Editor’s Note: Michele Pietryka-Pagán is the French-to-English translator on the three-person team dedicated to bringing André-Jacob Roubo’s work to life. We have Michele, along with Don Williams and Philippe LaFargue, to thank for “With All Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture” and “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry.”
These volumes are no longer in stock as we’re making room for new deluxe editions of each. The deluxe edition of “With All Precision Possible” will be for sale later this month and we plan to offer a deluxe edition of “To Make as Perfectly as Possible” soon.
Michele and Philippe have also completed the translations of more volumes of Roubo focusing on interior carpentry, garden carpentry and carriages. (You can read more about that on Don’s blog, here.)
Michele Pietryka-Pagán grew up in Vermont, the eldest of six children, born to native Vermonters.
“My parents were children of the depression, and so we grew up with a heavy dose of ‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without,’” Michele says. “That’s a common Vermont philosophy. My parents were also educated, and they wanted all of us to be educated, too. There was always a subtext of do-it-yourself, and that included putting yourself through college, so we did.”
Michele’s dad was a mechanical engineer who liked to, and knew how to, fix most anything. In the early 1960s, Michele’s parents bought a 19th-century house in Bennington, Vermont. It had no kitchen cabinets, so Michele’s dad drove to the lumberyard, bought lumber and taught himself how to make the base and upper cabinets. It was her first exposure to home renovation, helping her mom to wallpaper the old, horsehair plaster walls.
Michele’s mom was a teacher who stayed home to care for the family until Michele’s senior year of high school. When Michele was young, her mom taught her hand skills – sewing, embroidery and knitting.
“She taught me everything she could so maybe I would survive the next depression,” she says. “One of my earliest memories is getting a set of seven tea towels for Christmas one year, one for every day of the week, with a different motif to embroider on each one.”
As she grew up, Michele bought more and more complex patterns. By high school, she was able to make her own prom dress, and by the time she graduated from college, she made a friend’s wedding dress.
While Michele was growing up, her dad changed careers and became a high school industrial arts teacher and, later, a mechanical engineering professor at Vermont Technical College. Because of her dad’s position, Michele’s tuition at the University of Vermont was free. There she learned most of what she knows about textile science, in addition to perfecting her hand skills with fabric – turning 2D pieces of fabric into 3D garments.
“I had a real classical training in dressmaking and design,” she says.
Some of it she already knew – how to sew a straight seam and put in a zipper. She had whole semesters where she just studied tailoring or fabric draping. She spent two semesters studying textile science. She also learned how to make her own mannequin, which later came in handy when making mannequins for garments and costumes in museum exhibits. She graduated in 1973.
“Then, of course, the Bicentennial happened in 1976,” she says. “If you talk to a lot of museum folks of my generation today, we all got bitten really hard by the historic preservation movements that came about when the bicentennial celebration happened.”
Michele, John and Gracie, their terrier mix, today
In the mid-1980s, Michele earned her master’s degree in textile studies at the University of Connecticut. It was during this time that she met her husband, John Pagán, who was in the U.S. Naval Submarine Force. They married in 1984. Together they traveled up and down the East Coast, following John’s assignments both at sea, and at the Pentagon. In 1987 they moved to Washington, D.C., where they lived on and off for nearly 30 years.
Conservation & translation
While living in Washington, Michele and her husband hosted international students, researchers and writers. They had a particularly good experience with a young man from France, who stayed for a couple of summers. In part because of this, Michele began studying French in the evenings through a program with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Michele also studied textile conservation at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute, and became one of their Research Associates. While there she helped a senior textile conservator with a small French translation project.
Don Williams, who was the senior furniture conservator at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute, heard about her translation work. He had a couple of books about French carpentry written by an 18th-century woodworker named André Roubo that he wanted translated. He asked Michele if she’d be interested in volunteering.
“I naively said, ‘Sure! Why not?’,” she says. “For the next seven years, while most people were watching some sitcom on TV at night, I was sitting at my big dining room table surrounded by six or seven French-English dictionaries, a couple of them dating back to the 18th century,” she says.
Language changes over time. When Michele would get stuck trying to find an appropriate word in a 20th-century dictionary, she moved on to her 19th-century dictionaries, and then to her 18th-century dictionaries. She worked one sentence at a time: one paragraph, no matter how long it was, was always one sentence.
First, Michele would read the paragraph-long sentence and circle all the words she didn’t know. In the beginning, this ended up being about every third word because she’s not a woodworker nor a native French speaker.
“… So then I had to translate word by word, each word that I didn’t know,” she says. “I had to find the word in one of those dictionaries and then break up the paragraph into smaller sentences. That alone was a challenge because if I chopped up a paragraph into, say, three sentences, then I had to go back, after the translation, and see if the whole thing made any sense.”
Michele and Don, 2018.
With time, the work became much faster. Today, Michele can look at one of Roubo’s French paragraphs and typically type it into English, having to look up hardly anything.
“That’s how much I have improved over 18 years of doing this,” she says. “And now, of course, if there is a word that I don’t know, I just use Reverso. And the beauty of it is that it not only tells you what the word is, but it also puts it into context for you. So that’s really been lovely. But my French conversation still stinks!”
Michele and Philippe LaFargue, a native French speaker, work on the translations.
“My translated text then goes to Don, who adds contemporary information for today’s woodworkers,” she says. “Roubo was a master woodworker at the end of the 18th century in France. Some of that information translates to today, but not all of it. Don’s image of the project from the very beginning was to make this information as tangible and accessible as possible. Then the work goes to Philippe, who makes sure that my translation works with what Don is trying to say, for American woodworkers.”
Still learning – & teaching
Michel and John’s house in Dorset, Vermont.
John, Michele’s husband, retired in 2015. In May 2016, they bought and began restoring an 1825 farmhouse in Dorset, Vermont. It’s something Michele and John are well-accustomed to, having bought and restored four old townhouses while living on Capitol Hill. “All the homes on Capitol Hill are old, and they ALL needed a new furnace!”
Michele and a neighbor recently spent about five years researching 42 homes in their little village of East Dorset. In July 2025, the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation met and reviewed their application, calling for East Dorset to be named a historic district. It was approved.
“It was a long haul but definitely worth it,” she says.
“It’s a national search for 19th-century schoolgirl needlework samplers,” she says. “We’re trying to find them, document them, photograph them, analyze them and research the genealogy of all the girls who made these samplers and put them online. It gives me goosebumps. Nobody has ever done this before! Here we are, in the 21st century, and nobody has ever looked at a schoolgirl sampler, read her name, her birthdate, maybe her town all stitched there, and asked questions. Who were her parents? What kind of people were they? Did they have any role in making this country that we call the USA?”
Since November 2022, Michele and her team have found and documented more than 770 Vermont samplers. In 2025, in cooperation with the Vermont 250th Commemoration of the start of the American Revolution, Michele is coordinating a driving tour of 20 locations all over Vermont where visitors can stop and see exhibits of 19th-century schoolgirl samplers that all tie back to the American Revolution in some way.
In addition to research, for the past five summers Michele also served as a presenter at the Bennington Museum’s Summer Teachers Institute. There she teaches teachers seeking additional accreditation about how to use museum artifacts in their lesson plans.
“There’s nothing more gratifying than having an audience full of teachers, because when you’re teaching teachers, they are absorbing every single word you say,” she says.
Whether it’s translating, researching or teaching, Michele is all in. Case in point: She tore up part of her own meadow and planted flax, wanting to know more about how our ancestors planted, harvested, spun and wove it into linen. She brought the flax into her classes, along with different kinds of fiber for the teachers to observe under a microscope.
“This gives my life new meaning,” she says. “It’s a new chapter. I’m still really happy to be associated with Don and the Roubo project. What’s really special about working with Don is that he has so much respect for women: His wife and two daughters have raised him right! Occasionally, Philippe will call from France – we have never actually met – but I can tell he’s a really great guy, too. So, this has been a truly wonderful project to be part of.”
The Roubo project is also giving back.
“My husband and I decided to use some of the royalty monies from the sales of the Roubo books to start an endowment at the Bennington Museum,” Michele says. “The endowment pays for one high school student per year to spend the summer working with the staff at the museum, for about eight weeks. We are into the fifth year of summer interns whom we have funded, and all we ask is that the student write us a little synopsis of what they did at the museum all summer. Since we don’t have children, this is our part of ‘touching the future,’ as Sally Ride, the astronaut, said.”
Despite living different lives, there’s commonality in Michele and Don’s work. In working on the translations, Michele says she was able to help Don better convey the antique processes and mindset for creating wooden furniture.
“Don and I are both conservators,” she says. “We both believe in historic preservation. We both believe in transmitting our cultural heritage from the past and making it accessible to today’s students. That’s why I enjoy making textile history from the past accessible to today’s teachers and their students. Don and I did the same thing in just two different specialties. We’re both educators. We’re both passing on information from the past to today’s and tomorrow’s students, teachers and historic preservationists.”
Matt Cianci’s mom was reading a book in her living room, having just put Matt down for a nap upstairs, when she saw his 4-year-old body fly past the living room window and crash into the ground. She screamed, jumped up and threw open the door. Matt was in the bushes, a blanket tied around his neck, smiling.
“Mom, I can fly!” he said.
Matt laughs.
“That about describes me,” he says. “Always testing the limits of things. I guess you could say I’m a curious person with a vibrant imagination. I’m not a follower of the crowd.”
“My mom holding me when I was a wee babe … a well-placed hammer and peg toy in my lap!” — Matt
Matt was born in Evanston, Illinois, north of Chicago. His parents met in college in the 1970s, married, had a daughter in 1976, Matt in 1977, then moved to a suburb northwest of Chicago.
“I have the two greatest parents in the world because they are the two people I look up to more than anyone,” Matt says. “I had an exceptionally privileged upbringing, for a very simple reason. Anytime anything ever goes wrong in my life, I just have to take a moment and ask myself, ‘What would my parents do?’ And it’s never steered me wrong.”
Both of Matt’s parents have master’s degrees. Matt’s father is a biomedical engineer and his mother is a clinical social worker. When Matt was a kid, his mom stayed home, raised the kids and was (and is) a social justice warrior, says Matt, working with the greater Chicago chapter of the National Organization of Women, promoting the Equal Rights Amendment.
Matt, 6 or 7 years old. “In the woods (always!) and with the required makeshift tool belt and plastic screwdriver/stabbing implement.”
Always creative, Matt enjoyed drawing and playing with Lego bricks as a kid. At 6 years old he started making things out of scrap wood in his dad’s workshop. His grandfathers had workshops, too. One was an engineer; the other, a welder who worked for the United Automobile Workers at a General Motors factory until he was 75 years old. Matt’s ancestors were old-world Italian stone masons.
Matt loved to make guns out of wood (ironic, he says, giving his views on guns today) because his mother refused to buy him toy guns. But she couldn’t stop him from making them. Over the years, the guns became pretty elaborate.
Woodworking, Matt says, has always been a solitary activity.
“My dad preached nothing. He just showed everything. I don’t remember doing anything with my father, but he still taught me so many things because he did them and I just watched. Many of my values I’ve gotten from him that way. Just seeing what he did, whether it was getting up and going to work every day or how to deal with people or be a parent. He was more passive that way – classical modeling.”
When Matt was 10 years old, his dad was transferred and the family moved to Massachusetts.
“I had some social upheaval and I kind of struggled for the new few years.”
Academically, he did well – never a straight-A student but Bs without having to work too hard for them. He enjoyed writing and in high school, he wrote a lot of poetry.
“I’m a rather pensive, melancholy kind of person. So as soon as I started having any interaction with girls, it turned into romance drama. So that was good fodder. It brought out the tortured poet in me,” he says, laughing.
When he was around 12 years old, he started playing guitar.
“The band ‘in vivo’ likely playing for an empty hall with just the other bands and girlfriends watching (I’m far left).”
“From that point forward, my life focused on my band, playing the guitar and my girlfriend,” he says. “Then I got into metal and I started wearing all black. I was kind of a metalhead – you know, the tortured angry suburban white kid. But I really didn’t have anything to be angry about. I looked for targets of opportunity to put my angst out on.”
In high school, Matt started tinkering with guitars in his dad’s workshop, Eddie Van Halen-style. And then he was accepted to Providence College in Rhode Island.
“Nobody even suggested that not going to college was an option,” he says. “It was just what you did.”
“My college thrash metal band, ‘Sorrows Path’. I’m with glasses in the middle row, right (note the bleached hair … no wonder I’m bald).”
The college education was great, Matt says, but there were a lot of things he didn’t like about it. And by his sophomore year, things came to a head. He failed just about every class he took. He felt as if he was just going through the motions. He lacked purpose.
“I wasn’t happy,” he says. “I’ve always struggled with ups and downs. And I was like, ‘Something doesn’t feel right. What do I really want to do with my life?’”
In a magazine, he saw an ad for a guitar-building school on the West coast. He tacked the ad above his desk – a dream. But not all dreams come true, or at least not as envisioned.
“I stayed in school. I stumbled my way through college. I graduated with a degree in social work and I kept tinkering with guitars.”
Building Guitars & Furniture
After graduating in 1999, Matt and his then-girlfriend moved into an apartment in Providence. He had a job (in social work – vocational rehab), paid rent, was doing all the things adults do, but he still longed for something more. With time, he recognized the itch, the need to work with his hands. So he taught himself how to build guitars from scratch. And he fell in love with it.
Matt’s girlfriend at the time worked at Brown University as a research assistant. Matt says they were dirt poor. But they needed furniture. So Matt taught himself how to make furniture, too. Within a couple years, Matt, 25, and his girlfriend saved up enough money to buy an old house, and started rehabbing it.
“That was, essentially, how I learned woodworking,” he says. “Just trial and error. I didn’t really have any instruction and I didn’t read woodworking books.”
Every once in a while, Matt would get his hands on a copy of Fine Woodworking, and use it as a guide. But money was tight and more often than not, holding it while standing in line at the grocery store, he couldn’t justify the price. Around 2003, Matt remembers seeing an ad for a Lie-Nielsen dovetail saw in the back of Fine Woodworking. He wanted it.
“One of my early guitars. I made this one in 2002. It now hangs in my shop and I play it regularly.”
By now, Matt was well-versed in power tools, building furniture and beautiful guitars out of mahogany and curly maple. Next up were side tables for his bedroom. With the Lie-Nielsen dovetail saw heavy on his mind, he decided he was going to build two Shaker-style end tables in curly maple using only hand-cut joinery.
But at the time, the dovetail saw was $120. There was no way he could afford it. So he went to a big box store and bought a $10 saw. Now he had a blade. He scrounged together some scrap wood (curly maple), scrap metal and toilet bolts. And he made his own backsaw.
“And that’s when I learned to file saws,” he says.
In an old tool catalog, Matt found a one-page article titled “How to File Your Saws.” By now he had discovered eBay and he used it to buy a setting device. Following the tool catalog instruction step by step, he sharpened his handmade saw and used it to cut the dovetails in the two Shaker tables.
Around this time, both of his grandfathers were clearing out their workshops and Matt inherited a bunch of their hand tools. He continued building furniture for his house – a corner hutch, a table, an ottoman, a desk. Struggling to drill a deep hole through an exterior wall, he used a brace and bit for the first time, and was amazed by its torque and speed. He bought saws on eBay for a few dollars each, and practiced filing them. He quickly fell down the rabbit hole, he says, and he was happy. Until 2006. That was the year he and his girlfriend of eight years ended their relationship.
“My world got turned upside down,” he says. “I had to put all my tools into storage.”
An Intermission, a Tiny House & the Return of Woodworking
Matt’s ex-girlfriend bought him out of his half of the house.
“I walked away with this big wad of cash, which I had never had before,” he says. “And I’m not going to lie, I frivolously spent a good chunk of it.”
Always the guy with a girlfriend, Matt, now 29, had never been single before.
“I got back into playing guitar in seedy bars. I was not doing constructive things with my time or money. But it was just an absolutely wonderful experience I treasure because I needed to be on my own and just be young.”
Having realized how dysfunctional his relationship was, and the number it did on his self-esteem, Matt embraced his freedom.
“I just kind of went nuts and indulged myself,” he says.
About a year later, in 2007, he decided he needed to stop blowing his money on guitars and rounds of shots for the entire bar. He was living in an apartment, but wanted to put money back into a house. He found one pretty quickly, a 600-square-foot ranch in Warwick, Rhode Island.
“I fell in love with it because it had the most perfect, dry, sound basement I have ever been in,” he says. “And at that time in my life, basements were where all the good stuff happens. I remember going into this basement and thinking, This is the perfect blank space for my existence. And the upstairs was nice too – it had all the stuff you needed – but I was subterranean at that point.”
Matt bought the house, built out a nice basement workshop and started a part-time business making furniture on commission.
“Well, I say business, but I’m probably flattering myself because in business, you’re supposed to make money,” he says, laughing. “I remember building these pieces of furniture and essentially charging people for the lumber and, like, a little bit of money for me. I remember building this one lady this all-solid cherry desk. And I still love that desk. If I ever found that lady I’d offer to buy it back from her. I remember charging her $400 for it and the lumber cost me $300. I am such a horrible business person. I really am.”
Matt still worked full-time in the mental health field and most of his early customers were colleagues.
“You feel bad saying ‘This is going to be $2,000.’ Because these people, who are essentially your acquaintances or friends, they’re not going to pay that. Because, who the hell are you? You’re not Sam Maloof, right? You’re just the guy who has decided you’re going to be a furniture maker. I did that for a little while and literally lost money. Because I also justified all these purchase for tools and such. Well I have to buy this mortiser because I’m a professional furniture maker now so you’re taking in maybe $1,000 and spending $2,000. So that was silliness.”
But Matt was happy. He had his woodworking, his day job, another part-time job, and he was single – for a while. Around 2008, Matt had a whirlwind six-month romance. And for the second time in his life (the first was with his ex-girlfriend who he shared a house with) he bought a ring. It didn’t work out. But then, in 2009, Matt met Angie, now his wife, at work.
(An aside: Matt liked the idea of dating people at work, thinking it would be less work. “I would not – would not – recommend that to anyone,” he says. “Especially having an affair with your boss.” Matt laughs and says he hopes that if there’s anything folks take away from this article, it’s that he’s not your go-to guy for romance advice. “I did everything wrong. But the one thing I got right was that I met my wife at work and it just worked out.”)
Matt says he didn’t know Angie was going to be his wife at first.
“But she says she knew instantly,” he says. “We dated three months and she was like, ‘Hey, do you want to get married?’”
She even bought a ring. Matt said yes, and asked if she and her daughter wanted to come live with him in his “teeny-tiny little house” in Rhode Island. She did. They got married in 2010.
“I’m madly in love with my wife,” he says. “We’ve been married 14 years.”
Matt and Angie, 2010
Marriage gave Matt’s life a purpose and focus he hadn’t had before.
“It calmed me down and just made me grow up,” he says.”
And with that newfound focus, the saw bug came back.
The SawWright
Matt started writing a blog called The Saw Blog. People took to it and began asking him questions about saws. And then they started asking him to sharpen their saws.
“I was like, ‘You’ll give me money?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah!’ And I was like, ‘OK!’ Again, not a good businessman.”
One day, in 2011, Mark Harrell, founder of Bad Axe Tool Works, called. Mark wanted to focus entirely, at least for a little while, on making saws. But at the time, he also had a sizeable sharpening repair business.
“He tested me,” Matt says.
Mark asked to buy a tuned-up saw. He wanted Matt to show him what he could do. And if was good, Mark said he’d send Matt all his sharpening work. So Matt took an old saw and fully restored it – polished it up and sharpened it.
“Now I had never seen anyone sharpen a saw,” Matt says. “I had never owned another saw sharpened by somebody else. But I thought I’d do my best and send it to him. And he loved it.”
And that was the start of Matt’s saw-sharpening business.
“I became a professional saw doctor and it really blew up,” Matt says. “And I figured out how to pay myself a good wage for what I was doing.”
Matt also began getting invitations to teach saw sharpening at woodworking schools around the country, which was welcome additional income. Coming full circle, Lie-Nielsen also invited Matt to teach.
Matt came up with a name – The SawWright. He was sharpening saws and still working full-time, but now he wanted to try his hand at saw making.
“My prototype for the carcase saw I made for sale based on Smith’s Key. The backdrop is an article I wrote describing the history of Smith’s, as well as my design and building process.” — Matt
In 2012, Matt and Angie had a son, Francis. Matt remembers sitting in the hospital room and creating the layout for a website to sell custom-made saws while Angie and Francis slept. He started making backsaws based on an early 19th-century pattern he found in Smith’s Key. He contracted with a machinist to mill the backs. He wrote about his process in the Society of American Period Furniture Makers annual American Period Furniture Journal. And he sold them through his site.
In 2013, two big things happened. Angie and Matt had a daughter, Phoebe, and Matt decided he wanted to make saws full-time. So he took a leave of absence from his full-time job.
“And absolutely hate it,” he says. “I was in my shop fricking 12 hours a day in the basement making saws, and I was fricking miserable. I was just longing for human interaction.”
The full-time saw-making gig lasted a few months, and Matt went back to his old full-time job. It was an itch, he says, that he simply had to scratch to get it out of his system.
“Similar to when I was doing furniture, I didn’t know how to price things,” he says. “Sharpening and repair? I can do that. There’s something about the psychology of it. I know what it’s worth and I know what people will pay and it works. When it comes to making things, apparently I just will work for nothing.”
Today, sharpening and repair remain his niche.
“I like doing it part-time and I like having my day job where I can work with people because even though I hate people, I need them. I am a social animal. I’ve found my balance.”
In 2013, Kevin Ireland, then publisher of Popular Woodworking, called Matt while he was driving home from work. (Matt has always worked in Massachusetts and lived in Rhode Island. It’s a long commute – an hour and a half each way – but he loves the distinct separation of the two.) Kevin wanted to know if Matt wanted to make a DVD. Matt could hardly believe it.
“Here this magazine flies me out, treats me kind of like I’m a celebrity, we’re filming – it was surreal,” he says. “It was great.”
They made two DVDs – Build a Custom Backsaw and Super Tune Your Backsaw – in just a couple of days. It took a while for Matt to come to terms with the idea that he knew how to do something so well, other people would be willing to buy a DVD to learn from him.
“To me, the whole thing is like people want you to come teach them how to tie their shoes,” he says. “I don’t mean to sound like a pompous sort of expert but saw sharpening to me is kind of a mundane thing. It’s very challenging for people, I get it, but to me it’s not this complicated thing like, ‘Hey, I’m going to impart this wisdom to you that no one else can.’ I figured it out in my basement and if I figured it out, anybody can do it. I’m not that smart or talented, God knows. So it was just surreal.”
To this day, Matt is still surprised by recognition and publicity.
“Me and my love today (my wife’s in it too) lol!” — Matt
“I get to wake up every day and have this reasonably comfortable life because people have this faith in me to sharpen their saws and pay me really well for it,” Matt says. “I just feel so incredibly lucky to be able to do that. I’m grateful I get to live this way. I’m not saying I’m famous or a big deal, but it’s kind of like a dream come true. And I love it. And it’s really afforded me the ability to raise my family. If it weren’t for this, I would be doing something else that is not as fun, not as rewarding and certainly doesn’t pay nearly as well, which would put a lot of demand on my time and sanity. So it’s been cool.”
A Book, 9 Years in the Making
Matt has known Christopher Schwarz for more than a decade, via the occasional email, meet up at a woodworking show, or saw sharpening job. Around 2014, Chris needed a technical editor for a new Lost Art Press book by Andrew Lunn about making saws. He called Matt.
“I was like, ‘How much do you want me to pay you to let me do that?’” Matt says. Chris hired Matt (and paid him).
“I got to read and edit this whole thing. It was such a cool experience and a privilege and amazing. There’s so much wisdom in it. As a saw maker, I really loved a lot of it – he got so much of it right.”
But the book was never published. Andrew quit making saws and exited the woodworking world entirely.
Matt thought a lot about that unpublished book, including the last short chapter at the end that provided a brief overview of how to file a saw. One day, Matt asked Chris if he’d ever like to publish a book just on saw sharpening. Chris was interested. He asked Matt to write up a detailed outline and a sample chapter.
“I had this running theory: If I can teach, I can write a book,” Matt says. “I have this idea, I think, of what people need to know. And I have a lot of experience with what people struggle with when they start sharpening saws. I wanted to put that in a book to get more people to be able to do it. Because if they want to try, there’s nowhere else to learn it.”
In the 1980s, Harold “Dynamite” Payson wrote a short book called “Keeping the Cutting Edge: Setting and Sharpening Hand and Power Saws.” But Matt wanted to do something different – lots of macro photography, close-ups of important steps. A book that would have saved him from ruining 20 to 30 saws when he was starting out.
Matt wrote an outline and sample chapter, and sent it to Chris.
“He’s like, ‘Great. Let’s do it. I’ll send over a contract,’” Matt says. “And I was like, ‘What? I didn’t figure you’d say yes. Shit, now I’ve got to write a book.’”
Matt signed the contract in 2015. Then spent nine years writing the book.
“I think I know how to write,” says Matt, who does a lot of technical writing on policy and regulation in his day job. But he struggled with taking something that is such a huge part of his everyday life and putting it into words. At first, he was writing a chapter a year.
“I edit myself to death,” he says. “I will go back and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. I have written this book 10 times over. There are entire versions of this book that no one has ever seen.”
In college, Matt took a writing class that he loved and there he learned the importance of efficient writing. His professor would say, “Don’t say in 10 words what you can say in six.” So Matt knew his first attempts, meandering and laden with fancy language, needed work. He’d edit, turning 1,000 words into 150, saying the same thing but clearer.
“But that process for me is not fast,” he says. “It takes forever to do and that’s the loop I was stuck in.”
A few years in, the bones of the book were there, but Matt considered it only half done. He also had another obstacle: photography.
“Chris, he’s a freaking genius, right?” Matt says. “He’s just this incredibly smart, talented person. And I was like, ‘So Chris, what about the photography?’ And he’s like, ‘You can do it. You can do it with a digital camera.’ And I’m like, ‘Chris, I don’t even have a smartphone. I don’t know what a digital camera is.’ But he convinced me I could do the photography.”
Chris sent him a list of things to buy along with a how-to photography guide he gives to writers. But the whole process felt daunting to Matt. Every once in a while Matt would check in with Chris, worried about how long the book was taking. And Chris would always give him words of encouragement: “It takes as long as it takes. You’re doing fine.”
One day, Matt was teaching a class at Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking and ran into Mike Pekovich, creative director of Fine Woodworking. Matt and Mike had become friendly over the years and Mike knew Matt was working on a book. At one point, he asked about the photography. Matt told him he was trying to do it himself but so far he hadn’t figured out which end of the camera faces the work. Mike laughed and offered to teach Matt photography.
“Talk about privilege,” Matt says.
Mike underlined the importance of the book Matt was writing. And the only payment he wanted for the lesson was making a good book with pictures. So Matt went to Mike’s house and spent an entire day in Mike’s shop learning not only the technical aspects but also composition and lighting.
However, Matt found it difficult to find the time to replicate the process in his own shop. Another year went by and Chris, while talking with Matt about some saw sharpening, asked about the book.
“And I was like, ‘Chris, I’ve got to be honest with you. I have gotten one-on-one, day-long, private instruction from Mike Pekovich on how to do photography and I still can’t do it. I can’t make time for it. This book is going to take me another 10 years to do the photography.’ And then Chris, just casually in his Chris way, goes, ‘Well you know, I could just come up there and shoot all the pictures for you in a day or two.’ And I was like, ‘What?’”
In summer 2023, Chris drove up to Rhode Island. Matt created a shot list for every photo he needed and spent a few days on prep work and staging. They shot the whole book in two days.
“It was awesome,” Matt says.
Matt also got to spend time with Chris in a way he never had before.
“I got a better sense of his vision and what the business is like. And he’s just an amazing person. He told me his business model is to essentially take care of as many people as he can in his life. Now I understand so much more about why he does what he does. And it’s not charity with him. He just means it in this really profound way. He’s like, ‘I’m going to find all the talented people that I can and if they have things they want to do that I can help facilitate I’m going to use whatever resources and privilege I have to help remove the bullshit so that they can be creative and prosperous in a way that he has been able to.’ I was just like, ‘Wow. That’s really fucking cool.’”
Wrapping up the photography lit a fire under Matt. And although Chris never put Matt under a deadline, he said it would be great to publish the book within a year.
“I just buckled down and every free moment I had, nights, weekends, I just sat on my porch and wrote,” Matt says.
“It’s been totally surreal,” Matt says. “I just have to kind of pinch myself. I started sharpening saws on a lark 20 years ago because I was literally too poor to buy a tool I wanted and here I am, 20 years later. I wrote a book and people pay me to do this for them. I’ve gotten to meet all these amazing people and just spend time with people who are so talented and smart and just can’t help become more talented and smart on your own just because you’re with them. And that’s pretty cool.”
Andy Glenn is the author of the newly released “Backwoods Chairmakers: In Search of the Appalachian Ladderback Chairmaker.” He found more than 20 of them and earned their trust then, beautifully and authentically through words and photos, told the stories of their lives and their work, which has been handed down through generations for more than 200 years.
Andy and his sister, Mary Jo, helping their grandpa, George Fike, with a new set of cellar doors.
Andy grew up among fields of corn and soybeans on patchworked land so fertile that in 1808 Ohioans named it Richland County. His grandfather George Fike lived in an old Victorian farmhouse on about 150 acres in nearby Ashland Twp., Ohio, and had a wood and metal fabrication shop, where he worked on anything needed for the house and farm. Andy’s grandfather Lawrence Glenn was the town milkman in Ashland County, Ohio. In his basement shop he would turn old milk crates into boxes and small gifts for family.
Mary Lou and George Fike with Andy, on a rocking horse that Grandpa George made.
Projects Andy made as a child with his grandfather, Lawrence Glenn.
Andy’s family – parents, both teachers, and a younger sister and brother – lived on 11 acres. His mother had horses. Each year his father would raise six to 10 head of black Angus beef for neighbors or community members who put in an order. Andy participated in 4-H and had sheep. They had dogs.
“It was just a wonderful time,” Andy says.
Although Andy fed animals in the morning and evening, and helped care for the farm, he says he grew up surrounded by Amish and Mennonite families with children that “could run laps around me with their knowledge of things.”
Andy loved sports. He played baseball, soccer and basketball, and his parents encouraged it all, from a young age through high school.
“They’d sign me up for the local travel teams and we’d travel around the state and out of state. Now that I’m a parent, I realize how committed they were to providing opportunities.”
In the summers Andy worked as an extra set of hands for his best friend, Troy’s dad, Phil Perry, who ran a carpentry crew. Andy and Troy would spend many late nights in Phil’s basement shop, building things.
“And if we had questions, Phil would come down and give us some guidance,” Andy says. “Show us how to run a router, safe ways to run a table saw.”
Andy’s Uncle Galen made him this blanket chest as a high school graduation gift.
Andy attended Walsh University then transferred to The College of Wooster his sophomore year as a business economics major. He also helped coach his high school’s freshman boys’ basketball team, not minding the hour drive each way. He loved his college experience.
“College always seemed like it was going to be what I did,” Andy says. “My parents were the first to go to college and they really encouraged me to go to college. I suppose I was a bit short-sighted – I knew I was going to go to college but I didn’t necessarily know what was going to happen after that.”
From Business to Building
The table Andy made for his wife, Sarah, as a wedding gift.
Shortly after college graduation, Andy married his high school sweetheart, Sarah. His wedding gift to Sarah was a dining table, built in Phil’s shop. Together they moved to Boston, where Sarah, a classical violinist, attended graduate school at the Longy School of Music, just north of Harvard Square in Cambridge. Andy took a job as the business director of a small Christian high school, where he also helped with the basketball teams and coached JV soccer – a team made up of players who were fulfilling the school’s sports requirement, which made the whole experience fun but also absurd at times, Andy says, laughing.
“I thought the job was perfect,” he says. “It married my interests, my degree and my faith. I thought it would be a perfect job. And it was a nice job. But after a short time there I thought, I’m not in the right setting.”
Andy and Sarah lived in a small apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Andy remembers one day coming home and showing Sarah his hands. They were smooth – not a single callus in sight.
“I just kind of realized I was chasing numbers all day and then I would never catch them and then we’d come back the next day and chase them again. And I was just kind of out of place.”
“I loved every moment of it,” he says. “Just to be surrounded by all these people who are passionate about furniture and excited about it in much the same way. It was a wonderful two years.”
Andy particularly loved the instructors, including Dan Faia, still a close friend and mentor, and Alex Krutsky, who recently passed away.
“Alex was just the most charming man and he had a real ornery sense of humor,” Andy says. “One day I came in first thing and I was doing a glue-up. I had clamps everywhere. I was sweating and moving and it wasn’t going well and I was getting anxious. And Alex, he came up the stairs in the bench room and came over the way he did and had this little smile on his face. And he just goes, ‘The reason we use clamps is so we don’t have to hold the wood together with our hands while the glue dries.’ It was a joke, but it was just perfect in the moment because I was failing miserably and he wasn’t there to help, but to add a little joke. And he would have helped me if I needed it. Now, at least once or twice a week, I pick up a clamp and smile about Alex.”
Six months later, a live-in caretaker position opened up at NBSS. Andy and Sarah moved into a little, quirky, third- and fourth-floor apartment inside the school, and Andy served as caretaker for five years.
“Everything about it was fun,” he says.
For five years Andy managed the old buildings, attending to triggered motion sensors, water main breaks and sewer fires. A job perk was using open space as he pleased, as long as he remained somewhat unseen. This provided him shop space to build. During this time Andy also taught some classes at NBSS and worked part-time job at a furniture repair shop called Second Life in Charlestown, Massachusetts.
During this time Sarah was working for the Boston Symphony’s education department. Their daughter, Ruby, was born in 2011. Ruby’s nursery was a large closet (they previously used it as an office) in their NBSS apartment. Fourteen months later their son, Francis, was born. They loved Boston but they always knew they’d eventually leave. With two kids, they decided it was time.
To Maine, Kentucky & Back Again They moved to Maine, a place they always hoped to call home, and Andy spent time dropping off résumés at various shops. He found work at Front Street Shipyard in Belfast.
“It was a very fun job but it was a J-O-B, right from the beginning, because it was all new to me,” Andy says. “People think of wispy shavings on wooden boats but it was really like grinding fiberglass off tugboat refits. It was a dirty job, fun, but dirty.”
Several months later a custom commercial cabinetry shop (Phi Home Designs – the name has since changed, now Hay Runner) called him with an opening. He was the go-to furniture guy, working on projects that passed his bench. When there was no furniture work to be done he’d help out the cabinet crew, which, he says, was enjoyable and eye-opening – the materials, approach and methods were all different. He stayed on for about three and a half years.
In 2017, a position opened up in Berea College Student Craft’s woodcraft program, and Andy and Sarah thought it might be nice to live closer to family for a bit. Andy applied, was accepted, and they moved to Berea, Kentucky.
“The college was a totally new experience for me,” Andy says. “Being a woodworker in academia, that made my head spin for a little while. But the actual job was great.”
As the Director of Woodcraft, he worked with students all day, teaching them how to make the college’s craft and furniture items.
“Each year, a number of people came into the woodshop who had never woodworked before and I got to guide them through their first woodworking experiences,” he says. “And a number of them, you could just see it – they loved the shop and they’d come in on their off hours and you could just see that build and grow.”
Former students will reach out to him from time to time, with photos of walking sticks they recently made or news of how their career in woodworking, born in Berea, is going.
During this time Andy was also tapped to help get The Woodworking School at Pine Croft, formerly the Kelly Mehler School of Woodworking, owned by Kelly and Teri Mehler, back up and running.
“Kelly and Teri were very kind to our family from the moment we moved into town,” Andy says. “Kelly was working with the college with the possibility of selling the school, selling his property – I just kind of knew of it. And then the college did purchase the Mehler’s place, and as we were getting the school started up again, that’s where my role came into play.”
But as much as Andy was enjoying his work, Kentucky didn’t feel like home. He, Sarah and the kids all missed Maine. He remembers one day he and Sarah were driving around Berea, searching the radio.
“After scanning all the stations Sarah said, ‘I wished we lived somewhere that had a classical station.’ That resonated with me,” Andy says. “Our local stations played mountain bluegrass – which is beautiful – but no classical, and in that moment it felt like we were misfits for the place.”
So in 2021, they began looking for a new place to settle. The housing market at the time felt impossible. But then, serendipity: With a better understanding of what Andy and Sarah were looking for, their Realtor wrote and said her parents’ house, which wasn’t on the market yet, seemed like a good fit. Andy and Francis took a road trip to Waldoboro, Maine, and saw that it was a perfect fit.
Andy’s shop.
“It’s an old cape, 1859, and there are projects, nonstop projects on this place, which is why it was in our price range and why we could get into it,” Andy says. “And just the amazing providential piece of it was that he had built this shop space in 2013. He was a boatbuilder, so he had a few boats in there, but it was a board-and-batten shell. And I’ve been able to keep building it out ever since I got into it.”
Today the kids are enrolled in a small school. Sarah, a creative like Andy, works a couple of different jobs, and Andy builds chairs, makes custom furniture, sells chair kits and teaches. It works.
Until recently, Andy would put time into “Backwoods Chairmakers” in the morning, “the best time to write,” he says. “It’s just been in the last few months that that hasn’t been on the front of my mind and the back of mind at all times.”
He’s in the shop for as many hours as he can be, at least until mid-afternoon, depending on the day. The flexibility is a gift, allowing Andy to end his workday as late as 6:30 p.m. or as early as 2:30 p.m., to pick up the kids from school and take them to various activities when needed. Saturdays are typically a half day of work.
“The rhythm and the way it’s going right now works for us,” he says.
Andy also enjoys being on the road and teaching.
“I get a lot of joy from teaching in the sense that there is a connection when working with people who have their own goals, who are getting started in the craft or who are excited about a new project or skill,” he says. “I get to participate in that experience.”
On Building a Book
For about a year and a half Andy traveled to chairmakers’ homes. He’d visit, take notes, with permission record interviews, then come back home and write as much as he could about the visit and the experience.
“I was obviously and clearly an outsider visiting these chairmakers in Appalachia,” he says. “I kind of knew that right from the beginning. What I didn’t know was that Lost Art Press and this book idea really carried no weight. The chairmakers were intrigued by it, but it was fairly abstract.”
He learned some things along the way, including the necessity of a doorstep explanation versus a phone call from states away.
“The first couple of chairmaking visits I’d get all my gear out, right as I was getting out of the car,” he says. “That was the wrong approach because we didn’t have any rapport. Slowly I learned I needed to get out and we needed to just sit and talk for a while. And then the chairmaker could size me up and size up the project and decide if and how they wanted to contribute. And from there we could get going.”
He wanted the chairmakers to know that he wasn’t writing a quick one-off story with a photograph attached. Rather, he was going to be in touch again to make sure he got things right, to make sure he was telling the story fully and correctly.
Newberry and Sons. Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee.
“Usually, as we would sit and talk at the beginning, we’d reach a point where the chairmaker would say something along the lines of, ‘Well, we better get going if we’re going to do this.’ And that was my signal that it was time to work,” he says.
At first Andy had a collection of essays that didn’t relate. But once the traveling came to an end he was able to look at the essays as a whole and find commonalities, forming the book’s structure.
He also noted different themes: design, family, contemporary building methods, marketing.
“Each maker kind of had these threads that they emphasized,” he says.
Once he identified them, Andy would tug on those threads during the writing process, and call each chairmaker to follow up with questions along those lines.
He also looked for repetition. Every chairmaker mentioned dry rungs and wet posts, and as such, Andy had written about dry rungs and wet posts a dozen times. So he began paring what had already been said to make the stories more interesting.
Turning in the manuscript and photographs to Lost Art Press prompted a bit of withdrawal.
“That book was with me daily for years, and now it doesn’t need me anymore,” Andy says. “But I loved the travel piece. The appreciation for those chairs took me places that I never would have traveled to without this project. It took me into communities and into back lanes and to meet people that I wouldn’t have met otherwise. So there was just always an excitement around it, around travel and meeting other people. And it always felt like we had chairs as our commonality and we’d always come back to an appreciation of these chairs. That gave me a great place to start from as they shared their messages for making.”
A New Way of Thinking about the Intersection of Work & Life Although the book is complete, it’s still very much present in Andy’s daily life.
“I know it’s affected my work,” he says. “I’m by no means an Appalachian chairmaker but I can see the influence. I’ve been thinking about this every day for quite a while now. So it can’t help but permeate some of the work I’m doing. I loved meeting these people who made chairmaking, woodworking craft, furniture making, a part of their life. And it really changed how I quantify work.”
Andy used to think of work as part-time, full-time, 40 hours a week.
“Their lives had none of those parameters around it,” he says. “For a number of them, there were times to make chairs and then there were times when other things were more pressing. And that might mean because the shop is cold in the winter and so winters are for other things and recharging. And in the spring you make chairs. Or it gets really hot and so the summer is for gardening and other work and in the cooler periods you get into the chairs. So I stopped considering it as part-time, full-time, and I just started looking at it more as a part of life.”
Some examples of Andy’s work.
In addition to chairmaking, custom furniture builds and teaching, Andy reads a lot. He enjoys photography. He deeply appreciates the wildness, quietness and ruralness of Maine. He appreciates long nights by the woodstove.
“Our kids are at an age where they’re quite active and we’re about with them,” he says. “On Wednesdays I’m a goalie for a co-ed soccer team. Everyone here is like, ‘Oh, hockey!’ And I’m like, ‘No, soccer,’” he laughs.
He also finds that time spent in his shop and teaching complement each other wonderfully.
“I do love working in the shop by myself,” he says. “But after a stretch of that I want to teach. I want to be around other energy, other ideas. I enjoy that I get to teach and share and then come back to the shop and recharge, explore some new ideas and then go back out and teach again.”
For the first time Andy plans on teaching some classes in his shop, this spring. The 40′ x 30′ building has two floors. Currently the second floor is being used for storage as he outfits the first. He’s built walls, installed lighting and electricity, and he’s starting to get benches and machines, things he’s been acquiring since moving back to Maine, in place. Although he’s always had a bench, even in his apartments, he’s been spoiled, he says, due to the access he’s had to the shops everywhere he’s worked.
“I have more ideas than money,” he says, laughing. “I know, that’s everyone. I see how this will all come together in the end. I just keep working on it step by step.”
As of this writing Andy’s working on a custom timber-frame style bed out of large beams of red oak. And he’s working on a chair – he’s always working on a chair, either for himself or someone else.
“I really just love the process of making a chair,” he says. “Everything about it from the idea to the physical process of handling the materials, splitting it out, shaving them if I’m making a greenwood chair, all the way to putting the finish on and seeing how that chair comes together at the very end. I just really enjoy making, I think.”
Andy says he’s always been drawn to something chairmaker Curtis Buchanan said about 15 years ago.
Andy’s family – Andy, Francis, Ruby and Sarah.
“He just described his work and how family is close by and important to him, and how his shop is behind his house and how everything is kind of linked together and intertwined, and I found that appealing,” Andy says. “I enjoy having the shop behind the house and being able to work from home. Other things are more important but the shop is right here for work where it fits. And sometimes that’s more hours out here, sometimes it’s less. It’s just here as it needs to be.”
This is a love story about Tim and Betsan Bowen, authors of “The Welsh Stick Chair: A Visual Record” and owners of Tim Bowen Antiques. Their courtship is, in part, how their business and marriage, both of 20 years, came to be (and also, their book!). But it’s also a story of the love they have for Welsh country furniture, folk art, textiles, cottages and history, items and places and periods and people, which they refuse to overlook, instead seeking out, sensitively caring for and passing along.
Discovering a Love for Antiques and Each Other
Tim and Betsan’s childhoods were quite different. Tim was brought up in West Wales in an English-speaking home that didn’t have many antiques but with a father who was interested in the past and tradition. Tim fished a lot as a child, and spent quite a lot of time on neighboring farms, helping friends with haymaking, milking and the like.
“I was the complete opposite,” says Betsan, who was brought up in the suburbs of London in a Welsh-speaking family. They had a few antiques but her grandfather, who lived in Wales, was a big collector.
“Although he didn’t collect the type of furniture and the type of things that we like now, he had a house that was jam-packed full of pottery and bits of furniture, and he was always off at auctions buying things,” Betsan says. “And so it was sort of somehow indoctrinated into me, this kind of Welsh culture and history that was really important. And so it carried on. I can’t stop now.”
As a teenager, Tim left school and found work as a decorator and painter, as well as doing farm work and building things. One day he received a phone call from Terry Thomas, an auctioneer, who needed help clearing out a house for an auction he was holding in town that Saturday. Tim agreed to the job.
“I turned up to basically just help load and the first thing somebody brought in was a chair that I just thought was rubbish because it was falling apart,” he says. “Every time I picked it up a leg would drop off and the arm was wobbling and then I remember carrying it and Mr. Thomas said to put a note on it that said, ‘handle with care.’ And I thought that was a bit of a joke because I was the new guy. And then it came up for sale and I remember it going for a £1,000, which I just couldn’t believe. I think was earning £25, £30 a week. And here was a pile of wood that just made a £1,000. That was the moment I thought, ‘There’s something going on here that I don’t really know much about.’”
Tim ended up working for Mr. Thomas for a few years. During that time Tim started buying books, reading articles, visiting museums and befriending many of the local antique dealers, picking their brains.
“It became the thing I wanted to do, I suppose, or be involved in,” he says. “I tried to learn about everything from silver to claret jugs to Art Deco but it was always Welsh furniture that interested me. But I gained a bit of knowledge about the antique world.”
Betsan also left school as a teenager and ended up working in the property business in London. By the time Betsan met Tim she was pretty high up in the organization, a large public limited company, and she was one of the few senior women who worked there.
“I was quite keen on buying things for my flat in London,” she says. “And I went down to Wales and went into the antique shop that Tim was working in and bought a chair from him, which was kind of vernacular, not a stick chair, but it was quite nice, an interesting thing with a drawer in the seat, which we still have in the house.”
This would have been in the late 1990s, when Tim was working as general manager at Country Antiques Kidwelly.
“And then I started going back and buying bits and pieces,” Betsan says. “And you know what it’s like – you buy a bigger apartment and then you buy a bigger house … one day he came up to deliver two or three pieces of furniture for me. And he was at the door at 7 o’clock in the morning, which I thought, ‘To come all this way from West Wales at 7 o’clock in the morning! I think this guy likes me!‘ Then Tim said he wanted to go to this British exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in Kensington. And so we went, he came to stay, and we went together and that was it! We’ve never looked back, have we?”
Their courtship began in 2000. Tim was immersed in the antiques world but Betsan says she was still immersed in the property business, although as time went on, she realized that she wasn’t enjoying it as much and she wanted to be with Tim. And they both recognized their shared passion for Welsh country furniture and art, something they had never shared so intimately with anyone else.
“We realized, when we got together, how many of the same books we owned,” Tim says. “Books on quilts, furniture and folk art.”
They both knew they wanted to have children – a family.
“And so we decided to get married and start the business,” Tim says.
They bought a house in West Wales together, and married in 2003.
“He gradually weaned me away from London,” Betsan says, laughing. “I’m joking, actually, because I wanted to leave London. I was actually quite happy to go.”
They both use the word “derelict” when describing their first house.
“It was what we were looking for,” Tim says. “We wanted something that hadn’t been too modernized, which happens to a lot of properties in West Wales. They just get updated. I think all our family thought we were a bit mad. They don’t quite get it. But it was a lovely house.”
The official start of their business, Tim Bowen Antiques, is the same date as their wedding anniversary – they celebrate the 20th anniversary of both this year.
“We went to an antique fair on our honeymoon,” Betsan says. “It wasn’t really much, but we enjoyed it.”
Early on, Tim spotted a skip on the street (akin to renting a dumpster in the U.S.) and took a look through it. In it, he found an old Art Deco rug and he asked the owner if he could have it. The owner said yes.
“It turned out to be quite a valuable rug,” Betsan says. “He sold it in Christie’s in London and made quite a bit of money.”
Soon after, the same thing happened again. Tim found an Art Nouveau cupboard literally in the trash, which he was able to sell, again, for quite a bit of money
“I thought, ‘Gosh this is fantastic!’” Betsan says. “We started the business with that money. Which wasn’t much, we started small, didn’t we?”
“We did, yeah,” Tim says.
“We’re still pretty small, really,” Betsan adds. “I don’t want to give you the idea that we’re big.”
“But we always wanted to sell the things that we liked,” Tim says. “I didn’t really like the Art Deco rug but I recognized it as something that we could make money on. But we almost always choose Welsh furniture, folk art, the vernacular country style of things.”
It’s simply what they both love, as indicated by their 18th-century bed and 19th-century kitchen table.
“We’re surrounded by very old things,” Betsan says.
Hiraeth
Looking through their online collection, it’s clear that Betsan and Tim have keen eyes.
“I think it evolves over lots of looking,” Tim says. “We spent a lot of time looking in galleries and museums and over time you learn to sort of be in tune with what you like.”
A similar effect occurs when Tim takes photos for their regularly emailed Stock Updates (you can sign up to receive it here).
“I take thousands of photos and I think some of them I don’t hate and every now and then I think, ‘That one works,’” he says. “You just end up knowing a lot of stuff by looking.”
Betsan jumps in at this point and tells Tim that she does believe he has an innate skill here though, especially with how Tim now plays with natural light.
Here, Tim recalls a conversation he recently had with a friend.
“Over the last 30 years I don’t think that a day has gone past when I haven’t thought about furniture,” Tim says. “It’s not something where you think, ‘Well, I won’t do that today,’ because it’s just who you are. Even when you get away on holiday we tend to visit old places, National Trust houses – the poor kids get dragged down to every museum.”
“We build whole holidays around the delivery of a piece of furniture or the picking up of a piece of furniture and all the museums that are near,” Betsan says. “But only the older children are sympathetic. Our youngest, in particular, near the end of the holiday is saying, ‘No museums! No old churches! No artifacts! And definitely, no antique shops!’” She laughs.
The Bowens have become good friends with many of their customers.
“You end up becoming quite friendly with them because you share similar interests,” Tim says. He talks about good friends in Suffolk, a six-hour journey from their home in Ferryside, a small village in Carmarthenshire, West Wales. They bought a cottage, took pictures and videos, and asked the Bowens to furnish it.
“That was a great project,” Tim says. “We’re often involved in projects where people buy an old house, move to Wales, restore an 18th-century, 19th-century house and then they want to furnish it with the appropriate things I suppose. But you become friends with people. It can take a long time to find everything, projects can take ages to do. But it’s great. You end up helping furnish some amazing houses.”
Betsan notes that she often hears Tim talking on the phone to clients from around the world, including Australia and the United States.
“I have quite a large number of Welsh people dotted around the world who want – there’s a Welsh term called hiraeth, which is longing for something,” Tim says. “They don’t live here, but they want a piece of Welsh furniture or a bit of Welsh folk art.”
“So many people, they long for this thing which is ethereal, I suppose, this hiraeth thing,” Betsan says. “It’s a longing for something that is home, really.”
‘It’s a Privilege’
The Bowens eventually moved to “another lovely house in the village,” they say, not far from their first house in Ferryside.
The Bowen’s home in Ferryside.
Ferryside
“It has a view of the estuary, and out to sea, so it’s a really magical place to be actually,” Betsan says. “And we never tire of it. Well, I never tire of it.”
“No, I never,” Tim says.
“Just looking out the windows, I’m talking to you, looking straight out to sea,” Betsan says. “And you see all the weather happen and the wind – it’s actually a grey day today, not particularly beautiful, but it kind of is though, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Tim says.
“Even when it’s grey,” Betsan says.
View from across the estuary.
From their home they also have a view of Llansteffan Castle, built in the 12th century and located across the Tywi Estuary.
Betsan with Megan, Morwenna and Tomi, and their two sausage dogs – Selsig and Sglodion (Welsh for Sausage & Chips)
When asked about a typical day they laugh as most parents of three children do and say their entire lives are dominated by their kids, ages 16, 13 and 12. They have a gallery, also located in Ferryside, but almost all of their sales are done online, and Tim and Betsan work from home.
“It’s an online business, really,” Tim says. “So it’s quite a sensible working day.”
It’s a model that allows both of them to be available to get their kids off to school on the bus, pick them up after school and manage after-school activities. Any given day might involve updating things on the website, delivering furniture, visiting with a client or picking things up from a restorer.
“So I wouldn’t say there is a typical day, which is part of what we like,” Tim says.
“We’re sitting now at the kitchen table,” Betsan says. “And the kitchen table is where we work. We’ve tried having offices but it just didn’t work. We always gravitate back to the kitchen table.”
“And the tea,” Tim says.
“The kettle, yeah,” Betsan says. “And it’s nice and warm in here. We put a stove in here.”
Betsan’s day is also not complete without walking her dogs, Selsig and Sglodion, Welsh for Sausage and Chips.
“We’ve got two dachshunds, and they’re very naughty,” she says. “They’re at my feet right now.”
Betsan and Tim keep busy with other projects as well, and their book, “The Welsh Stick Chair – A Visual Record,” which they published in 2020, is a good example. During the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, they took on a new project.
The Bowen’s Grade II listed 19th-century Welsh clom (mud) cottage
“We bought a quite rare, tiny Welsh, Grade II cottage,” Tim says. “It has to be sensitively conserved, so we spend time when we can up at the cottage.”
Tim has already been taking pieces up to the cottage and photographing them, which has worked out quite wonderfully, he says, and it’s been exciting to see how they look in an original setting. In addition to serving as a photo studio, the plan is to rent out the cottage for holidays.
“But it will be quite a particular person who is prepared to stay there because in the cottage itself, there is no running water and no loo,” Betsan says.
A kitchen and bathroom will exist in a building they’ve built alongside the cottage.
“They’re so rare, these cottages,” Tim says. “They’re basically made of mud walls, two tiny rooms downstairs and a loft. They were dotted around Wales but they just didn’t survive. Once they deteriorate, they can disappear very quickly.”
“It was a heart rules the head kind of moment,” Betsan says. “But we don’t regret it for one minute.”
“Oh no, it was an amazing thing to do,” Tim says.
“It is,” Betsan says.
“It’s a privilege to look after it.” Tim says.
Championing Humble Furniture
Tim talks about a recent chair they bought which had been stored in the loft of a barn in a farm.
“It had such a hard life,” he says. “It’s missing components, it’s been broken, but it’s just the most amazing thing.”
“Hang on, you haven’t said the most important part,” Betsan says. “That it’s got at least one, if not 10, layers of thick gray paint all over it. You know, not nice paint, it is, isn’t it?”
“It’s tractor paint,” Tim says.
“And you can see it’s exactly that color,” Betsan says. “It used to be on a Massey Ferguson.”
“I think a lot of people would think it’s not worth saving but it’s such an amazing thing,” Tim says. “We’re still pondering what to do. You have to be so sensitive to the restoration, conservation of these things. We’re giving this some thought to see how far we go with it or do we just try to stabilize it and leave it as an object as it is now, which I think is what we’re trying to do. It might stay with us forever.”
“You can read that as he wants it to stay here forever,” Betsan says, laughing. “I am just thinking of another chair that we bought, which had a beautiful seat. The seat was about 4” or 5” thick, one piece of wood, but at some point it had obviously been used for somebody who was an invalid and they cut a hole in it, in the seat. And so it was used as a commode. And I mean, I don’t know what it would have been worth if it hadn’t had this hole cut into it. But actually, we sold it, didn’t we?”
“It’s in our book,” Tim says. “It’s probably one of the most remarkable chairs, really. But when we bought it, it was in such a neglected state. But the idea is being sensitive to it, really, not trying to get it as good as new.”
“Yeah, not trying to hide what happened to it,” Betsan says. “This is what happened to it – you either love it or you don’t love it. What we’re saying is that we love the chairs the way they are.”
“I think we’re always mindful of the things that we pick,” Tim says. “They aren’t fine works of art or antiques. They are very humble, everyday things. It’s always good to remember that they had a life. They’ve been used and sometimes been neglected and put out in the shed because they’re no longer needed. I think that’s in part what we like about them. They’re not perfect in a sense. So we won’t go looking for pristine-looking antiques.”
Tim and Betsan say they always buy things that they really love. But that can come with its own difficulties.
“There is always a little bit of regret when something you’ve never seen before goes,” Tim says. “But you learn to know that a phone call or an email or something will come up where you will say, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to get that, that’s fantastic!’ It’s full of surprises, the antiques. You have to let them go, I suppose, sometimes. Of course, there are a lot in this house.”
“I’m glad you said that,” Betsan says. “That’s quite an epiphany. He usually says things like, ‘Oh, you can never have enough! Actually, I’m just joking because we really are as bad as each other. There’ll be something where I’ll say, ‘You can’t sell that!’”
“I think in the antique business, you’re only really as good as what you can sell,” Tim says. “You try to find good things and offer good things and so you build a reputation on having good, original things and if you keep everything, well, that’s not going to be the case. How are you going to put food on the table?”
Betsan and Tim regularly seek out what they call “the humbler pieces of furniture,” the things that were used by everyday people and built by everyday people.
“They weren’t works of art in prestigious buildings,” Tim says. “I think sometimes, perhaps, these things have been overlooked in the world of antiques. Often they get sorted as primitive or basic and it’s mostly when people compare a primitive or simple stick chair to a fine Chippendale chair. They’re quite different things but they were also made totally differently by totally different people. I think we champion it a bit more.”
Tim says it’s the same for the little cottage he and Betsan bought.
“It’s very important,” he says. “There are the big houses in West Wales that the National Trust will love over and conserve but sometimes the cottages, they are here one moment and gone the next or they’ve been modernized and there’s no trace of them. So I think I’m right in saying it that way, that that’s what interests us. The things that are made by — not ‘honest’ people because we don’t really know a lot about them — but just the people who lived and worked in West Wales in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. We try to champion that, I think.”
Betsan says they’re working on their next book, but progress has been slow, in part because they can’t agree on the title.
“It’s a term for folk art, and it’s a modern term, really, for things that have been made as art but they might be made for a particular purpose,” she says. “Can you call a turned wooden bowl a piece of art? I mean, you do, because we think of it as art, don’t we? Because it’s such a beautiful object. But it wasn’t made for that. It was made to be used.”
“For people, the term ‘folk art’ conjures up a style or an image or a way of art,” Tim says. “It’s a tricky one, that.”
“But it’s really more to do with the fact that we’ve got three children and it’s really busy!” Betsan says, laughing. “We do have a number of books that we’re thinking about.”
“The stick chair one took us a bit by surprise, how many people wanted to know about stick chairs,” Tim says. “It’s a lovely thing to do, to have for people who don’t know about these things. It’s good for business – we’ve got a good archive of photographs. But I think it’s always that way with business. You have to keep thinking, ‘How do you keep it going?’”
“Yeah,” Betsan says.
“Not just rest on your laurels and do what you’ve always done, I suppose,” Tim says.
I can’t imagine the Bowens ever doing that at all.
John with his first stick chair, elm and yew, 1987, and a child’s highchair, also elm and yew, 1988.
Early on John Porritt (author of “The Belligerent Finisher“) enjoyed playing around with bits of wood in his spare time. In the early 1970s, he carved a face into a piece of hazel and strung it onto leather as a necklace. He used a heated rod to create and carve a pipe. During a difficult period in his life, he made a carving out of soft maple based on Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
In 1979, John attended Shrewsbury Technical College (now Shrewsbury College) for one year. At first, they refused him a grant, but John appealed and won, “which was marvelous,” he says. He studied fine furniture making with John Price who trained with Edward Barnsley in the Arts & Crafts tradition.
“I remember the first week I virtually shook with nerves about being in the college and being back in school because I didn’t have great experiences in school and it felt odd being there,” he says. “John Price came by, and he looked at my work and laughed. And I said, ‘Don’t laugh; show me what I’m doing wrong. Show me – go on. After that, we started to get on, and it was grand.”
John loved his time at Shrewsbury College. He remembers playing football at lunchtime (and a woman from Liverpool, nicknamed Carol Keegan, who was studying ceramics, beating them all every time) and an exhibition they had at Shrewsbury Castle. John showed a cabinet based on Chinese forms.
A cabinet John built while attending Shrewsbury. Walnut, ash, ebony and silver. 1980.
“At Shrewsbury, the finish we used (this was between 1979 and 1980) was polyurethane thinned 50/50, and put on really thin with a clean, well-washed rag,” he says. After several coats we gently cut back with flour paper, then applied a couple more thin coats, burnishing with a taut cloth pad as we went. This gave a great finish. I remember saying to the design lecturer, after using it on a cabinet, What a fine finish! He said, There is no such thing as a fine finish. There is only a finish appropriate for the job. This shut me up. He was a serious, definite man given to pronouncements; however, over the years this thought does come back to me – that’s just another can of worms. But I suppose we all decide what is appropriate – it is fluid after all.”
John says he loved his time at Shrewsbury. After Shrewsbury, John worked briefly as a carpenter then, in 1980, he went off on his own, working out of his parents’ single-car garage, trying to get commissions.
“And that was very hard,” he says. “I was very naïve about it, really. It was hand-to-mouth as I recall.”
Zippo the Clown and his assistant Tommy. A prop John made in collaboration with Alfie Van Derplank in 1981 as a prop for a theater show for kids about energy.
In 1982, he got a commission from Winchester Cathedral, “which was quite something,” he says.
The piece was to be used as a stand for The Book of Remembrance in the Epiphany Chapel in the cathedral. John designed the piece within about three minutes of the meeting. The cathedral, he says, which was built from 1079 to 1532, is a mishmash of styles.
“I tried for a few days to find other designs, but the first one was the best. The cathedral has a stunning roof, and it’s got superb columns and mouldings. And I designed this piece as three columns, two in the front and one in the back, as a symbol of Calvary.”
The Book of Remembrance Stand, designed by John, 1982 to 1983. The silver gilt lettering was designed and made by P.C. (Phil) Craze.
The columns, made out of brown oak, are held together with laminated curves of soft maple designed to echo the ribs in the roof. John used Indian ink to gradate the stain of the rails from blue to purple and back again, carrying the colors of the chapel’s stained glass windows designed by Edward Burne-Jones with William Morris & Co.
John hoped more work would come from this commission than did. People did, however, start to ask him about restorations.
“And I really didn’t want to do restoration work,” he says. “I hadn’t trained for it, I didn’t know a lot about it. But I did it. And as time went on, I got somewhat better at it. And I had help from two great guys, my friends Spike Knight and Johnny Gould. I started to understand color and texture, and surface. And that was a wonderful thing and that’s added to what I do. And that has come back again, to my interpretations of the Welsh chairs.”
In 1981, John had met Keith Rand, who trained as a cartographer, went on to art school then studied sculpture in Scotland. Keith made fine sculptures and occasionally chairs for a living, as well as teaching. Keith and John ended up becoming good friends and shared a workshop for a while; he was John’s best man at his wedding. John taught Keith about tools – how to sharpen them, how to work them – and Keith taught John how to better understand and explore form.
“For a while, we were embryonic chairmakers,” John says. “He worked from leaning seats onto chairs inspired by agricultural forms using tines. Then years later onto beautifully realized Windsors with very few components. They really worked so well. Mine were firmly in the country furniture mould, inspired by the yew-wood Windsors that I was often restoring. Keith was a great man to know and share with.”
In the early ’80s, John became interested in paint, particularly industrial paint. A friend, Phil Craze, an artist and inspiration, showed him the joy of coral and turquoise together. He partnered pigments and created stunning effects. He put the colors onto plywood and made simple, geometric objects. Phil had designed and made the silver gilt lettering for the Book of Remembrance stand John made for Winchester Cathedral.
Paint samples, Hammerite and cellulose, 1982-1983.
“One thing that did come from this commission was that Phil and I were invited to an aluminum anodizing plant to experiment with different effects using color and shape on the raw aluminum,” John says. “This was actually a lot of fun. We kept some of the work, and they kept some for their gallery.”
John tried to do craft fairs, selling things like mirrors made out of thin plywood, but he had trouble selling fine furniture or colorful things. He did, however, successfully sell a cricket table at a fair in the Guildhall Winchester. However, he made it as a joke.
“I made a small top and then I had three legs coming out of it at odd angles and then an even smaller base so it was actually quite unstable,” he says. “I did the top blue like a sky and I did the legs white in ash and the base green. I got a turned piece of wood and I colored this up red so my cricket table was like the three stumps and a ball in a game of cricket. I made a couple of bales on the base that were knocked off so the guy was out. And it got me on the front page of the local paper. The headline was ‘John Bowls the Maiden Over.’ It was a play on words which in Britain people do a lot and I’ve always enjoyed. A ‘maiden over’ is six bowled balls with no runs made from any of them.”
Mirror frame photographed with the sky, soft maple, green copperas with Indian ink and enamel paint. John says Dexion industrial shelving served as inspiration. 1983.
In 1983, John’s father died, “which was as huge blow for me,” he says. “It was huge.” In his grief he carved a massive head, shaped liked a world, and painted it blue, with rockets going off all over it.
“My mum said, ‘What are you doing that for?’ And I remember saying, ‘I have just got to do this,’” John says.
Falling in Love in Paris, Making a Life in England, Moving to the States
In 1984, John went to France. Sue, an American who was in Paris studying art, was standing outside of a hotel on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. They talked. They fell in love. Eventually, John had to get back to England to make some more money. They planned to meet next outside the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy. The meeting spot was a lot bigger than they each realized, and they spent a lot of time walking around, looking for each other.
“When we finally bumped into each other I had my one small bag filled with clothes and she had massive amounts of luggage,” John says. “We traveled over northern Italy together, discarding bits of her luggage along the way.”
A simple table inspired by the massive oil platforms on the North Sea, 1985.
A flat-top table base John made during his first trip to the U.S. in 1985. Everything was purchased at a local hardwood store: plywood, yellow pine and maple dowels. The top looked like it wasn’t flat, but it was. John says he was inspired by military aircraft, “the wonder and the horror.”
John and Sue got married in 1987 and moved to Shrewsbury, England, where they lived for 20 years and had a daughter who is now 18.
“I never thought I’d have a child,” John says. “It’s like having a room opened, another room in your life, full of stuff you never realized. It’s an astonishing thing. It’s not really explainable.”
Davenport desk, early Regency design, 1988, commissioned.
A chair based on West Country forms, ash, colored with caustic soda (lye), 1988.
John built three of these chairs. This is the second one and he still owns the first. Yew with burr elm seat, 1988.
Welsh-inspired cricket table, burr elm and ash, 1989.
Windsor chair based on Michael Dunbar’s C-arm design, 1989.
Around this time John got into spoon carving. He liked the idea of creating things with small tools and bits of wood that he could carry around, a traveling workshop of a chisel, small axe and a couple of knives. He liked the simplicity.
A spoon that John made in the Catskills. Hard maple, 2009.
“I think spoon carving is a fantastic thing for people to do and gain a better understanding of line and form,” he says. “I look at the spoons that people make today and some of the work is just lovely. Wonderful, wonderful things.”
John’s mother died in 2006.
“It was almost inconceivable that my mum died,” he says. “We were very close. She was always very encouraging about whatever I was doing. And she’d always like coming out to places with me and meeting different people. That was good.”
Welsh-inspired 10-stick chair, oak and ash, 2004. “I enjoy this one a lot,” John says.
Gothic-attempt chair, soft maple and yew from the owner’s estate. The chair is situated in Pontesford House, a regency mansion in Shropshire, England. The home’s arch gothic window inspired the back of the chair. “I’m glad I made it,” John says. “It is almost successful, like a lot of things in life.”
John and Sue decided to be nearer to her family so they moved to the U.S. in 2008. They lived in the Catskills for a year and then bought an 18th-century house with a red barn situated next to a picturesque stream in Spencertown, New York, near the Shaker Museum in Chatham. Sue loves to help John with advice on color.
“There are a lot of great people here,” John says. “I’ve got a couple friends here who I wouldn’t agree with on very many things other than our friendship and our woodwork. They have completely different views from me but they’re great people. It’s an interesting thing to think of the different ways people see things. Celebrate the similarities and enjoy the differences, where possible.”
Photographs Spilling Out of a Book: How ‘The Belligerent Finisher’ Came to Be
John has done a lot of restoration over the years for well-known English and Welsh antique collectors and dealers, including Tim Bowen and Richard Bebb. Tim suggested John send pictures of his chairs to “a lad down here who likes stick chairs.” So, John did.
Nicholson plough plane, restored 2012. This restoration project launched John’s career as a tool restorer in the U.S.
“Many, many years later, I got a phone call completely out of the blue,” John says. “And it was Chris Williams. And he said, ‘Why all those years ago did you send me those pictures?’ And I said, ‘Because Tim Bowen told me you were interested in chairs and I just wanted to share them with you, reach out, for the camaraderie.’ And he stuck them in a book and completely forgot about them. And then many years later, Chris Schwarz came to see him. He was looking at a book and these pictures fell out. And they had a look at them. And that’s how Chris Schwarz heard about me, I think.”
Around the same time, Chris Williams heard about John again through Tim. Tim and Richard had separately been talking about restoration projects John had done and they couldn’t work out how John had done them.
And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“I thought to myself, My god, this could be it,” John says. “We could die from this. I didn’t know what to expect or think. So I decided I’m going to go out and do stuff I really want to do that I put off that I couldn’t afford to do or that I didn’t think people wanted. So I made the chairs that are featured in the book. Starting with the black North Walian four stick chair, and I’m really glad I did that. It’s hard to make speculative stuff and run a business as well.”
John sent pictures of these chairs to Chris Williams who then sent them on to Christopher Schwarz. And that’s how “The Belligerent Finisher” was born.
“Some of them are good I think,” John says, when talking about his chairs. “I’m not vain but I know some of them are good. Because I’ve looked at a lot of stuff I’ve made that isn’t good. I’ve always felt that the only person I’m in competition with is me. I’m inspired by other people and occasionally disappointed by them. But I’m not in competition with them. To create, a person’s got to be honest with themselves, look at something they’ve done, assess it, praise it, destroy it even (this decision is often better slept on), whatever, but really be honest about it and walk away and move on and think about the next thing. You learn from what’s happened.”
Talking about the chairs he’s making now, John says: “They almost frighten me because they’re quite hard to do, to get the proportions together. They have to look right and be comfortable. You know, I think I’ve made two or three really comfortable chairs, ones that you want to sit in and just not move from and a lot that are OK and some that aren’t that good. I have to make all my chairs, regardless of what they look like, comfortable. And that’s not always an easy thing to do.”
John currently has chairs on order. He’s also working on restoring Cesar Chelor planes for a collector and, for another collector, he’s restoring a 1696 handsaw with the help of his friend Tom Curran. Also there’s a rare, small, Holtzapffel miter plane that needs attention. But what he most wants to do is build – and finish – chairs. John recalls one comment he saw in response to his book, from a professional finisher, who said, “When I saw this, I was initially appalled.”
John says, “I love that phrase. He was ‘initially appalled.’ The fact that I made someone initially appalled, I like! But I would also agree with him. He went on to say that now that he’s looked at the book, there are things he wants to try.”
While in the states during Covid, John thought a lot about the places he has loved throughout his life. In his head he’d re-walk the hills and lanes in Shropshire and mid-Wales, and spend imaginary time in the meadows around Winchester.
“I would think about some of the things I have come across, seen and enjoyed,” he says. “I wanted to get that feeling, that flavor. I wanted to touch that. That’s really why I make those chairs.”
John says the finishing techniques he used on his chairs in the book and today are not an attempt to create fakes.
“They’re not even copies of antiques,” he says. “They’re interpretations of ideas, ideas of how a chair and finish could be. And some of them are successful and some of them aren’t quite successful. I think the black one, the first one I did that seemed to flow through me, is very, very successful. I loved that. And the green one, the big green one. And there’s a red one on the next page that’s very good. And there are some good effects on the others. I try to get an effect like grading color, like when you see a sky in the evening and it’s changing. That is in my mind, as well as the look of worn furniture surfaces. You see that a lot in England during October and November. The light and the color and the amount of water in the atmosphere. The color and the sharpness— but also the mystery. I’m trying to get that. I’m trying to get a good depth of color. I’m trying to get texture, with the wood having refraction and depth.
“I just wanted to find something to do,” he says. “That was really important to me. I wanted to find something that had value. And I think I found it. I don’t think I’ve always worked on it. I think I spent a lot of time paying bills. But now I want to pay bills with these chairs.
“Enthusiasm and encouragement. The following was said to me by a woman at a show in Upstate New York, and it still makes me smile and laugh. She sat in the North Walian four stick chair with a worn finish, looked up and said: Harmony for my cheeks. I said, That’s it.”
