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At 7 a.m. on a Wednesday in mid-August, 2020, it’s 52° (F). There was snow a couple of days ago. Bars and cinemas are open as usual, and no one’s wearing a mask.

If this picture strikes you as something out of a parallel universe, that’s because it is. I’m on the phone with Laura McCusker, who’s bundled up in a sweater, relaxing at the end of her day in Hobart, Tasmania, which she calls “an island, off an island, at the bottom of the planet.”

“Tasmania is a good place to be riding this out,” she says, referring to the Covid-19 pandemic. “We are an island state. The borders were locked down early; there have been no active cases for two months.”

The more you learn about Laura and her life, the lovelier this picture becomes. Laura and her husband, Pete Howard, live in West Hobart, a five-minute walk from the center of town. Their three-bedroom house sits on a hill overlooking the river, with fruit trees, a dog and chickens in the backyard. A bush reserve down the street is home to wallabies, possums and pademelons.

Laura’s workshop, in the suburb of Moonah, Tasmania (an indigenous name for a type of eucalyptus, or gum tree), is a 17-minute ride away on her electric bike. The building was constructed as an apple-packing shed circa 1911. Layers of brick with sawdust insulation between them keep the temperature stable and the shop noise down. Add a timber ceiling, picture the place set by a babbling brook, and you’ll get why Laura calls it “completely idyllic. When we came here from Sydney, I couldn’t believe there could be such pretty industrial buildings so close to town.” Tasmania has a lot of Georgian buildings, she goes on; because the economy was depressed for many years, the buildings escaped the razing that most of us know as “development.” As a result, “a lot of old towns look like they’re straight out of Jane Austen.”

Laura’s background is more cosmopolitan than her charmed domestic and work situation these days might suggest. The second of four children (her brother, Jim, is two years older; sister, Anna-Lucia, 2-1/2 years younger; and the baby of the family, Daniel, is 8 years younger), she was born to a Brazilian mother, Lucia, and her father, Charlie, is from Northern Ireland via Glasgow and Adelaide. Both parents are doctors (Lucia, now retired, is a specialist in chronic pain management and palliative care, and Charlie’s an OB-GYN) who met as students at The Memorial Hospital in Worcester, Mass., did their residencies in Glasgow, then returned to Australia.

Laura went to an all-girls high school in Sydney where classes beyond strict academics were limited to home economics or textiles and design. She had no idea that there were people who made furniture for a living. She understood that her future would involve university, followed by a profession.

But in the pause between high school and college, Laura planned to travel. Shortly after she took her final exams at the age of 18, she flew to London. Two days later, she’d slept off the jet lag and headed over to a pub for something to eat. “The guy behind the bar said ‘Oh, you’re from Australia. Are you looking for work?’” He mentioned that a pub around the corner was hiring. She checked it out. “Does the job come with accommodation?” she asked. It didn’t, but the manager said she could sleep on the pull-out sofa in his flat upstairs. Pete was the manager’s flat mate. “I met Pete on the third day I was in London, and that was 27 years ago,” she says, laughing.

They stayed in London for about 18 months, with a trip around the Greek islands along the way. After a while, Laura switched from selling drinks to selling medicinal herbs for Culpepers in Covent Garden. Then, in 1994, it was time to go home and enroll at Sydney University.

Pete followed six weeks later. While she was in classes, he was employed – first at a butcher’s shop, then at a bakery. He forewent candlestick making in favor of management; two notable jobs were preparing for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and working for Opera Australia.

Laura started a degree in fine arts, but left because “it wasn’t hands-on enough.” She took classes in medieval history, classical mythology and social anthropology, then heard that students in an architecture class were building tables. She signed up for the course. But when she heard it was going to cover concrete stress fracture points and building regulations, she says, she “ran screaming from the room,” thinking “there must be an easier way to learn how to build a table.”

Shortly after, she entered a training apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker through Lidcombe TAFE, a vocational school in New South Wales, where she began what would result in a Certificate III in Cabinetmaking.

It was the late-1990s, when a lot of manufacturing was moving to China; that made it hard to find a position as an apprentice. She hired on at a business that made high-end furniture out of particleboard with architectural veneers for offices and law libraries. While it was valuable experience, it wasn’t what she really wanted to do. “It wasn’t solid timber, and it wasn’t fine woodworking,” she says, “but it was a fantastic training in how to be efficient in the workshop and get the job done.” So after a couple of years she went back to school, this time at the Sturt School for Wood, just outside Sydney, which specializes in craft-based traditional woodworking. There she learned coopering, laminating, steam bending, dovetails – the whole shebang.

That was a year-long course. “Completely wonderful,” she says of the experience. “It was monastic. Beautiful. You could cut dovetails to your heart’s content seven days a week.” But she will always appreciate the pragmatic training she got from the job in the cabinet shop, where she learned to run a business and pay the rent.

On graduating from the Sturt School, Laura moved to Sydney and worked at a co-operative, the Splinter Workshop. There were about eight members who shared the space and machines. She set up her own corner and started building and selling furniture, relying on word of mouth at the start. When she didn’t have paid work, she built prototypes to her own design and did her best to get coverage in the local paper. She also tried small-batch products such as wooden vessels to hold ceramic dishes for burning essential oils, a venture that she says barely covered her costs, “but it was really good training in small-batch production, marketing and building relationships with galleries.” She worked there for five years, during which she gave birth to her daughter, Ella, and her son, Jimmy.

In 2003, when Ella was 4 and Jimmy a few months old, she and Pete decided to move to Tasmania. Real estate prices in Sydney were out of reach for a furniture maker and arts administrator, and getting worse by the month. They realized that quality of life was important and felt that they wanted to give their kids a home where they could settle, rather than having to move every year or so from rental to rental. With no local contacts or work lined up, Laura took a job at a shipyard, building furniture for a 60-metre (nearly 200′) luxury super yacht. She also completed a bachelor’s degree in adult and vocational education, which certified her to train others in the trades. It seemed like a good idea – she could spend part of her time teaching and the rest in design-build for her own business. But as things turned out, she didn’t need the back-up plan. “Work got so busy, it was hard to do both,” she says. “I made the choice to go back to my studio practice.” In 2010, she convinced Pete to leave his work in management and work with her full-time.

When we spoke, they’d just finished a set of shelves for a local client and would be moving on to a couple of mobile cabinets for a client in the hospitality business. Other jobs coming up include a big dining table in Huon pine. They’re also trying to finish up some jobs at home, such as a pair of decks and a studio flat on the lower floor of their house. It may be a place for friends to stay, or perhaps an AirBnB.

They work primarily in local species. One is Tasmanian oak, which Laura points out is not in fact an oak, but an umbrella term for a variety of eucalypts. “In Tasmania they call up to five different euycalypt species ‘Tasmanian oak,’ she says. But in Victoria they’ve got the same lumber and they call it ‘Victorian ash.’” It’s a big tree, so she suspects Europeans who took over the region simply called it “oak” in a generic sense. It’s easy to get, kiln-dried, quartersawn, consistent in color and consistent in price. Although it’s used primarily as a building material, Laura says “I actually think it’s a beautiful furniture timber as well.”

Huon pine is another prized species. Laura says it’s soft, and perfect for boats. But “it costs a lot of money, so people think it has status.” Another regional species is blackwood, which she compares to chocolate cake. It’s variable in color, which makes it hard to get a uniform look for a piece of furniture, and the dust is carcinogenic.

Much of their work to date has been for clients in the tourism and hospitality industries – hotels and event spaces. They’ve done pieces for the MONA Museum and built tables and seating for restaurants. Tasmania’s economy relies heavily on tourism; as a result of the pandemic, that kind of business has taken a big hit. But as more people have shifted to working from home, those in the building trades have had new orders for decks, home offices and interior renovations. She and Pete have moved, at least for now, from contract clients to domestic ones. “I feel we’ve been really lucky,” Laura says. “It’s kind of weird to get on national television and see what’s happening in the rest of the world.”

She didn’t expect to make a living as a furniture maker when they moved to Tasmania, but as it happens, she could not have been more mistaken about the prospects for doing just that. “If I could find some way to live, own my own home and have a high quality of life,” she remembers dreaming, “to actually have a viable business making beautiful and interesting furniture for people… I never expected to be able to do that in Tasmania.” Handmade furniture, she explains, was always “very, very expensive.” But Tasmania turned out to be the ideal place to make furniture for a living. “You don’t have huge overheads, so it doesn’t have to be that expensive or exclusive.” She compares her current circumstances to those of the past, recalling how she and Pete weighed pros and cons as they considered the move to Hobart. There’s a lot of money in Sydney – “big-city paychecks.” She wouldn’t have that in Tasmania. But, she thought, “I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll flip burgers, or I’ll teach.” In fact, her studio rent plummeted with the move; her annual rent for that idyllic timber-ceilinged industrial space is what she paid in Sydney each month. Marketing via the internet means she doesn’t have to sell her work through galleries; given that galleries typically make their money by doubling (or more than doubling) the price an artist puts on her work, selling directly to customers makes her work vastly more affordable. And shipping costs from Hobart to Sydney have turned out to be almost the same as what it cost to move a piece of furniture from her studio on one side of Sydney to the other.

“But it’s also a much nicer quality of life,” Laura adds. “Living in a big city was wonderful when we didn’t have kids, but once you have kids it all changes. We had a wish list consisting of (amongst other things) good coffee, live music/theatre venues, good food, museums, beautiful beaches, bushwalks etc. and an airport so we could get out quickly if and when we needed to visit family overseas and interstate. Hobart ticked all these boxes and more…they even have the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and now there’s MONA. It’s also in the same timezone as Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane so it doesn’t really feel like we’re very far away from grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins when the kids speak on the phone. Hobart is still a small town but has enough to keep us interested and it’s only a short flight to Melbourne or Sydney when you feel you need a fix.”

At this point, Ella has one year to go in her fine arts degree at the National Art School in Sydney, with a focus on printmaking. Tuition is paid for by the government through the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS); students repay the investment in their education by means of a prorated tax over the course of their working life, once their income reaches a certain threshold – interest-free. “So, if you’re an artist or a teacher or a nurse, you pay a lower rate” and it takes longer, Laura explains.

Jim, she says, “has a really mathematical and engineering brain” but is also into philosophy – he reads Kafka, Foucault and Chomsky “for fun” – and plays piano and guitar. At 17, she says he’s “interested in everything. I don’t think he’ll be hanging around Hobart.”

Reflecting on how views of work and higher ed have changed over the course of her life, Laura recalls the way things were when she was the age her kids are now. “If you’re intelligent and good at academics, you will go to university and become a professional. The fact that I didn’t want to do that – the idea of wanting to go into a trade – wasn’t ever on the table. If you’re a girl who’s smart, you don’t go into a trade.

“I think I was just a bit of a shit stirrer; I probably wanted to wind my parents up a bit.” She mentions Matthew Crawford and Richard Sennett. “If you work with your hands, you’re not very bright, and if you’re bright you get ‘rewarded’ by being able to work behind a computer for up to 10 hours a day!

“I feel very lucky to have a job where it’s intellectually challenging as well as physically rewarding. I’m able to be creative and analytical… It’s like productive yoga. It feels so good to be moving and producing and making and…by the end of the day you look around and it’s very satisfying.”

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

The first woman I was ever aware of in the realm of woodworking publications is Aimé Ontario Fraser. It was the early 1990s when I began to notice her name, and occasionally her picture, in the pages of Fine Woodworking. By then, I had spent a decade in custom furniture and cabinet shops in England and the States. One of the shops where I’d worked had three women, along with about ten men. But in the pages of the woodworking magazines I read, women rarely made an appearance.

The last article I remember seeing with Fraser’s byline was in 2005. After that, she slipped from my notice. Every so often I wondered what had become of this woman who was among the first to normalize images of women in woodworking – to get our eyeballs so used to seeing women (of all ages, sizes, etc., just as we do with men) fitting butt hinges, planing boards, ripping panels on table saws, carving mantels, and so on, that we may someday no longer say “wow, a woman woodworker” and simply see someone building a cabinet or applying her skill in the furnishing of an interior. So I contacted Fine Woodworking’s unfailingly helpful Betsy Engel, who forwarded my inquiry to Fraser. To my delight, she agreed to speak with me.

***

Fraser got her start in woodworking as a high school exchange student in New Zealand. It was 1976 and New Zealand was the center of modern wood composite boatbuilding technology – we’re talking 1/8” or thinner layers of wood laminated with epoxy and fiberglass cloth to produce hulls that are very light and strong. Even though she hadn’t been allowed to take woodworking classes in high school back home (she had to take home economics instead), she got a job working for a boat builder. She loved the work.

Back in the States, she wanted to keep building. She became romantically involved with a sailing buddy in Connecticut whom she would later marry. “He built stuff, so we started doing boat stuff,” she says. Building boats and finishing hulls became her work for the next decade-plus. This is how she learned woodworking.

Fifteen years later, she worked her way into running the boat shop at The Maritime Center (now the Maritime Aquarium), where she focused on traditional local boats and boatbuilding techniques. She led a group of serious volunteer builders, and the job also allowed her to work with schoolchildren; at one point she and a group of seventh graders built four boats in two weeks and then raced them on the river behind the Center.

On the Topic of Gender

At this point it’s worth noting that the trajectory of Fraser’s woodworking career has had a lot to do with being a woman in a field long dominated by men. “I’m pretty skilled as a woodworker,” she says. “I know how to make odd shapes and how to fit things together so well that the water doesn’t come in.” If you know anything about boatbuilding, you’ll appreciate she’s being modest. Such meticulous work is no mean feat. “But I never worked in a boatyard or on a building site. I honestly didn’t want to put up with that s**t.”

Take mansplaining, for instance. (Please, do take it, and never bring it back.) “I remember when I was in charge of the boat shop at the Maritime Center,” Fraser recounts, “and one of my jobs was to build boats so that people could watch me. I was a display! I had a team of volunteers including a V.P. from GE, a retired general, some heavy-duty people I had to manage. They would come into the shop and work, and we worked together to build boats in a traditional manner. But then men would wander by to watch the display. Some high level work was going on, and random men would tell me I was doing it wrong and start lecturing me on how to use a chisel or plane. Anyone who knew anything about building could see what I was really doing, yet so many clueless men felt compelled to tell me I was wrong. This phenomenon has always been hard for me to fathom.”

It’s fair to say that neither Fraser nor I would claim that such advice is only given to women. What’s irksome – well, aside from the “correction” being based on a widely held belief that fails to take all relevant factors into account – is the experience of people assuming you know less than you do because you’re a woman. Which is pretty ironic in Fraser’s case, considering she’s something of an expert on this subject. In 2002 she wrote an article on sharpening handplanes for Fine Woodworking (#157, July/August 2002) that involved electron micrographing plane irons and sharpening stones.

Shortly after, she put together a team for the New England Handplaning Contest (organized by The Woodworkers Store in Norwalk Connecticut); her team included the then-president of DMT, students, and friends, and relied heavily on Harrelson Stanley of HMS Enterprises, importer of Japanese tools and sharpening equipment. They trained by sharpening planes every day for weeks prior and discussed technique. The president of DMT made them a diamond flattening device so they could flatten the soles of their planes. Fraser was named the New England Handplane Champion for producing a 9-foot long lace-thin shaving of Alaskan cedar. “After I won it, I had to go to the grocery store on my way home. I remember walking down the frozen food aisle and thinking, ‘I’m the New England Hand Plane Champion!’” she recalls, chuckling at the geekiness of it all.

Nevertheless, corrections from men on the proper way to put down a plane continued to dog her. She did a TV commercial for Woodcraft in which she was planing a wide panel while talking about the company’s products. She put the plane down upright on the bench. Alarm bells went off around the country. “People throughout my career who were not professional woodworkers, people who did not win the New England Handplane Championship, would tell me I was doing it wrong!” she laughs. “I would have to say, ‘no if you put it on its side you risk nicking the blade [or] cutting yourself. Put it down gently, but not on its side, [or] somebody’s gonna get hurt.”

And then there’s just plain old-fashioned sexism. “I always faced a lot of crap for being a woman,” she continues. “‘Oh, you do that and you’re a woman?!’ I didn’t let it bother me. Writing helped a lot because it gave me many more opportunities than if I’d been a tradesperson alone. But I always felt, ‘This is what I am, this is what I do.’ I think like a woodworker. I never wanted to get too bothered about gender, though it’s always been there. At this one boatyard, one guy called me the Varnish Muffin. I said, ‘Look, I’m a professional; I have a staff of four and thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment. If you want me to come and varnish your boats, I will, but I am not a ‘Varnish Muffin.’ I don’t varnish just because I’m the captain’s girlfriend and girls varnish. I varnish because it’s my part of my profession.”

The Taunton Connection

Throughout the early years of her career she wrote for WoodenBoat and other boat-related magazines, in addition to running her own business on the side. One winter’s day, as she headed out to work on a 60-foot yacht in the water, she realized, “if I fall off this dock I will die, and no one will know, because I’m the only one out here and it’s too cold, and the current is too swift [to survive].” She started looking for another way to stay in woodworking and was hired by the Taunton Press.

After leaving Taunton around 1998, she had a job as the director of education, planning classes and teaching at The Woodworkers Store in Norwalk, CT that had a woodworkers’ club. People paid for shop time by the hour and there was someone on hand to help with projects. “I tended not to do ‘woodworking for women’ because I felt that was talking down to people,” she says. “I recognize that women at that time needed extra encouragement. But I didn’t like the idea of putting the women off in another room. I [did teach] boatbuilding classes. It was Taunton’s 25th anniversary; the owner of the franchise teamed up with Taunton and we had a bunch of authors come in and demonstrate while working.”

After that, she was the Principle Instructor at the Wooden Boat Workshop, also in Norwalk. It operated on a similar concept, focused on building small boats.

Fraser has written two books: Getting Started in Woodworking and Your First Workshop. She did technical editing for Taunton Books, working on the Mark Duginske’s Band Saw Handbook and the second edition of Bruce Hoadley’s classic, Understanding Wood. After that, she hooked up with John Kelsey and Ian Kirby; together they had a small company called Cambium Press, which published Kirby’s books on sharpening and dovetails, along with other books. She also ghost-wrote James Krenov’s book With Wakened Hands. “I was given a box of photographs and several hours of recordings, and we made that book.” She spent a week with Krenov to finish it up – a special experience, given that he was one of her heroes from the 1970s. “I had the good fortune to hang out with people who were my heroes,” she reflects. “Krenov, Mark Duginske, Ian Kirby, and others. We became good friends and had a lot of fun together.”

By 2008 Fraser had gone out on her own, with a 1500-square-foot woodworking shop in an old warehouse in Connecticut. Along with other types of cabinets, she did specialized work for equestrians, designing and building travel cases for all manner of dressage equipment.

Then the economy shifted, culminating in the housing crisis and the Great Recession. As a one-person business without the capitalization necessary to survive the drying up of high-end spending, she was devastated. She worked all day in her shop, then went to an evening job at a grocery store in an effort to keep the bills paid. “When they taught me how to run the fryer, I cried just a little,” she says. Eventually she realized she could not keep her business going. She sold all of her machinery, though she kept the hand tools and clamps.

Just last year, Fraser was hired as New England Training Coordinator for Mueller Reports, a company that specializes in insurance inspections for homeowners and small business. She trains people to inspect buildings. Not surprisingly, her knowledge of building and woodworking is invaluable. “It’s a wonderful challenge, and the steadiest paycheck I’ve had in my life,” aside from when she was at Taunton Press.

For the present, Fraser thinks of woodworking as a fallow field she’s letting rest. She lives in a community that regulates how she uses her garage. “But I do have a basement and tons of clamps and tons of tools,” she adds, thinking about how she’ll get back into it.

Finally, what about the name Ontario? I’ve always been curious, so I asked. Fraser’s family is from Upstate New York near the Canadian border. Her grandmother was from Ontario, and her parents had a summer cottage on Lake Ontario, so that became her middle name.

Thank you, Aimé, for allowing me to interview you, for digging up all these old photographs, and for being one of the early public faces of women in our field.

— Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work“

A few images of Fraser’s work

Whether he’s playing Ron Swanson in “Parks and Recreation,” Forest in “Devs” or Frank Fisher in “Hearts Beat Loud,” Nick Offerman is immediately recognizable as that hunky actor with a twinkle in his eye and a lush crop of facial hair. So closely has he come to be identified with his mustache and beards, plural, which range from just-beyond-stubble to “full bush,” that some fans are taken aback when some new role demands he be clean-shaven.

Nick’s humor is dry, understated and often conveyed wordlessly, through masterful timing and manipulation of his brow. Call me a sick puppy (you won’t be the first), but the performance of Nick’s that I’ve found most hilarious to date concerns a quote he found on Twitter a few years back: “I saw Nick Offerman without his moustache. I vomited and died.” He followed this citation with a plainspoken reminder to his audience that the face they may feel at liberty to trash was made by his parents, who would be hurt by such a remark.

Humor is a weird thing. In this case, it was something about the juxtaposition of a cruel comment thoughtlessly hurled into cyberspace for all to see, and the way Nick brought his own reduction from complex individual to objectified celebrity home to the world of Mom, Dad and genes, that left me weeping, doubled over with laughter. He did it all with a straight face, which made it all the funnier. And even as my diaphragm spasms left me gasping for breath, I was sharply aware that he was engaged in the serious business of moral counsel, doing his part to make the world a kinder, more caring place. Which made it wickeder still – I mean, we’re talking the Golden Rule, delivered via a heartfelt response from a typically confident character to a self-entitled tweet. Welcome to Nick’s world of serious fun.

Mention Nick Offerman and most of those familiar with his name will conjure an image of Ron Swanson, fictional director of the Parks and Recreation department in the (also-fictional) town of Pawnee, Indiana. The part made Nick a household name, especially among those under the age of 60. What many don’t know is that (1) Nick had been acting for a couple of decades before he became famous for his role as the series’ pivotal character, and (2) in a very important sense, he credits his success as an actor to woodworking. “From the age of 16, my tool box and framing bags saved my life again and again over the years,” he told me. “I became an artist by the good graces of the lumberyard.”

Nick grew up in Minooka, Illinois, a small Midwestern farm town he describes as “Norman Rockwellian,” located “about an hour and fifty years southwest of Chicago.” He was blessed to have “charismatic examples of woodworking” in his own family, and in particular cites his father’s “intrepid ability to take a competency with hammer and nail and saw and build legitimate pieces of oak furniture” for their home. His father, Ric Offerman, had had no woodworking instruction. “Everything was put together with nails but still very gorgeous. That was what first instilled in me that with our hands and a bit of cleverness we can make wonderful things in wood.”

Nick’s parents grew up on farms four miles from each other. His dad taught social studies in junior high. “He was very much a renaissance man,” Nick says. “He had a farmer’s capability when it came to earning income for his family. He drove a school bus, coached sports, worked on a blacktop crew, did hired-hand work for my mom’s family.” His mom, Cathy Offerman, was about 20 when she had her first child; she became a homemaker, raising four kids (Nick is the second) and, Nick says, “wielding all the superpowers of any member of the Laura Ingalls Wilder family.” When the youngest was out to school, she finished a nursing degree and became a full-time labor and delivery nurse in Joliet, Illinois, a profession she pursued for 25 years.

“They’re really incredible Americans, my mom and dad,” he goes on, calling them “people who would fit neatly into the fellowship of Wendell Berry’s fictional community.” Not that he appreciated this as a child. It wasn’t until he went to theater school that Nick realized how bucolic his childhood had been, working with his uncles and his mom’s family who raised pigs, corn and soybeans. “I was fascinated with them, with working on a farm, riding bikes with my cousin and playing baseball – enjoying the fruits of these wonderfully home-economical parents.”

Born in 1970, Nick describes himself as “a child of Saturday morning cartoons.” The nearest theater was in a town about 20 minutes away. They went to the movies once a month, which was a special treat. “It seems like a storybook childhood. We were not overly wealthy, but I was unaware because my life was extremely rich in other ways.”

Minooka formed Nick’s entire world. In his junior year at high school, he and the rest of his cohort had to declare their plans for a career. It was before the widespread use of computers for printing, and he vividly recalls the high school guidance counselor presenting him with a list of 36 worthy professions printed in purple ink from a ditto machine. “You had to pick one,” he says. “Mine isn’t really on here,” he told the guidance counselor. “I think I want to entertain people, like, be an actor.” The counselor responded with something along the lines of “I don’t think you can get there from here.”

Fortunately for Nick and the rest of us, his girlfriend at the time was auditioning for the dance department at the University of Illinois. He drove her to the audition. While chatting with some theater students in the hallway, he learned you could get a degree in theater there – and get paid professional wages to perform in plays. “And I said ‘By god, I knew it!’” He auditioned for the school’s theater department, which accepted only 16 actors a year. He portrays his acceptance in characteristically modest terms: “They had just run up [against] a shortage of meatheads. In any theater department you need a couple of beefy meatheads to carry the talented people on and off stage. I got there just in time.”

“I had some great teachers,” he continues. One, Shozo Sato, a master of Zen arts from Japan, taught them kabuki. He took them touring in Japan and Europe, performing a kabuki version of “The Iliad.” There was also a class in set building – “a bunch of suburban kids who don’t know a standard from a Phillips head, and I step in and they look at me like I’m a ringer.” He began to appreciate his abilities as a carpenter, which he’d learned on the farm and in summer jobs framing houses. The theater department started paying him to build scenery.

Because of the extra time spent on tour, he took five years instead of four to graduate. He considers the additional investment unquestionably worthwhile, though he insists he “still wasn’t very good at acting” by the time he graduated. “But people kept me around because I was good at stage combat – sword fights and fisticuffs. They figured out that if they gave me a couple of small lines in a play, I would build the whole set.”

Leaving home

After college Nick moved to Chicago, which has a thriving theater culture (or did, before COVID-19). Carpentry proved an important part of his income there. He built scenery for big theaters including the Northlight, Victory Gardens and Shakespeare Repertory, and acted in plays at night. But his favorite memories of Chicago involve a company, the Defiant Theater, that he started with some friends. “We did some of the greatest work of my life, because of the freedom that your mid-20s bring with them. We had no budget. We’d go see shows at the big theaters…and they’d do something cool on the stage and we’d go back to our storefront theater and say, ‘we want to put a car chase in this play’…. We would build a couple of cars out of refrigerator boxes or luan and have stage hands dressed in black shove these boxes around the stage. We learned that if you engage the audience’s imagination, they go along with it. Together we all agreed that this was a high-speed car chase happening onstage, and that had them rolling in the aisles. It makes for a more rewarding theatrical experience than all the budget in the world can provide. It was one of the first establishing moments in my body of work, of understanding the value of wabi sabi, the imperfections being the thing to showcase.”

Nick moved to Los Angeles in his late 20s. Chicago had been good to him, but like most people, he thought of LA as big-time. “Things had been going very well in Chicago, both onstage and backstage,” he explains. “I didn’t get rich financially, but I lived like a king. I thought that living in LA would be a continuation of that arc. I was dead wrong. LA is just not a theater town. At all! My 27-year-old manhood, such as it was, was built on the rock of my professional work in the theater…and so I spent a few years kind of flailing, trying to find my footing. Which in my late 20s meant drinking too much bourbon with my best friend, and trying to find the footbridge from youth to adulthood.”

He turned to freelance carpentry – cabins in people’s yards, decks, “the biggest things I could [do] without needing to be a licensed contractor.” His eye had been caught by the work of Greene and Greene and Frank Lloyd Wright – the Gamble House, the Blacker House, the pieces at the Huntington Museum – which he says “really knocked my socks off.” He also became aware of Sam Maloof. Nick started working details from these inspirations into his decks and other jobs, and describes his first bridle joints for a decorative deck railing as “just revelatory.” When he got a gig to build a yoga studio, he decided to use post-and-beam construction. “Those were my first mortises and tenons. I also worked in bridle joints,” both types of joinery he’d seen in antique furniture. He experienced a kind of epiphany: “I think I’ve accidentally become a woodworker.”

“I had a couple decades of carpentry in which at times my peers and I would make fun of any woodworker we came across, especially in the scenery shops of Chicago,” Nick recalls. There was a very nice guy named Brad who sometimes would bring his very nice roll of Two Cherries chisels…and we would make fun of this sensitive artist with his nice chisel roll because scene carpentry can be so much more brutal an existence. In the scene shop, chisels are used exclusively for opening paint cans.” There would be no more making fun of sensitive woodworkers.

An acquaintance gave Nick a stack of Fine Woodworking magazines. “I saw that magazine for the first time at 28 or 29 and just flipped out,” he remembers. He spent a few years teaching himself, up to the point where he built a blanket chest with dovetails (“probably a Becksvoort project,” he adds, invoking one of his furniture-making heroes) and a couple of Nakashima tables. “While my acting career was going better and better, with every woodworking project I would up the degree of difficulty.” At some point he knew he had to try a small boat, because it would require a whole new way of working with the material. “My friends with [professional] shops hated me then,” he remarks, “and they hate me to this day, because they need to crank out kitchen cabinets to pay their LA shop rent, and I’ve had the good fortune of my acting jobs making it so that I could choose my woodworking projects.”

Even so, he describes his years in LA before he met Megan Mullally, who is now his wife, as “the nadir of my adult life.” Their meeting, in 2000, was a fortuitous by-product of his stubborn determination to pursue his original métier. “I know this is a TV and film town,” he remembers thinking, “but my whole thing is doing theater, so even though it’s not necessarily what’s done, I’m going to do a play.” Some casting directors hooked him up with an audition for a play called “Berlin Circle.” He won a role. (Naturally, he also helped build the set.) Megan showed up as a fellow cast member. Nick says their meeting, and the relationship that grew out of it, “really did save my life. Here was an opportunity to clean up my act and…become a productive citizen.” He adds, “I don’t believe I’ve had an unhappy day since.”

Several years later, Megan got a job in a Mel Brooks production of “Young Frankenstein” on Broadway. In keeping with their commitment to avoid spending long stretches of time apart from each other, Nick planned to move with her; he hoped to find a space in New York where he could build his first canoe. There he met his friend Jimmy DiResta, whom he describes as “a master of filming all of his work and making it palatable to viewers.” Jimmy agreed to shoot the whole canoe-building process at Nick’s shop space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, an experience he considers “a graduation” to realizing that “really, anything is possible with wood.”

“In 2008, after 18 months of astonishing audiences with her powerhouse talents, Megan finished her run on Broadway and we headed home to Los Angeles,” Nick wrote in follow-up correspondence. “I am grateful for the life lesson that resulted from that time. Had I obeyed the typical actor’s narcissism, I would have stayed in LA ‘in case I got a TV pilot or some great movie gig,’ thereby missing out on a year and a half living happily with my bride for the very slim chance of something good. Instead, by making our marriage the priority, I got to witness her triumph first-hand (I saw the show 25 times), I got to build my first 18-foot cedar-strip canoe, I did a film with Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst and an award-winning musical (“Adding Machine”). Conan O’Brien had turned me on to road cycling, and I got my first nice bicycle, which I then rode every day 18 miles round trip to my shop in Red Hook and back to the Upper West Side. The moral being that by remaining open to life’s possibilities, and placing my relationship above my own selfish needs, I think I reaped a good deal more bounty than I would have otherwise.”

Patience made possible by woodworking pays off

With each year Nick worked in film and TV, his roles became more frequent and substantial. People told him they thought he had something unique. “Stick around,” they’d urge. That helped him persevere through the kind of times that have sent plenty of others back to more conventional ways of making a living. The seed of his big break came when he auditioned for “The Office.” One of the writers, Mike Schur, who went on to be part of the creative team for “Parks and Recreation,” wanted to cast him in the “Office” role for which he’d auditioned, but Nick ended up having a conflicting gig, so Mike wrote Nick’s name on a Post-it Note and kept it for future reference.

When they got around to making “Parks and Recreation,” NBC didn’t want Nick, who was then 38, in the role of Ron Swanson – the character was written as someone 20 years older. But Mike and his co-creator, Greg Daniels, were adamant. “They saw something peculiar in me that they weren’t prepared to do without.” He compares it to Gary Knox Bennett’s once-infamous (and now quite famous) nail. “It’s just a matter of experience and talent and a lot of luck and serendipity.”

After two decades, his acting career finally took off. Up to then, he’d had a one-man woodworking shop with occasional helpers. Now, he realized, “I’m going to need to put some employees in the shop or it’s gonna sit here in the dark.” He hired RH Lee, then the Offerman Woodshop crew grew to five or six. Nick started touring as a comedian, a performance genre he claims he’d never had in his sights. (This is literally incredible to most of us who know his work.) “I’m a theater actor,” he offers by way of explanation. “I perform other people’s writing. But when colleges began mistakenly inviting me, I took advantage of the opportunity to talk to a couple thousand young people, and now I’m apparently a humorist.” (He is definitely a humorist.) At the same time, his skills in playing the guitar improved – so of course he wanted to learn to make one. He read some books, which tempered his bravado a tad. “Every book ends with an admonition about getting just the right amount of shaving for the sound but to keep it from being so thin it would explode.” To ease himself into the craft, he started with a ukulele, “because their strings are plastic and it’s going to be a less painful mistake.” He describes the ukuleles he has built as his primer course in preparation for acoustic guitars.

Artists in pandemic mode

As with sports, Nick observes, performing artists generally require an audience. Even in TV and film, which don’t require a live audience, groups of people are part of the process: actors, directors, camera people and more. His 2020 schedule had him touring in England and Europe, as well as shooting the next series of “Making It,” his show with Amy Poehler about working with your hands. All of these plans have been cancelled or severely postponed.

“It’s quite dejecting,” he remarks. “I have never experienced this as an adult. I’ve always been able to find some way to make myself feel useful. Those of us that are lucky enough to not have to be on the front lines of dealing with the pandemic or with the social unrest we’re undergoing…. For me, my self-worth is predicated on feeling like I’m doing somebody some good, somewhere. And under the auspices of this lockdown I can still do some good for my household and immediate family and some friends…. I’m figuring out some ways of doing some good for my audience, or my fan base. But it’s really been very strange.”

He recently spoke with an older actor friend who was having a hard time; he had to remind him, as well as himself, that “a lot of people in the world go through stuff like this” – the lack of paid employment, the isolation from friends and family, the extreme limitations on travel and other activities – “all the time. The fact that this is entirely new to us feels like an incredibly privileged position to be in,” he says.

“The things I can do as more of a contribution are reaching out to my friends and family and asking, ‘How’s it going in Minooka? …in England?’ Shows are beginning to strategize ways to keep creating content.” In addition, he has made three comedy specials available online at nickofferman.co, with all proceeds going to America’s Food Fund during the pandemic. “I wanted to find a way to provide this content for people who find me funny, but I’m very comfortable financially, so I don’t feel good plugging my wares, so I thought what if I donate all of my ‘wares’ to America’s Food Fund?” I’m much better working for a show or a film. I’m not a great lone wolf. So I’m really looking forward to smarter people than me putting me back to work.”

In the meantime, he’s working in his shop. Some friends are running local grass-fed meat programs; he buys a box of meat every so often and gives it away as a gift.

And he’s working on another book, his fifth. (His others are “Gumption,” “Paddle Your Own Canoe,” “Good Clean Fun” and “The Greatest Love Story Ever Told.”) “That,” he says, “feels very medicinal.” This one is a book about our relationship, as humans, with nature – or lack thereof. “The stuff that I’m reading, the homework I’ve been doing for it over the past couple of years, that’s personally an incredible salve. It feels like what Wendell Berry would hopefully consider ‘good work.’ And down the road I should also get paid for it,” says Nick.

“Books remain the bedrock of democracy,” he believes. “As a clumsy and flawed human, when I can look past all of the distractions of modern life, it is in books that I find the signposts pointing me towards the pursuit of decency. Even in some books not about woodworking.”

– Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work” (which Nick calls “poignant, honest, sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious but always masterful stories”) and “Kitchen Think”

With thanks to Cathy Offerman for hunting down early pictures.

Considering how wistfully many adults talk about youth, you’d think it really was carefree.

Was your youth carefree? Mine wasn’t. Aside from the usual complement of jobs, household chores and emotional Sturm und Drang, I was beset by concern about ecological devastation from the age of about 8, and about war and violence of all kinds. How can your heart not be broken by news of people being killed at a wedding or while having a pint at the pub, or wild animals dying in a human-caused conflagration?

Beyond this, the clear horizon of seemingly endless possibilities that causes so many adults to wax nostalgic about youth felt more like a burden to me. How should I plot my course when I had no idea what I “wanted” to do? What would be an ethical and meaningful way to make a living? As I went from one job to another, I quickly got a feel for the work that didn’t suit me. But it was far more difficult to imagine a line of work I might be capable of pursuing over the long term that would give me a sense of contributing, somehow – and one that wouldn’t quickly become depressingly routine.

A recent conversation with a young furniture designer-maker in England revived these memories and reminded me how glad I am to be (gulp) 61. Harriet (“Hattie”) Speed contacted me after she read Making Things Work – she wanted to interview me in connection with her project This Girl Makes. I looked up the website; it was clearly a worthwhile endeavor with which I’d be glad to help out. But when she sent a list of questions, each carefully related to an excerpt from the book, I was blown away by her thoughtfulness and how keenly the book had resonated with her. For example:

“Did you go through the mid-twenties crisis (as I am experiencing)? E.g. doubting yourself and your chosen career, questioning if you are ‘enough,’ losing motivation, falling out of love with making, feeling disenamoured with the ‘scene’/the ‘industry’?”

Excerpt from Making Things Work: With this change came a creeping return of the perfectionism I’d cultivated during my City & Guilds training. “Is this good enough?” I’d asked Mr. Williams in those days, handing him my latest effort at a dovetail or miter. In his soft Welsh accent he always threw the question back to me: “Do you consider it good enough? If you need to ask the question, you most likely know the answer.”

And

Perhaps you were expecting something technical: “Invest in a SawStop” or “Tails before pins.” With me, it’s always more existential.

I couldn’t help thinking this person would make a great career counselor (or shrink). And I was intrigued by what she’d revealed about her situation. As someone who gets her share of correspondence from woodworkers of all ages asking for my thoughts about going into furniture making as a livelihood, I sometimes feel like a therapist saying it’s OK – and in many cases, better – to save woodworking for your spare time. Fortunately, Christopher Schwarz agreed that as a thoughtful young person with formal training and an impressive list of awards, who is finding her way in the world as a woodworker, Hattie would make a good profile for this series.

Hattie was born in Hexham, Northumberland, a town Wikipedia describes as dominated by Hexham Abbey, a Gothic confection constructed in the 12^th century. The youngest of three sisters, she came along in 1995. For her A-level studies (the rough equivalent of junior and senior years in high school in the States) at Hexham High School, she did Product Design. Her first project was a light; the second, a chair. It was the chair that hooked her. She wanted to make furniture.

She started working toward this goal with an Art Foundation Diploma at Newcastle College, specializing in 3-D design. Next she considered a cabinetmaking apprenticeship with Robinson-Gay Fine Fine Furniture, but the principal, Stephen Robinson-Gay, told her to further her design education, specifically at Rycotewood Furniture College, in central Oxford.

She took his suggestion and went through a three-year bachelor’s of arts training in furniture design and making. To cover the course fees (each year of tuition at Rycotewood cost her £6,000-£7,000), she got a student loan. Hattie was one of three women in her year, some of them mature students (i.e., older than the typical students, who were recent high school grads or in their early to mid 20s). “I think that’s why it was such a positive experience,” she remarks; “there was such a mix of ages and backgrounds.” She learned as much from her peers as from the tutors.

She describes the training as “very traditional.” Hattie was particularly influenced by tutor Dr. Lynn Jones, who’s best known as the designer of a chair for breastfeeding women. “Her approach is so specific to each person she works with, she really listens and tries to understand who you are and what you are about,” she says of Dr. Jones. “She would often give me advice on projects I was doing alongside my studies, which meant her guidance was really holistic and I was able to benefit from resources outside of the college. It was also one of the first times I had met another woman in furniture, who shared my aesthetic style and love of resourcefulness! I guess we just clicked. She is now a very good friend. I must say though that all the staff at Rycotewood were VERY good and very committed to my learning – [it’s] worth mentioning Joseph Bray, the course leader; John Barns, the machine-training tutor/jig maker extraordinaire; and Drew Smith, CAD and design tutor.” 

The training was also quite competitive. “I felt I really had something to prove,” she says. “College taught me resilience, as I hadn’t done furniture making before,” she wrote for a testimonial on the Rycotewood website. “I kept trying, and eventually got up to a good standard. The tutors and staff are really amazing.” She spent the summer holidays following her first year at Rycotewood gaining work experience at Robinson-Gay, and told Stephen that he had changed her life.

The training at Rycotewood focused on hand tools to start, after which students added small equipment such as biscuit joiners. Following this basic training in techniques, they moved on to projects that involved designing and building to briefs. Her projects included bedside cabinets, a pair of reading stools called “HINNY” and “Corkey’s Cabinet,” her final design-build project, which she partnered with a related 5,000-word dissertation.

“Corkey’s Cabinet” explored how craft can help those who have been bereaved, a subject with which Hattie has personal experience, having lost her father when she was just 14. She designed and built a collector’s cabinet for keeping mementos of a loved one, the whole thing constituting a kind of therapy. “It ended up winning quite a few rewards,” she says, adding modestly, “so that was quite good.” Quite good, indeed. Rycotewood has its own annual award for graduating students; she won best in show. She also won best in show for the Young Furniture Makers Award that year. Following these exhibitions, she showed the piece as part of a show of furniture and artworks in wood at Messums Gallery, a contemporary arts center housed in a jaw-droppingly lovely 13^th-century tithe barn and adjacent dairy barn in the rolling hills of Wiltshire.

After this series of high-profile exhibitions, the prize-winning collector’s cabinet currently lives in her room, where the frame serves as a clothes horse and the top stores makeup.

Hattie lives in a shared house in Oxford with three others. In a few weeks she’ll be moving to a larger house with 10 occupants that she calls “a sort of art commune-type thing. I met the girl that set it up when we started a punk band that ended up being quite short-lived, but I went on to meet other people in their community.” When a room became available, Hattie jumped at the chance to be part of the household.

For now, she has two part-time jobs. One will be familiar to many graduates of furniture making courses: on Saturdays she teaches furniture design and making to young people at her former college, Rycotewood. Her other job is less typical: three days a week, she does therapeutic woodworking with patients at a neuro-rehab center that’s part of the National Health Service. She’s typically working with in-patients who have suffered strokes or traumatic brain injuries, as well as working with out-patients who experience other neurological conditions, such as MS. “There is a real mix; some patients are in wheelchairs and have good cognitive function, whereas others may have good limb function, but might struggle to communicate or have difficulties with vision or spatial awareness.” The workshop is in the ward; she collects the patients from their rooms and brings them to the workspace. They have a few set projects – a bird box, for example, a trinket box and a picture frame – and are encouraged to be creative in how they personalize them. Those who wish to customize their work are free to do so. They use a hand-powered miter saw for the cutting; the frame ensures it’s well within the capabilities of even those in lower-functioning cognitive states. “It’s pretty impressive what you can achieve,” Hattie remarks. “I find it really interesting as a designer-maker. You’d think it would be repetitive, but each person’s different, and the way you go about doing things is different for every person. It’s a form of therapy, so you get to learn about [them] and talk with them. It’s really social.”

But let’s go back a bit. After graduating from Rycotewood in 2018, Hattie took a job as a design engineer at Ercol, one of England’s best-known furniture manufacturers, which has been around since the 1940s and is still a major provider of home furnishings today. Ercol is a big supporter of Rycotewood; they do a lot of live projects, which says something about the company’s interest in staying relevant as tastes and ideas about furniture change. The chairman and head of design were at Hattie’s graduating show; she caught their eye because she won three awards. (It’s hard not to make an impression when you keep being called up to the stage.) When she saw a job opening in the design team, she applied, a move for which she credits a furniture designer friend, Alys Bryan, whom Hattie met during her first year at university; Alys, too, was a student of Dr. Jones.

By way of illustrating the gulf between what many imagine the job entailed and its reality, she offers the following: “’Oh, you’re a designer!’” friends would say. “No, actually, I’m a design engineer,” she’d reply; “I’m looking at what kind of screws we’re going to need.” As middle-person between the designer and the production team, she prepared technical drawings and did modeling on CAD, helped with bills of materials and sent them to the purchasing department. If the company was putting on an exhibition, she might design stands for the pieces, or help lay the show out.

“I definitely felt like, reading the job description, I could do that role,” Hattie reflects. “I went into it knowing I was going to learn a lot, but it was out of my comfort zone and what I would expect of myself. The skill set I thought I had – it was going to teach me the skills I didn’t have.”

As she settled into the job, the compartmentalization of the industrial work context chafed. “I like the holistic approach of doing every single part of the process and seeing it from start to finish. Although you did get to see the furniture being made, you weren’t involved in the making.” She’d spent three years in college making every day, always feeling she had something to prove. “When you’re a woman, people think you’re going to be a designer. So I worked really hard at learning to make.” And now she was in a job where several layers of intermediaries stood between her and the making.

On the other hand, she says, “they were really supportive in giving me opportunities and supporting projects I was doing outside of my job.” For instance, when she had an exhibition, they paid for printing for the exhibition, including postcards and artwork. They provided sponsorship so she could participate in the Young Professional Industry Experience, a three-week tour around furniture factories and showrooms, most of them larger operations but some smaller shops with 10 or so people on the shop floor. When a Design Technology teacher from Didcot Girls’ School approached her to ask whether she would run a workshop with her students, Ercol allowed her to do it on company time and provided two members of staff, as well as materials (“we used their waste components,” says Hattie – and what better use to make of waste than teaching people to build things?) to run the project. “That was probably the best thing I did while I was at Ercol. It made me realize that I enjoy being in a learning environment and working with people to create their own designs. Because the school was same-sex, we were running the workshop for approx 15 GCSE students (ages 14 and 15). Seeing that many girls in the workshop cracking on with the design-and-make project we had set was so exciting! It was a stark contrast to the factory floor.”

Feeling a bit of burn out, Hattie took four months out to reset. “I had no other job lined up. But a friend, who I studied at Rycotewood with, told me he was planning on leaving his job (the NHS role) to go travelling, which just so happened to be around the time I was thinking of leaving Ercol. I had already heard of the hospital’s workshop when the workshop manager had visited Rycotewood in my second year. And I had been in contact with him when I was doing my research into craft and bereavement, as I referenced a study the hospital carried out with its patients in my final essay. Whilst waiting to hear about the NHS role, I also contacted Rycotewood and asked if they had any work suitable for me, which resulted in the Saturday Club role.”

Lockdown

The lockdown proved a time for Hattie to do a lot of thinking and working through emotional stuff. Her job with the NHS has continued – she wears full PPE: mask, goggles, apron, gloves. But there has been no teaching at Rycotewood since the lockdown began. (She points out that those Saturday classes wouldn’t have been happening during the summer anyway.) At this point, she hopes to apply for a full-time role at the NHS and teach evening classes at Rycotewood on the side. To get there, she needs a teaching qualification. So she decided to do a post-graduate certificate of education through the City of Oxford College, where Rycotewood is based. She’ll be studying part-time over the next two years, while keeping her current jobs.

Taking on the bigger picture: This Girl Makes

Hattie started This Girl Makes in 2016, during the second year of her degree. She’d visited the London Design Fair at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane and spoken with the women makers; all agreed there should be a blog promoting women in craft. “You hear about all these men and you can reel off the names,” she says. “But not women. I did a lot of it for my own personal interest because I wanted to find other women who were interested in what I was interested in.”

She decided to put on workshops that would encourage women to get involved. Lacking her own workshop, she couldn’t have people come to her, so she went to them, approaching galleries and museums, community spaces, with proposals to engage members of the public. To save time during the events themselves, she put together kits of parts in her room in the shared house. The first project was a three-legged milking stool; the second, a toolbox made of plywood. In a two-hour session, participants would assemble these kits, as an introduction to the satisfactions of building something useful and practical for themselves.

It’s important to Hattie that the events be inclusive and accessible. For some of these events, she has managed to obtain funding, which allows low-income people to participate. Others are ticketed. At this point she’s done more than 20. They’ve gone really well, she says; she often fills every spot available. “There are a lot of schools where you can learn to make high-end furniture [that] cost thousands of pounds,” she notes. In contrast, these two-hour courses are accessible to kids and complete beginners. “There’s definitely a demand for it. I want to keep doing it as a side thing.”

Parents tell her schools don’t offer this kind of teaching any more. Their workshops aren’t well resourced, or they’ve been entirely shut down. There’s a lack of teachers who can teach these skills; everything has shifted to digital. “Everyone at school will learn to use a laser cutter, but won’t necessarily learn to sharpen a chisel or set a plane.”

Reflecting on where she stands at this moment, Hattie is keenly aware that she’s on a road less traveled. “At formal furniture training colleges you’re going to learn to make fine furniture so you can get a job making furniture for the 0.1%. It’s unlikely this furniture will ever be used. It’s superficial and made for people to show off. But there’s a market for that. There’s [also] a reduced middle class, and therefore market, for bespoke, handmade furniture. Some people are totally fine with that, because they just want to make what they want to make and they don’t question the ethics. But that didn’t sit comfortably with me.”

She was training to be part of that scene, but she didn’t want to be part of it. She thought that working at Ercol, which makes well-designed furniture that is more affordable, more vernacular and functional, would align better with her values. But various aspects of that work jangled, too.

She’s quick to acknowledge that she’s pursuing a different path from many furniture design students. “Having studied on a bespoke furniture making course, you don’t do design for industry!” There are different standards and materials – the whole perspective is far more commercial. Having been trained to use hand tools, she was now designing for CNC production. It was also her first experience in a corporate environment. “Because my parents are both self-employed, it was my first experience of being in a pecking order. Also, the office environment – that was totally not me. So that was a bit of an education. A lot of positives came out of it, but it was a very tough year.”

A few weeks ago, Hattie and her family observed the 10th anniversary of her dad’s death. “When I had my exhibition last year…the last line of my thank you speech was ‘thanks mum and dad, for bringing me into the world.’” She’s grateful for opportunities her parents have given her. “My mum is very tough-love. In her not being a typical mum she’s made me more independent… It’s a silver lining of something that could be viewed as more negative.” She describes her dad, a quantity surveyor who worked with architects to calculate materials needed for given jobs, as “a man of real integrity. Very honest. He had a very big heart. Even in business, he had really good relationships with people he worked with. He had his own business, working in construction…but approached everything with a real sense of humor and playfulness and would always find ways of incorporating creativity into his days. I definitely wouldn’t have achieved as much as I have had he not been my dad, and had he not died. If you lose a parent when you’re younger you grow up quite quickly, and you also learn the value of life.”

I, for one, will be watching with interest where Hattie goes.

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