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Around five years ago, my attention started to drift towards furniture and architecture. These disciplines don't seem to suffer from quite the same level of absurd seasonality or the incessant need for newness like the world of clothing. A well-made chair can come in a few species of wood or a few colors of oil finish - it doesn't get a different spindle size or shape of leg just for the novelty of being new every six months as so often happens with clothing. On the contrary, a successful and iconic furniture design can be produced for decades, relatively unchanged.
I gravitate towards that kind of continuity. With clothing, my goal is to strip a garment down to the most elemental version of itself, so that it doesn’t need to be reinvented or altered every season. I prefer instead to focus on material, seeking new expressions in rare and beautiful textiles that bring different personalities and feelings to the same forms.
After a few years of collecting books and compiling browser tabs on furniture makers and architects, the opportunity arose to renovate an old Victorian storefront into a shop and studio space. Working with the different trades, I found it very exciting transforming ideas into three dimensional forms. It’s similar to making clothes but on a very different scale - there's only one chance to get a 40’ concrete bench right and there's no seam ripper or cutting another sample if the first go doesn’t work out.
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Besides working on different built-ins throughout the space, refinishing the hundred year old douglas fir floors offered the most direct learning experience with wood. I felt there must be a better option than the choice between matte or gloss polyurethane finish as offered by the contractor - so I fell down a rabbit hole. I wanted the natural material to have a natural finish, one that improves with wear and age and gains a patina or warmth over time. After dozens of tests and staring at the space and a small sample board of the wall finish next to it, I found the solution I was looking for - and along the way sparked a much deeper appreciation for working with wood.
Designing clothing requires an attention to fit, drape and construction, but the development that leads to those decisions also establishes a logic that can be applied to just about any medium. The toolbox remains proportion, form, material, scale, color - whether it’s clothes, furniture, ceramics or any physical product. Particularly when the focus is always to make something unobtrusive, functional and beautiful. It’s one continuous expression of ideals across different realms.
The momentum created by the renovations gave way to a desire to test other ideas in wood. The first piece we worked on was the bed. I was simultaneously getting a grasp on the Bay Area’s rich legacy of independent wood sawyers. My friend and carpenter, Sam, who I've been working with on all of this, had inroads to what seemed to be an underground network of local wood sourcing.
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The story of this furniture project is primarily in the material and process. I see my job as staying out of the way, to come up with simple forms that allow the material to sit front and center - the same approach I have with clothing. The wood we're using is sourced within a 100 mile radius of San Francisco. The slabs were once part of trees that came down in storms or were taken down in parks or private property in different nearby towns. These independent sawyers keep these trees from becoming wood chips, helping to usher them into their next life as slabs and furniture. They are relatively wild trees. They weren’t cultivated like standard lumber trees are farmed. They're not ‘perfect’. They're not intended for mass commercial consumption.
We made the first bed prototype with 18’’ wide douglas fir boards from a tree that was struck by lightning in the Santa Cruz mountains. Knowing where that tree came from, how it came down, and having it milled to our spec all within a few hour drive from the studio was a heavy realization for me. A path opened up that allowed me to clarify and define this furniture project as an extreme version of my desire to make true regional products. It’s not possible to make clothes the way we’re making the furniture, I can’t source every material or process I need within a few miles of our studio.
In the best case scenario, a tree falls in the forest and turns into compost. Beyond that, the most respectful thing you can do for this plant–what some people would say is a sentient giant–that's been growing for thirty or fifty years and has consumed who knows how much energy, is make something out of it. Celebrate the tree and carry that energy forward.
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