweet is that every decision about color and grain is intentional, had some thought behind it. I’m never sure where my tastes lie with Krenov’s tables – they are, I would say, the most dated of his work (this is just me talking, not the biography). They tend to be a bit “bell-bottomy,” which I like in some of the cabinet stands, but less so here. But, you can look at every piece making up the table and know that he thought it through. When you start seeing flat sawn and quartersawn legs on the same face of a table (you can’t unsee it now that you know to look for it) you’ll know that not everyone pays attention to it, especially not with the eye that Krenov had. His consideration of grain is exceptional.
Before we look at the last piece, I think it’s important to bring to your attention the writing on pages 58-60. I’d say read it again, if you just scanned. It is, I think, my favorite passage in the book.
But it isn’t my favorite passage because it’s the most inspiring, or the most poetic. I like it because it’s frank. It’s a passage where Krenov shows a side of himself that he didn’t often display in person – nuance and self-reflection. He was famously irascible in his interactions, but a lot of the people I’ve talked with also mention his nuance a reservation, a self-awareness that only a few people really encountered. I can hear some of that in this passage. He’s talking about doubts, discouragement, his own luck, his old age – it’s like a few pages of a memoir, one I wish were much longer. I’ll excerpt a particularly good passage, which was also called out by Merle Hall last week.
“… I am a very lucky person. When I feel lucky in the total sense, I also feel very much ashamed for my weaknesses and the times when I have doubted, the instances when I’ve wasted a bit of what is most valuable in life. Time has passed, and I’m somewhere on a hill now. Anywhere I look around is down. Along the rest of the way, I must be less afraid. And more grateful.”
“Music Stand” (1963) in lemonwood, the first of four Krenov made. The one pictured in “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” is the third or fourth of the stands Krenov made – something about it was compelling enough to encourage so many iterations.
The last piece pictured in detail in this section of the book is his “Music Stand,” in pearwood. In his larger body of work, this is a piece unique for its specificity in use. Later in his career, when he was able to do speculative pieces without a specific buyer or intended use, he gravitated to cabinets, which provided the forms he may have most enjoyed making. But his music stands, of which he made at least five over his career, are purpose built for a pair of players sitting opposite each other.
The pearwood stand pictured in the book is now in the collection of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, which has the largest number of Krenov’s pieces of any museum. Still, that collection is only five pieces – Krenov never made enough pieces to be collected in a volume that other makers could muster.
Here, while the intention of wood selection and form is just as salient as the chess table, what I see carefully explored in this piece is his penchant for shaping and fair curves. The legs have a complex set of facets that ground them neatly, one he accomplished with his planes and a spokeshave. The drawers can be pulled from either side, with a pull that is carefully shaped and “let in” to the two drawer fronts in a particularly graceful way. It’s a sweet piece.
Bernard Henderson, a woodworking student in the class of 1987, and Marcia Sloane, a cellist in the local “Symphony of the Redwoods,” play at Jim’s last iteration of the music stand.
Music played an important role in Krenov’s life. His mother was a deep appreciator of opera and classical music. Krenov was fond of musical analogies, and it’s clear that, in music, he found a lot of similarities to his own creative practice. “The cabinetmaker’s violin” is what he called his handplanes. In the photo above, Bernard Henderson and Marcia Sloane played for the class of 1987 when Jim made his last iteration of the music stands. Marcia Sloane would also play for Jim in his last days, bring her cello into his hospital room in 2009. His compulsion to make five of these stands must have had some deeper tie to this relationship with music. The intimacy of their design, too, being made for two players sitting opposite each other, shows a preference for the sensitivity and familiarity required when playing in a duet.
As I’ve been writing this biography, it’s been easy to forget to look at his work, not his books and relationships. Krenov’s personality was terrifically complex. His writing makes that clear enough, and his relationship with the world could be both contrarian and optimistic in the same breath. But, looking at his work, his ability to be present in the execution of a piece of work is clear. The presence of mind to carve a pull and position it to be comfortable for a reaching hand shows a consideration of the user that I don’t see present in much furniture. While my biography does not stray too deeply into a critical analysis of his work, his furniture had so much of him in it that it almost makes up a secondary set of primary sources.
I was excited by some of the comments in last week’s post. Scott, I’m thrilled with all of the remembrances and encounters you’re sharing. A lot of the writing in this book is a slow burn – it’s fun to follow along as you read through with us, and I’m enjoying your notes!
Next week, we’ll read just a few pages, up to page 78. It’s a short read, and it features two distinctly different passages – one about cats, one about Krenov’s process. There’s a lot to unpack, and I have a lot to add about Krenov’s life with animals. So, I look forward to the next post! As before – if you want to join in and read along, please do, and use the comments section below to ask any questions, highlight a passage or make a comment on this next section of the book or the photographed works therein.
I hope everyone is doing well with their time at home, or for those working in essential roles in these crazy times (like my amazing wife), a big thank you. Another week down, and another week ahead, with the hopes that we’ll find some silver linings in all of this.
“Number One Chairs” by Michael Fortune (photo by Michael Cullen)
Editor’s note: I haven’t been able to talk much about “The Difference Makers” by Marc Adams because the printing plant’s schedule has been quite messed up. We weren’t sure when it would go on press. Well we now know the book will be delivered in mid-July. If you order before the book is delivered, you will receive a free pdf download of the book at checkout.
The book is $72 and you can place a pre-publication order here.
— Christopher Schwarz
Thanks to the internet, you can see a lot of interesting work with ease. But it’s easy to forget that the vast majority of the images on your screen are of pieces that are derivative, merely acceptable in their craftsmanship and were made by people at the beginning of their journey.
When you encounter true greatness it is shocking, inspiring and a bit humbling. The hair on your neck might stand on end. Your stomach might lurch like you were on a roller coaster. You might want to quit your job.
Encountering this kind of greatness is also an incredibly rare experience these days.
Since 1993, Marc Adams has invited hundreds of the best craftsmen and women to teach at his woodworking school in Franklin, Ind., which has grown to become the country’s (if not the world’s) largest. Every year, thousands of students soak up the instruction from a who’s who list of woodworkers and artists in multiple disciplines.
“Fall Front Desk with Cat” by Silas Kopf (photo by David Ryan)
Every year, Marc has expanded the school and brought in a different mix of new instructors and veteran ones. As a result, he has figured out who is the best. He’s seen their work. He’s seen them at work.
Now Marc has selected the 30 best men and women makers that he’s worked with for his new book, “The Difference Makers: 30 Contemporary Makers; 30 Remarkable Stories.” It’s a sweeping journey into the work and lives of a diverse group of people, from pure traditional woodworkers to people whose brain is from the future. Furniture makers. Toolmakers. Luthiers. Sculptors. Engravers.
“Inferno” by Michael Hosaluk (photo by Trent Watts)
Each chapter reads like a short biographical novel – recounting the person’s life and how they became the artisan they are today. Then Marc offers an analysis and interpretation of their work – why it’s special – and tells a few stories about what they are like in the workshop.
And then there’s a gallery of the person’s work. Even if you never read a single word of “The Difference Makers,” we think you will spend hours poring over the photos.
All of this is wrapped up in a beautiful and huge book – 11” x 11” and 260 pages long. The large and square format of the book allowed us to reproduce the images as large as possible. The book is printed on a heavy and coated #100 stock – the nicest and smoothest paper we could find. Like all our books, the pages are sewn together and bound with fiber tape so the binding will outlast you. The book is hardbound with the boards covered in cotton cloth. And the entire package is wrapped with a long-wearing full-color dust jacket. It is made in the United States (Tennessee) using domestic materials.
We are honored to have worked with Marc and the 30 outstanding people featured in this book. Collecting their stories took Marc decades. Writing it all down took more than two years. And we are proud to present it to you so you can be inspired by it for many years to come.
Nancy’s story begins in 1960s suburban Florida, a life that was soon challenged and broadened by homesteading hippies. There was divorce, a move to a tiny flat in London at the age of 12, boarding school in the English countryside, a strict grammar school, work, rain, boyfriends, work, cold, miles spent commuting on her bicycle, a City & Guilds certificate in furniture making, work she loved, more cold she hated, a move back to the States, a marriage, a divorce, work for others, work for herself, love again and grief; but through it all, passion.
This, from Nancy’s July 20, 2019, “Making Things Work” blog post titled “The Problem with passion.”
The problem is, the popular understanding of passion is seriously flawed. The word passion comes from a Latin verb that means to suffer, undergo, experience, endure. While love is central to passion, passion is no easy kind of love. When we’re passionate about something, we’re driven. We serve our passion by dealing with the trying circumstances and sometimes-maddening fallout that come in its train, every bit as much as by enjoying the satisfactions generated by our pursuit.
From Florida to London
Nancy (right) with her sister, Magda, wearing dresses made by their mother.
“The salient thing is that my mother was always very handy when we were little,” Nancy says when talking about her childhood in Florida. “She was always doing things around the house, like home-improvement projects such as changing the hinges on the kitchen cabinets and changing the faucet on the sink. She built us a playhouse in the backyard. One of my favorite things was that she tore down the wall between our two bedrooms [Nancy has one younger sister, Magda] and so we had a good example of a woman who wasn’t afraid of using tools.”
“Listening to music with my sister in the living room furnished with stuff our mother put together –– an old couch she reupholstered in mod fabric, coffee table made from a salvaged base topped with a found piece of marble, artwork by friends, and a stack of upholstery materials waiting to be put to use,” Nancy says.
Nancy’s father was brought up to be a white-collar professional. He went to law school and then into public relations after time in the Coast Guard.
Nancy grew up in what had been the gatehouse of a once-large estate, later chopped up into subdivisions. It had a Spanish-Colonial-Revival vibe and the outside walls were made of coral. Located on a half-acre plot, it had been landscaped decades earlier by a well-known botanist who brought plants from all over the world back to the estate.
“The scale of our half-acre must have been tiny, but to a little kid it was just this huge world of diverse landscape,” Nancy says. “There was a little bamboo forest with gravel paths and there were all kinds of exotic tropical fruit trees, like carambola, kumquats, loquats and all kinds of oranges and mangoes and avocados.”
Growing up middle class in 1960s America, Nancy says her family’s little patch of land was a revelation. While everything else around her was pre-packaged and filled with preservatives, she witnessed fruit growing on trees first-hand. There was a Norfolk Island Pine tree she loved and a little coral stone cottage in the backyard. For a child, it was near magical.
Nancy grew up playing with Tonka toys, Flintstone building blocks, Mattel’s Thingmaker, Play-Doh and LEGO. At the beach she would build sandcastles, bridges and little channels for water to flow.
“One thing I remember vividly is that I loved rearranging the furniture in the living room and in my bedroom as a little kid,” Nancy says. “So I was always interested in how the inside of the house looked and felt.”
Nancy has always been deeply interested in people and their stories. She didn’t love school, but she remembers enjoying learning about Eli Whitney and his invention of the cotton gin. In second grade she went through a stage in which she signed all her schoolwork with different names –– Amelia Earhart, Calamity Jane –– she’s grateful for the teacher who quietly allowed it.
When Nancy was in fourth or fifth grade, on a cold (for Florida) winter night, her parents brought home some young people who had been sleeping in the local park.
“My parents, Mary Lee and Herb, around 2001 with two of their (now-late) dogs, Lottie and Jeffrey.”
“My parents, to their credit, have always been pretty open-minded,” Nancy says. Her parents were impressed with how these young people, from all over the country, were living free-spirited lives, eschewing conventional ways of earning a living and instead building what they needed, growing their own food, and selling natural foods in a society that seemingly loved the opposite. So intrigued, Nancy’s parents ended up inviting some of the young people to stay with them. And that’s when everything changed.
“There were all these different micro-areas within this half-acre lot and so a couple of the hippies lived in this little stone cottage in the backyard and a couple more built a little wooden house and a couple others built an A-frame,” Nancy says.
The experience was undoubtedly formative. “Whenever that kind of thing happens it certainly makes you realize that the way you’ve been brought up to see the world is not the only way,” Nancy says. “So it was opening up a perspective that I think, in principle, is a good thing.”
Then Nancy’s dad told her she didn’t have to go to school anymore on the grounds that she was being homeschooled. But there was no structure. Nancy filled her time with reading the World Book Encyclopedia and spent countless hours watching and learning from the people living in her backyard.
“It was a revelation to see these guys with a saw and sawhorses building a house,” Nancy says. “It was just so direct. It was amazing to see that you could take tools and simple materials and build a dwelling in which you could live, however crude. That was wonderful for me to see.”
Nancy’s grandparents became concerned. Her sister had already gone to live with them. In 1971, Nancy’s parents separated, and Nancy, along with her mother and sister, moved to a tiny flat in London. Nancy’s grandparents had good friends who lived in London and helped them settle. They then sent Nancy and her sister to a boarding school in Sussex.
Her last year in Florida, with its total lack of structure and discipline, did prove valuable. “After that, I craved structure and discipline,” she says. “I was 12, going back to school and I actually wanted to be there. Had we not had this series of events I might have gone through the rest of my educational years totally unmotivated.”
The boarding school was a Rudolf Steiner school, which meant all the boys and girls had to take sewing classes and woodworking. “It was great because it involved a real contact with material,” Nancy says. She carved a serving platter out of Applewood, which she gave to her parents, and a mechanical toy.
“The mechanical toy I made in shop class at school when I was 12, an alligator (in theory) whose tail and jaw move when you swing the weight on the string back and forth,” Nancy says.
“There were so many things I loved about that school because the boarding hostel was in this fantastic old building and to get to the school you had to walk through part of the Ashdown Forest and just all the smells and the seasons — it was a real sensory awakening for me,” Nancy says. “But I just really missed my mother who was in London. So she finally let me move back.”
“Drawing in felt-tip marker of a view through my bedroom window in 1973.”
“Drawing in felt-tip marker of the roofscape in the mews behind our flat in London when I was 14.”
Nancy then attended a grammar school operated by “an extremely strict, no-nonsense woman and that was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” she says. She started learning Latin “which it turned out I had a great affinity for,” she says. “It’s very obvious to me now, because it’s architectural. It’s all about building blocks and how they go together. But it was very good for me psychologically because it was like, ‘Here, take this thing, show me you can do it and I will give you praise.’ It was one of the first times in my life someone said, ‘Oh, you’re good at this. You can do this.’ It gave me a feeling of achievement that was new to me. And that’s important for everyone to have.”
Learning the Trade
“A self portrait made from the reflection in the window over my bedroom desk at night when I was 14,” Nancy says.
Nancy doesn’t talk about lifelong dreams. Instead she has always led her life with an air of practicality. As a young adult, she didn’t have a strong sense of direction. “I knew what I was good at and I knew I had to work,” she says.
Throughout high school Nancy worked in bakeries and cleaned apartments and worked at a local sandwich shop with a woman named Hilda.
“Sure it was minimum wage but it was a job and it was money and it was experience and I never thought I was too good for any of it,” Nancy says. “I was always grateful to have someone pay me to work.”
“With my sister in a park during a visit with our father in the mid-’70s.”
Nancy was accepted into the University of Cambridge but took a gap year and worked as a clerk at the Automobile Association in London. Several years earlier, her mother had gone back to school to study art, met a fellow student and married. Together they had started a remodeling business. Nancy’s father was freelancing as a travel writer, and she and her sister would see him once or twice a year. Nancy lived with her boyfriend in an old building in Islington, east London, that had been condemned but through a community housing association they were allowed to rent an apartment.
At Cambridge, Nancy loved the studying but couldn’t imagine staying there without knowing how a degree in Hebrew and Aramaic would be relevant to a career. She didn’t want to be a teacher and didn’t know what else one could do with such a degree.
“It just seemed, honestly, so self-indulgent,” she says. “I wouldn’t say that now but that’s how it felt to me.” Nancy was there on a government grant, surrounded by people who believed a Cambridge degree and the right contacts were all they needed to succeed. “There was this overwhelming sense of privilege. I loved my tiny, tiny world of study, but other than that, I was like, ‘What am I doing here?’ So I left,” she says.
She went back to the Automobile Association and then, after moving out to the country with her boyfriend, close to where her mother and stepfather then lived, found work in a factory. Having no furniture, she began building some in her spare time. Her stepfather was intensely critical of her work; his harsh and hurtful words prompted her to sign up for a City & Guilds course in furniture making, and she was intent on proving him wrong.
The course was taught in a local community college and she commuted 3-1/2 miles each way by bike daily. Because she had already done her A-levels she was (a) the oldest in the class and (b) exempt from doing course’s required desk work in the afternoons. So she spent her mornings in City & Guild shop classes and her afternoons earning money.
“I set up a ridiculously crude, in retrospect, shop in our dining room and just started making stuff,” Nancy says. She built furniture for her family and neighbors using pine from the local lumberyard. “It was pretty miserable,” Nancy says. “Mainly because it was always freezing and my stepfather was just not a kind person.”
After earning her City & Guilds certificate, Nancy put an ad in the local newspaper, looking for a workshop with a place to live. A man named Roy Griffiths, a Slade School of Fine Art-trained designer, answered. He owned a kitchen company called Crosskeys Joinery that built mostly pine kitchens.
“He drove out to where I lived and I showed him pictures of what I had done,” Nancy says. “I went and visited his workshop. He had bought a Georgian brick house, which sounds fancy but it was just what all the houses were along the river in this little town of Wisbech.”
Roy’s house had come with brick horse stables, which is where he had set up his woodworking shop. There was no insulation, all the windows were single pane and the only heat source was a wood stove.
“It was freezing cold but you know, I had never seen anything like it,” Nancy says. “It was really cool. And he had all this old machinery he had fixed up.”
At first Roy wanted Nancy to build a set of upper kitchen cabinets (what he called a dresser top) as a trial, for pay. But then he simply offered her a job. Nancy left her boyfriend, accepted the job and moved into a room in Roy’s house. But a week later, near frozen, she moved out, choosing instead to move back in with her boyfriend and commute to work by bicycle each day.
“To get to his place was four miles each way, which was not a lot at all and it was all flat but it was always windy and this was through all weather, so it was really, really cold and miserable and always damp, throughout the year,” Nancy says. “But in retrospect I’m so glad I did it because I know I did it and no one can take that away from me.”
Roy served as Nancy’s mentor, not so much in the way of craft but in the way of business.
“I learned from him the importance of being efficient, working efficiently, and designing things for efficient production as well as beauty,” she says. “I mean he certainly impressed on me the importance of good materials and proportions. He was trained as a fine artist, a painter –– he had been to art school, like many of the big names in English furniture making who came from architecture and the world of fine arts. It was before the renaissance in craft training.”
“The upper sections of this kitchen dresser were the first job I did for my first woodworking employer, Roy Griffiths,” Nancy says. “The image is from an article in the English House & Garden Magazine circa 1981. Although the stained pine and low-res picture suggest the piece was rustic, it was meticulously made. The drawers were dovetailed and inset in the dadoed solid structure; the doors were all solid, with mortise-and-tenon frames, inset in their openings and hung on traditional butt hinges; I made the mouldings for the doors and crown, as well as the beaded back boards, in the shop and cut the friezes individually with great care.”
Nancy learned a number of techniques using old, restored, English machinery that are less common in America, such as a tenoner and a sliding table saw. She worked for Roy for about two years. By then, she had decided she no longer wanted to be a woodworker.
“That was my only experience in professional woodworking, and I found it depressingly monotonous,” she says.
Nancy acknowledges that Roy had given her a plum job, building the upper kitchen cabinets that were decorated with custom-made mouldings, and little doors and cubbies. But still, she spent much of her time cutting hundreds of tenons and mortises, and while it was not factory work, it began to feel like factory work.
“I was just doing the same basic processes every day and going out of my mind with boredom,” she says. “Plus, I was freezing all the time. I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining. That was just the reality. It was depressing. And I was in my early 20s and I had not yet developed the capacity for that kind of routine work I now possess. That is a real learning experience, learning how to just keep doing it. It’s part of growing up in any line of work.” Nancy was desperate to use her brain.
So she and her boyfriend moved, and Nancy got an office job with a travel agency at the University of Reading in Berkshire, England.
“That was a great experience because it was run by this fabulous woman, Bobbie Gass, with whom I’m still friends,” Nancy says. It was an office of women and they became so close that they still stay in touch and even got together for a reunion several years ago.
But eventually Nancy felt an urge to return to woodworking and she found employment at Millside Cabinetmakers, a rural shop located in a converted chicken shed where craftspeople built custom furniture and kitchens. Nancy was the only woman, and there wasn’t even a bathroom when she first worked there. So Nancy used her lunch break to ride her bicycle into town to use a public restroom. “They were nice to me, or they tried to be,” she says.
Back to America
Nancy worked at Millside for about a year and then, for a number of personal reasons, began thinking about moving back to the United States. By this time she had gone through a divorce, and both her mother and sister had already moved back to the States.
“I just wanted to be closer to my family,” she says.
While preparing to move Nancy got a temporary job in the carpentry shop of the Imperial War Museum at Duxford Airbase. There she worked on displays, cabinets and platforms with older, unabashedly sexist male woodworkers who, she says, she got along with splendidly.
Nancy wanted to move to New England, specifically western Massachusetts. But she couldn’t find work there. So she ended up taking a job at WallGoldfinger in Northfield, Vermont, a woodworking company that made architect-designed furniture mostly for financial-market offices on Wall Street and in Boston.
The work, made with architectural-veneered panels, edge banding and highly rubbed-out lacquer finishes, was completely different to what she had been doing in England. “Superficially, the work was absolutely gorgeous, and I learned a lot there about using sheet materials and European hardware.”
While at WallGoldfinger, Nancy fell in love with fellow craftsperson Kent Perelman. They soon decided to leave Vermont together, seeking work in Montana. It was 1988. Nancy was 28. But within the year, they married and moved to Brown County, Indiana, close to where Kent’s parents and sister lived. They opened their own furniture and cabinetmaking business, Credence Custom Furniture. They worked together in their home shop and, after a while, Nancy decided she wanted to go back to university. So she began taking one class a semester while also working in the business. Soon she decided to attend school full time. She won a scholarship, which paid for her tuition. She continued working at Credence, doing design, bookkeeping, client visits and helping with installations and deliveries. The combination of school and work, she says, was good.
Kent and Nancy divorced in 1993. (Kent, who Nancy says was an outstanding craftsman, moved back to Montana, where he remarried, had a family and continued woodworking until he died in 2016 from cancer at the too-young age of 53.) Nancy went on to graduate school with the intent of getting her doctorate and teaching. “But in my first two years of graduate school I realized that an academic life was less likely to be about teaching and much more likely to be about research and bureaucracy,” she says. So after completing her master’s degree, she stopped.
“The one thing I knew is that I did not want to build furniture and cabinets anymore” she says. “I wanted to get an office job.” No longer weighed down by the lack of a degree, Nancy applied with optimism. But it was one rejection after another. “You’re over-qualified.” Or, “You ran your own business, you won’t want to work for someone else.” She became exasperated and, frankly, needed to make money.
She called up a man whose house she had rented with another grad student her first year of graduate school. She remembered his bathroom being almost totally decrepit. She asked him to hire her to remodel it at a reduced rate, because she would be learning as she worked. “I’m not sure whether it was a good thing he said yes but he did,” Nancy says, laughing. “And that was how I got back into the trades.”
Initially Nancy focused on remodeling old houses. She wanted varied work, outside of a solo workshop, allowing contact with fellow human beings. She needed more than working with mute material. But over the years she simply found herself doing more of the woodworking parts of the jobs and less of the remodeling. There was no grand vision. There was no dream. Rather, life happened. Practicality reigned.
“If you said to me, ‘What has driven you?’ I would say it’s really been the need to make a living,” Nancy says. “But also, the desire to be happy and for me, part of being happy is doing what I have to do. So it’s not like a person who feels she knows she has a burning desire to do something in particular. I’ve always been happily motivated by necessity. And when I say happily, it’s a happiness that isn’t always recognizable by everyone as happiness but there is a peace in accepting what is necessary. I know this is not a fashionable way to think in America. But I find it key to happiness. Doing what you have to do and finding happiness in that, finding the bright spots or something that gives you the feeling of comfort or hope or joy or — look at that joint, that joint fits well —I’m happy about that. And I build it up out of little, little things.”
Nancy started her own business, NR Hiller Design, in 1995. She incorporated a few years later at the advice of her accountant.
“I didn’t want to be self-employed,” she says. “It just seems so scary to me.” But she leans on Mark Longacre, her partner, who also is self-employed (Mark Longacre Construction Inc.) and has been for most of his adult life. “It helps to have somebody with whom you can discuss the problems and challenges,” she says.
“My husband, Mark, with our (now-late) dog Henny around 2011.”
Also helpful is that Nancy and Mark have built and become part of a network, made up of customers who have become friends; employees (Mark has three and Nancy says they’re as close as brothers); colleagues; acquaintances met through research and at talks; readers; editors; students and more. This larger community of like-minded individuals, this connectedness, has helped ease the anxiety that inevitably comes with self-employment.
Nancy knew of Mark the same way you’re aware of other people in your larger field who also live in your town, she says. They first ran into each other at an appliance store where they had both gone independently to look at appliances for their respective clients. “It was shortly after my first article in Fine Woodworking had been published and the local paper had written a story with a picture of me. He said, ‘You’re Nancy Hiller, aren’t you? I recognize you from your Fine Woodworking articles.’ And I said, ‘Well, there aren’t articles, plural, there’s only been one.’” She then asked, “You’re Mark Longacre, aren’t you? I recognize you from the article the paper did about you.”
At the time they were both involved with other people. For a few years they would run into each other every so often. “I always thought he just seemed like a nice, capable, kind, down-to-earth person,” Nancy says. Nancy and Mark both split up with their respective partners and on the night before Mark’s 50th birthday, Mark called Nancy and invited her to dinner. That was their first date, in 2006. They’ve been together ever since.
Although Nancy never wanted to be a mother, she says she was given the extreme privilege of becoming a stepmother to Mark’s brilliant son, Jonas. “I was lucky,” she says. “I was just so lucky to walk into a relationship in which there was this beautiful, intelligent, self-motivated learner who was just endlessly curious.”
That curiosity is, unfortunately, what ended Jonas’s life on Jan. 2, 2014, at only 15 years old. Described by many as an old soul and deeply curious about the word around him, Jonas was interested in everything, from robotics, advanced calculus and writing software to Latin, constructing languages and reading (at the time of his death he was reading Douglas Hofstadter’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden”). He adored spending summers at Camp Palawopec and was keen on learning primitive survival skills. He was considering a career in computational linguistics.
Nancy was the one who discovered Jonas on the night he died. Out of simple curiosity, a desire to better understand how the human body works, Jonas had experimented with what’s commonly called the “choking game.” It involves self-strangulation as an experiment, to feel what it’s like to have oxygen rush back to your brain after it’s been cut off. Only Jonas died before he could un-strangle himself.
Nancy says she believes in the importance of telling this part of her life story for no other reason than to share the light of Jonas with others and to raise awareness about the game. “I was very lucky to get to know him and be a part of his life.”
Finding the Bright Spots
Left: An armoire inspired by a turn-of-the-century Scandinavian design, featuring retractable doors with decorative strap hinge hardware salvaged from an old barn in Ohio. Photo by Kendall Reeves, Spectrum Studio of Photography and Design. Middle: Mohawk sideboard commissioned to double as a room divider made entirely of solid walnut and curly ambrosia maple with hand-cut joinery. Right: A measured reproduction of a 1903 English Arts & Crafts sideboard by the Harris Lebus company of London. Nancy made this piece for her book on English Arts & Crafts furniture, and it was also the cover feature of Popular Woodworking Magazine (November 2017). Photo by Al Parrish.
These days Nancy works on her own, although she has had employees in the past (see her post “Daniel O’Grady is in the house” here). Her work is now so varied, employing someone would be difficult. In addition to shop time Nancy’s writing, designing and meeting with clients. Flexibility is important and, Nancy notes, it’s often nice to not carry the heavy weight of responsibility that comes with being in charge of someone else’s livelihood.
At the end of last year Nancy spent three months building and installing a couple of kitchens. The installation process in particular is intense, physical work, manhandling cabinets made out of 3/4″-thick veneer-core plywood with solid face frames while scribing them to fit walls and floors. There is travel time between the client’s houses and Nancy’s shop, along with ongoing business-related work: preparing quotes for customers, design work, drawing and more. For book projects, Nancy might block out three weeks at a time to focus on writing, attending to small parts of the business in the evenings or on weekends. And then, it might all reverse. She’ll spend her days in the shop, using her nights and weekends to write her next blog post for Fine Woodworking.
“I find the more variety I have the more hours I can work because changing is refreshing,” she says.
It is here, though, that Nancy’s lifelong work ethic deserves praise. I ask her about it. “I just have this deep-seated admiration for people who work hard,” she says.
Nancy isn’t sure where this came from. Perhaps England. Perhaps hidden in the prayers she had to recite at school. Perhaps, paradoxically, she says, from the hippies. “Even though people think of hippies as layabouts, what I saw was a lot of work being done.”
Nancy in her shop, May 2018.
Growing up in the 1960s, Nancy says as a child, she associated working hard with being a man. “I didn’t aspire to be a man,” she says. “I just thought, well, those are the people who have respect in our culture. They were the people who were recognized in public life and they were the people who did important things with a capital I. It’s hilariously ironic because look at women’s work! It’s just that women’s work hasn’t always been appreciated (and is still vastly underappreciated) in American culture.”
And it’s not that Nancy loves working for its own sake. “It’s that I’m building toward something,” she says. “There’s a tangible result, a satisfaction, and I feel connected to the world, and I feel like I have a purpose. All of those are important motivators for me.”
This, of course, all ties back into Nancy’s definition of passion: While love is central to passion, passion is no easy kind of love.
Nancy finds herself thinking a lot about the tiny bright spots in her life. It’s easy to feel depressed right now, she says, by politics, ecological realities, the pandemic. “So much of it is just psychological,” she says. “It’s like playing on the monkey bars, going from one rung to the next. You just keep going. And it’s weird because I know that I’m depressed a lot of the time lately. I recognize that clearly but there’s also kind of an underlying happiness at the same time and it comes partly from acceptance and partly from finding joy in tiny things and not needing everything to be perfect. I think there’s happiness to be found in kind of letting go of trying to control your fate at every level of your life because you can’t. Or, at least, I can’t, and I don’t know anyone who can.”
When we’re passionate about something, we’re driven. We serve our passion by dealing with the trying circumstances and sometimes-maddening fallout that come in its train, every bit as much as by enjoying the satisfactions generated by our pursuit.
“Our dog, Joey, with the shop cat, Tony,” Nancy says.
And so Nancy spends time at home, with Mark, and in her shop with her shop cat, her dog, Joey, often by her side. She reads. At the time of our interview she was reading a biography of Thoreau. She finds reading about the obstacles humans overcome both helpful and fascinating. She likes gardening (but despises the chiggers). She likes the changing of the seasons, the way the soil, plants, animals and trees change with them. She loves to laugh. Nancy Hiller has thebest laugh.
Not too long ago Elizabeth Knapp, managing editor at Fine Woodworking, read Nancy’s “The problem with passion” blog post. Liz asked Nancy if they could publish it in the magazine (Nancy said yes). It’s easy to see why. It sums up Nancy’s life so beautifully but with that air of Nancy practicality.
Doing what you love for a living demands that you cultivate a larger understanding of loving what you do, she writes. And that is why, because of everything, despite everything, Nancy can say, she’s happy.
In the fall of 2005 I found a message on my shop’s answering machine from Kelly Mehler, who had seen my Fine Woodworking article on designing built-ins and wondered whether I’d like to teach a cabinetmaking class the following summer at his school on the outskirts of Berea, Ky. I was single at the time, running my business with one employee and dividing my evenings and weekends between finishing my house (installing wooden floors and trim, framing and drywalling stud walls to subdivide the attic, painting) and establishing a garden. I’d recently turned 46 and had no grand vision for how I wanted the rest of my life to look; it was all I could do to keep things together emotionally and financially day by day. So Kelly’s invitation was like a ray of sunshine. I leapt at the chance to teach and chose the week of my 47th birthday for the class to ensure I’d have something cheerful going on.
Kelly Mehler’s shop and school. Image by Mary May from her blog post Back from Berea, KY
I was thrilled to find the school located in an idyllic setting at the end of a long gravel drive. Surrounded by rolling hills and forest, it was a two-story building with tall windows and plenty of natural light. There was an enviably equipped machine shop on the ground floor, a bench room above and air conditioning — a serious boon in the Midwestern summer. As an instructor, I stayed in the delightful cabin next to the shop, while Kelly and his wife, Teri, lived just up the hill in an old log house built for Swedish weaver Anna Ernberg, who had been hired decades earlier to lead the weaving program at Berea College. The class was small, the people friendly, the food great. I could not have imagined a happier introduction to teaching.
Kelly helping student Jim Ferrell during one of my classes, 2011.
Over the next several years I taught a few more times at Kelly’s school. One year, he and Teri invited me to join them for a Fourth of July party at the home of some friends whose house was high up on a hill with a great view of the fireworks display. A bunch of people at the party worked for Berea College, and I was fascinated to learn a bit about the institution, which is committed to educating the young people of Appalachia and — astonishingly — tuition-free. What a concept, especially at a time when so many students go tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars into debt for a college degree!
Fast forward a few years. Kelly and Teri had retired and sold their property to Berea College, which re-opened the shop as the Woodworking School at Pine Croft, with North Bennet Street School alum Andy Glenn at its head. Andy contacted me to ask whether I’d like to teach in the summer of 2020, and we settled on a week-long class on my version of Voysey’s 1898 design for a two-heart chair. We also agreed that I would give a presentation one evening about English Arts & Crafts furniture for students and members of the local community who might be interested. The topic seemed ideal because I could see all kinds of parallels between the values upheld by Berea College and the philosophy of John Ruskin that had given the Arts & Crafts movement its spark. For example, Ruskin held that traditional craft work, pursued in circumstances that allow the individual craftsperson some freedom of expression, poses challenges, requires endless learning and allows for wholesome satisfactions, all of which Ruskin thought essential to a fully human life. Nor did Ruskin wish a fully human life only for those of his socio-economic level, but for all.
That class would have taken place a few weeks ago. But as with so many other events this year, it was cancelled, along with the other classes at Pine Croft scheduled for 2020. Berea College was among the first to send students home and end on-campus activities in March, the decision based on the institution’s avowed commitment to the kinship of all people and the dignity of all labor. Such respect implies “an obligation for each other’s safety and wellbeing.” said Aaron Beale, Director of Student Craft, when I spoke with him recently. He added: “We are lucky we’re in a situation where we can make those decisions. It seemed clear that we couldn’t start the summer with those early classes in May and June, and it seemed unlikely that there would be a miraculous change” going into the later months. It was a hard decision to make; Andy had worked hard to pull together a group of instructors for the inaugural season, but Aaron said “it didn’t seem right to string people along for something that wasn’t likely to happen at all,” considering that classes would have involved people traveling, then being taught in confined spaces.
Despite the cancellation, I wanted to learn more about how Berea College’s commitments expressed so many of Ruskin’s convictions regarding education and work. So I arranged a conference call with Aaron, Andy and Chris Miller, associate director and curator of the Appalachian Center.
Savannah Smith, Jamie Schlabach and Sophia Gueye (Photo: Justin Skeens, courtesy of Berea College).
History
Founded in 1855 by John Fee, a Presbyterian minister who was an abolitionist, Berea College originally focused on providing an education to freed people of color. That mission changed in 1904, when the college was forced to segregate by the Day Law. The college, Aaron told me, “elected to focus on the education of white students from Appalachia here in Berea, and split its endowment to also form The Lincoln Institute in Shelby County, Ky.” This school operated as an all-black boarding high school from 1912 to 1966.
“At that time, a college education was far rarer than today,” Chris elaborated. “It was considered elite. Berea was a pioneer in educating common people, whether freed slaves, children of farmers, whatever. One of the ways we differed from other colleges providing a liberal arts education: we had a more progressive idea of what education means.” Leaders of the college’s policies integrated the ideals of the Sloyd and YMCA movements, which focused on educating the whole person. Early in the 20th century they ran an outreach program — a preacher would preach a sermon, then someone might provide the latest instruction on planting beans, followed by someone else discussing Shakespeare. (Returning to echoes of Arts & Crafts values, this was not unlike the broad range of character-enriching programs offered to members of the local community by Englishman C.R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicrafts when it moved to the Cotswolds, west of London: the idea was to provide education for everybody and for the whole person.)
Since then, the leaders of Berea College have continually experimented with how to put those same ideals into practice. Today, for example, in addition to programs in agriculture they have emphasized organic and sustainable local agriculture. Another example: the college has a four-year liberal arts nursing degree — nursing is not typically taught in the context of the liberal arts. There’s a program in technology and applied design, and all students in the business school have to take the liberal arts core. A program called “Entrepreneurship for the Public Good” responds to the urgent need to create sustainable businesses in Appalachia, ideally to encourage students to stay in the region instead of leaving. “We expose them to an ethic of service,” Chris said, “because it infuses the institution.”
Since 1892 the college has been tuition-free. How do you manage that? I asked. The greatest factor in making it possible is a $1.2 billion endowment. Unlike most colleges with substantial endowments, which re-invest interest income back into the endowment, Aaron pointed out that Berea College “puts 100 percent of the return…to work for students, paying their tuition and offering the other programs that make Berea so special.” Another significant factor is that most students qualify for federal, state and other financial aid. One of the most unusual features of Berea College is its student-run income-producing enterprises, such as the college farm store and the Boone Tavern, which the college built in 1909 to house visitors and still operates today. From its inception, the tuition-free education has also depended on income from the sale of student-made products in the crafts of wood, weaving, ceramics and broom making. Beyond attempting to generate income for tuition, these enterprises broaden the range of educational offerings to encompass hands-on skills that are rarely taught at academic institutions of higher education.
Despite all these sources of tuition-supporting revenue, the college must still raise $4 to $5 million annually through an appeal to donors known as “The Berea Fund.”
Horse logging at the college forest (Photo: Berea College).
The college also has a Forestry Department — appropriate, considering that the institution owns nearly 10,000 forested acres held in a carbon sequester program. It’s the oldest privately managed forest in Kentucky and one of the oldest in the entire United States. Berea College has been a pioneer in managing forest sustainably. They log in the least-damaging way — with horses — and just hired a second team of horse loggers. Although the college does not offer a degree in forestry as such, its forestry studies are run through the agriculture department. Wendy Warren runs the forestry outreach center and lives in the cabin where instructors at Kelly’s woodworking school used to stay.
“It really is all about the forest,” added Aaron, returning to the reasoning behind the college’s purchase of the Mehlers’ home. “The [Pine Croft] property is about 15 acres and borders the college forest on two sides. We didn’t want to see that property subdivided into 15 properties.” The Mehlers’ former home also included two structures that tie in with the college’s mission: the main house (now a bed and breakfast, which fits the mission of bringing people into the forest) and the woodworking school, which furthers opportunities to live up to one of the college’s principle missions, a commitment to the dignity of all labor, not just white-collar professions.
Pine Croft Cottage, the Mehlers’ former home (Photo: Berea College website).
Berea and Craft
The town of Berea, which grew up around the original college, has long been recognized as a center of craft and cultivated a market for tourists interested in buying work that’s locally made. In recent years, Berea’s approach has shifted from simply promoting the sale of completed objects to exhibitions of craft in process, as well as encouraging visitors to participate in the making. This, too, factored into the opening of the Woodworking School at Pine Croft. Although Berea College has long had a woodworking department with staff instructors, Pine Croft would allow the college to bring other craftspeople who teach into the area. “The college has been limited vis-a-vis student craft,” Andy explained. “There are typically 20 to 25 students; most have never held a woodworking tool before their first day. Pine Croft allows us to expose our student population to master craftspeople and brings master craftspeople into the region, which is important to the mission of college. Again, it’s about the dignity of labor. Woodworking is a trade that deserves respect. Bringing high-quality work to the area is another way the college sees itself partnering with the region” — to which Chris added: “It helps people see that Appalachia is not just a ‘deficit situation,’ but has a lot to offer the world.”
Andy’s job goes well beyond teaching; he’s also responsible for making products for sale — rolling pins, cutting boards and a wooden stool with a hickory bark seat, the last of these made with wood and bark from the college forest. The proceeds from sales help support the costs associated with tuition.
“My job is to train the students so that we can make the crafts,” Andy explained. This is not as simple as it sounds. The most profitable way to make these items would be by adopting some modified form of assembly-line production, in which each student would master just one part of the process instead of learning the whole. But that would be inconsistent with the college’s commitment to training students for their own benefit in addition to giving them a way to help support their own tuition. It’s a challenge to convey the richness of handcraft while being as productive as possible.
“It’s a real tension,” Aaron acknowledged. “Andy has two jobs that are compatible, but both extremely demanding — running wood craft, the woodworking component of the student craft program, but in addition, Andy also is the head of the Woodworking School at Pine Croft. Andy really does do two separate full-time jobs.” As with the other student craft programs, the goal since the 1890s has been to run an enterprise to support the running of the college. Aaron conceded that for the past century, these programs haven’t made a profit; in fact, they regularly run a deficit. But instructors and students do still approach the work as a business; they face real production demands, as opposed to the ethos in most craft schools, which allow students a temporary respite from the financial and time constraints of regular jobs so that they can really focus on mastering skills. Andy has to teach and provide an environment that links up with the college’s mission, all while turning out saleable goods.
Set of 18 chairs for the college president’s home, awaiting oil and finish, then upholstery. Cherry and maple, 2020. This was originally a student crew project before concern about Covid-19 shut down classes on campus. Andy completed the chairs after the students left for the semester. The chairs are based on Federal-style chairs made in the Portsmouth, NH, shop of Langley Boardman circa 1800-1815. Andy designed the project to fit the style of the president’s home and utilize, as well as stretch, his student crew’s skills.
The wood craft program also takes special orders, which make up between 30-40 percent of their work. These jobs have run the gamut from simple recycling bins with solid wood doors to pieces of fine craft, such as a recent run of 18 chairs in the Federal style for the president’s home on campus. Andy and the students will also build a 17’-long table. In addition, Andy has increased the use of hand tools. The same elevation of appreciation for material culture applies to the other craft departments. As Andy put it, “We’re making items that have a story to tell, that we can be proud of and that link to the college values.”
Azariah and Andy.
With students off campus (there would ordinarily be about 20 of them helping), Andy is running the shop’s production with his shop assistant, Natalie Brown, who gained her woodworking skills during a residency in art at the University of Iowa.
Andy Glenn
Andy and Sarah with Ruby, Francis and Oreo (not pictured: the family’s Maine Coon cat, Elsie).
Andy joined the staff in 2017, when he was hired as head of wood craft. He and his family had been living in Rockport, Maine, where he worked as a woodworker after teaching and working in other capacities at North Bennet Street School.
Woodworking has always been an integral part of his life. Both of his grandfathers had wood shops; one worked on a 150-acre farm outside Ashland, Ohio, while the other, who lived in Ashland and worked as the town milkman, had a small basement shop where Andy spent a lot of time making things.
Andy graduated with a degree in business economics from the College of Wooster, Ohio. In 2004, straight after college, he and his wife, Sarah, got married. They moved to Cambridge, Mass., so Sarah could pursue a master’s degree at the Longy School of Music. Andy found work as business director for a school but realized the job involved too much administration for his liking. “I was chasing numbers all day,” he laughs, recalling himself thinking “’Look at my hands. There are no callouses anymore!’ In a weird way I recognized I just wanted to work with my hands.”
North Bennet Street School was two miles from where they lived; he took some classes, then went through the cabinetmaking and furniture program from 2006 to 2008. While he was a student, he also did a significant amount of teaching, worked as caretaker for the building and helped create the curriculum for (in addition to teaching in) a middle school program that was a partnership between NBSS and local public schools.
Despite all of this extracurricular work, he had to take on some debt. He found himself graduating into the Great Recession, which was daunting, but says “I was still excited. Still am. Which has served me well as a woodworker.”
Armoire. Curly and birdseye maple, student project at NBSS, 2007.Chest of drawers, cherry and pine, 2009.Spider leg table, cherry. 2012, based on an 18th-century English table.
Sarah graduated with a degree in violin performance, then went on to work for the Boston Symphony Orchestra as assistant manager of Education and Community Engagement.
Meanwhile, Andy had become friends with Freddy Roman as a student at NBSS. When Freddy left his part-time employment with Phil Lowe at the Furniture Institute of Massachusetts, Andy took over his role.
His next job was back at NBSS. At that time, he says, the school “was in an old structure, three buildings cobbled together to make one. I was on site for troubleshooting and routine (and after-hours) care. There were annual issues with fires in the sewer.” Having someone on site was critical. He also did such mundane jobs as taking out the trash and says “I loved every moment of it…. The school moved around the time I left, though it only moved a few blocks within the North End neighborhood of Boston. The new school building was renovated and outfitted to house the growing school.”
Andy and Sarah had a daughter, then a son. As the school was getting ready to move to a new location, Andy moved on to a position with a shipyard in Belfast, ME. “The dream was making wispy shavings on wooden boats. The reality was, I was a wearing a Tyvek suit grinding fiberglass. It was the job. In a weird way, I enjoyed it, but I only enjoyed it because I left it. Those people put in hard days and they love boats. Boats are something in your blood. They would come to work on these boats and ships, talk boats at lunch, and go home to work on their own boats.”
Next he got a job at a cabinet and furniture shop, Phi Home Designs in Rockport, ME, which made high-end residential cabinetry and furniture commissions. Andy did both. “That was a great position and a great education.” After leaving that job, he started doing his own work, piecing his income together from multiple sources, including commissions outsourced by other shops. He also taught at NBSS one week a month. “That was going well. I was working hard. But it wasn’t working for our family for me to be gone a week per month. Sarah was at home with the kids in midwinter. My travel and unpredictable schedule put too much stress on our young family.” They were open to something different.
Had they stayed in Maine, Andy would have had to get some kind of more stable employment with benefits, almost certainly not in woodworking. “I love woodworking,” he explains. “But it’s definitely secondary to family. I was really excited and grateful when the job opening came up in Berea.” He started the job in the summer of 2017.
“The students here are wonderful,” he says. “There’s very little entitlement. The students are grateful for the opportunity. They’re thankful to be at the college. Most of the students who work in the shop — you never know how they’ll use these skills going forward.”
Custom table with building crew Marrone, ‘Minta and Tim.Chase Slone, after making six shave horses.
Andy wrote to me separately that when it’s safe to resume classes at Pine Croft, Kelly Mehler will return to teach (and just generally be around the place) as often as he likes. Andy, too, will be teaching a number of courses. He asked me to point out that in choosing visiting instructors who are deep in knowledge, skills and expertise within the field of craft woodworking, he and his colleagues bore in mind the interracial and coeducational ideals and commitments of Berea College. “Our goal is to put together a roster that is representative of the woodworking community,” he wrote. “Much like Kelly created, my hope is that the school is a welcoming and special place for people to gather to learn woodworking.”
“I’m proud of the schedule and of our visiting instructors for the first season,” he added. “I’m certain the strength of the visiting staff came together because of the school environment and community that Kelly and Teri created. Peter Galbert and you [i.e., the author of this post] had taught at the school before. Megan Fitzpatrick cut her first dovetails with Kelly at the school. [Megan clarified that they were her first dovetails cut entirely by hand and noted that she has visited the school on multiple locations and loves the place.] I am grateful that Michael Puryear, Cathryn Peters and Brendan Gaffney were open to joining us for our first year.”
On Saturday, Chris Schwarz and I had our biennial chair conversation. I subjected him to a mind probe about his recently purchased a Welsh stick chair and an Irish Gibson stick chair he is currently building.
Suzanne: Please confirm if you have more Welsh chairs (made by other chairmakers) than house cats.
Chris: We are at a 2:5 chair:cat ratio. To be honest, Chris’s (Williams) chair has melted into the fabric of our daily lives and furniture because it isn’t a “room broach,” like so many pieces of custom furniture are. That’s the beauty of these chairs – they are so charitable. Welsh chairs like the one I purchased last week are as rare as hen’s teeth – especially here in the States. It’s a bit odd seeing it in an American house. I put it by my fireplace so it might feel a bit more comfortable.
Suzanne: Your newest chair was purchased during your visit with John Porritt. Not to get too personal but to use a term referenced in “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” (p.50) did you experience the “tingling in the bathing suit area” when you saw this chair? What struck you about the chair?
Chris: My first sight of the chair was less like a tingling and more like the aggressive groping I received from Kym Harper during 8th grade.
It was the second-best chair that John Porritt owned (the best one was in his house, see the gallery below). That chair is good enough to be in a museum.
Chris’ new Welsh chair.
What I like about Welsh stick chairs, especially the one I bought, is their motion. Most chairs are designed to look fairly balanced and stable to give you the confidence to sit in them. Welsh chairs, on the other hand, have a wildness.
The chair rakes back aggressively. It suggests it will be a comfortable chair to lean back in. And it delivers on the promise.
Also, there are many little details of this chair that deserve study. Some of the tenons into the arms are blind – not through. That’s quite unusual, and I am eager to work out the best way to build a replica. The crest rail has some subtle shaping that is difficult to photograph. The ends have a bit of a waterfall-like curve.
The armbow is clearly a bent stick that has been resawn, scarfed and bookmatched. It’s just a lovely piece of work. The only bummer about the chair is the shiny finish – likely shellac – which looks a bit wrong to me. I’m going to live with it for a while before I consider cutting it back. I’m not eager to mess with antique furniture as that’s not my specialty.
John Porritt’s chair.
Top view, Chris’ new chair.
Side view, new chair.
Suzanne: You have given a lively description of why this chair has such a strong pull for you. I’m looking forward to reading about more details after you have spent more time with the chair. As for the finish, live with the chair for a long while before thinking about a change.
When comparing the new Welsh chair with your American Welsh chair you wrote the chairs look distantly related, but also your chair is “uptight” in comparison to the old chair. That made me take a second look at the side view photo of the chairs. The older chair looks more relaxed and your chair perhaps has a stiffness to it. What elements of your chair do you think make it “uptight” and are you OK with that?
Chris: There are many elements of my chair that are more “uptight” in the craftsmanship. Some are obvious and some aren’t.
Obvious: I use hard edges and facets on every possible surface. I don’t like things that are rounded over. Even my seat, which is saddled and curved, has a sharp line surrounding it. The legs and stretchers are faceted – not turned or smoothed to round. I don’t round over the arms. My crest – same thing.
Less obvious: My sticks are consistent and have little tapering or entasis. One of the hallmarks (and charms) of an old Welsh stick chair are the small handmade inconsistencies in the construction. The sticks are not as regular and may taper or have a lot (or no) entasis. Also, I shoot for precise spacing of my sticks, which adds to the overall sharpness of the design.
I am, of course, happy with my design. It reflects the way I approach furniture, writing, cooking, music and making my bed. I like my desk to be clean….
But, I would like to be able to work in the older mode as well. This will require just as much thought and work. It’s not a sloppiness or a shortcut.
Suzanne: Adding to the sense of relaxation in the Welsh chair are the spindles under the arm. They tilt back in concert with the back of the chair and are another suggestion offered by the chair to sit down and lean back.
Your chair by itself is clean and it is evident you have thought through every detail. When placed next to the older Welsh chair the hard details of your chair stand out. If we were looking at two humans they would be an old pensioner next to an edgy teenager.
A few more questions about details. When you are working to make each detail exact and as precise as possible are you losing spontaneity?
Chris: Probably. But I think spontaneity in furniture should be in very low doses. Some people can make big design swings (and succeed) while building an object. I am not that kind of designer or builder.
Suzanne: Using pre-made dowels for spindles saves time, and you aren’t trying to make replicas, but does it take away from the Welsh aesthetic of the chair?
Chris: Perhaps. I use factory dowels in the classroom to remove a barrier that many first-time chairmakers face, which is the difficulty of making long, thin sticks. I make my own sticks for customer chairs. Even so, every stick – factory made or not – is scraped and shaped to fit. They do give a very consistent place to start, and they do contribute to the overall consistent look of the finished chair, like it or not.
Suzanne: Adding the sharp edge around the seat echoes the sharp edge of the armbow but does it make the chair more inviting?
Chris: I think the sharp edge around the seat removes the mushy line I see on many chairs. I hate mushy lines. My opinion is either have a sharp line or blend the seat and spindle deck together completely. The former is my approach because I like to repeat design elements up and down a chair. The second option (no line whatsoever) is one employed by old chairmakers who weren’t trying to show off.
Suzanne: You also wrote in a recent post you obsess over every detail. When do you know when a chair is finished and you can comfortably walk away?
Chris: For me, I spend a long time looking at my work from different vantage points and in different lights. I’m looking for things I can improve. I keep working until there’s nothing left that I can improve.
That doesn’t mean the results are perfect. There are lots of things on a finished chair that are not perfect. Those imperfections are details I cannot repair without starting over. A good example of this might be a wedge that is 5° off the axis I was shooting for. I can’t fix that without destroying the entire thing.
For me, making furniture is as much about looking as it is about doing.
Suzanne: I think it is the same for craftsmen and artists in any field. Step back, step away then come back to see what needs to be tweaked before saying the chair is done. You will also have a list of changes for the next chair because chair begets chair, no?
Chris: Yup. I have already made changes to my American Welsh Stick Chair. I incorporated those into a chair that hasn’t yet been made public. I also have a couple minor changes to make to the arms in future chairs. I don’t think it ever ends. Heck, I still make changes to my tool chests….
Suzanne: On to the Gibson, a variation of the Irish hedge chair! In “Irish Country Furniture 1700-1950,” Claudia Kinmonth wrote, “…although the origin of the name, which may be associated with Oldcastle, county Meath, is unclear. This design is distinguished from others by the distinctive ‘W’ (or less often an ‘M’) shaped arrangement of back spindles…Gibson chairs were once common in county Cavan, although they were generally made in northeast Leinster, especially counties Louth, Monaghan, Meath and Westmeath.”
The first Irish stick chair I found was painted green and not a Gibson but I loved it. Then, you turned up a true Gibson (although not painted green) and I liked it even more. These are wide and open-armed chairs. You have started making your first Gibson chair. What are your thoughts so far?
Chris: I’m in the middle of building the first one, and today I fit the arms to the front spindles.
A couple things really stand out for me with this chair. It seems to me to be an all-wooden version of a Morris Chair. The geometry and seat height (and other factors) give me the same feeling as when I first started making Morris Chairs in 1997 or 1998. The back leans 25°. That’s insane. Plus the seat is low – 15”. The position of the arms is similar. The extreme (24”) width of the seat is also similar to Morris Chairs. I’m not saying one influenced the other but the similarities are remarkable.
The best part of building the chair is trying to get into the heads of the chair’s original makers. This is necessary because there is obviously a right order of operations and a wrong order of operations when making this chair.
After I drew the chair full-size on paper and started to work it out at my bench, I received little flashes of communication across the centuries from Ireland. Things that aren’t completely obvious.
Like today: Mounting the arms on the front sticks first allows you to easily find the 25° angle of the two outside back sticks. Once you drill those, then it’s a piece of cake to drill the ‘W’-shaped sticks.
In other words, once you get into the briar patch, it’s obvious how to get out. Until then, it looks like a nut-doodle chair that is hard to build. It isn’t.
Mostly, I’m looking forward to sitting in it. My spine has a lot of questions.
Suzanne: I have to take you to task for your “Do the Irish have big butts in general” question on an Instagram post last week. I believe you could have used “generous bottoms” or “perhaps a bit wide abaft the beam” instead. The Gibson is a big welcoming chair and nothing wrong with that, boyo.
Chris: Apologies. But could you answer the question?
Suzanne: I’ll do some research and get back with you much, much later.
Chris Williams, your Welsh brother, will be returning to Covington later this month. What are you most looking forward to during his visit?
Chris: Mostly the arguing about the chairs. We work in very different ways. And we see the chair in different ways. He has baggage I can’t claim. And I have my own personal hang-ups. In the end, we’re both better for it. And I don’t have anyone else that I can talk to about this stuff who isn’t bored out of their minds after five minutes of splay-splaining. So my relationship with Chris is a healthy and wonderful thing. It is one of the greatest gifts the internet has given me.
Suzanne: What is the perfect place to put your chair (either one). Sit down and get comfortable. What are you drinking and what are you reading?
Chris: I like to be alone. The dream is to put it by a fireplace. Three-legged cat on my shoulder. Glass of red at hand. And a book of short stories by Wendell Berry.
Suzanne: My Welsh chair is by a fireplace, bottle of red and rereading “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” The Gibson under a tree, sipping a fine whiskey, memorizing “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” a cat sprawled next to me (because the chair has plenty of room).
The gallery has two more images of the green Irish stick chair and a gathering of Gibsons.
