They even put together a video, which you can see here:

Thanks guys. Your mission to highlight the brands and people who represent the creative spirit of the West Coast is inspiring.  Keep up the good work!

The following process photos show a lighter colored chair, powdery from being freshly sanded into shape. I love how you can see the angles so clearly when it’s light like this.

The last photo shows what the chair becomes after you rub in the oil and wax and the wood has time to drink it all up. Nice, no?

The Following is a Transcribed Presentation of George Nakashima for the Bowers Museum and the Cherry Blossom Festival: Celebrating One Hundred Years of the Gift of Trees

A century ago, 3000 cherry blossom trees were bestowed on Washington, DC by Tokyo, Japan as a living reminder of international friendship and the beauty of nature.

To fully appreciate this gift, we must remember that “in Japan there is a reverence for wood and a gentleness toward nature that we don’t have here in the West.”  This observation was made by Japanese-American George Nakashima, a famous woodworker, artist, teacher, and peace activist.  He had a reverence for trees and their organic forms, flaws and imperfections, that became the intrinsic design element of his now famous furniture.  Nakashima is best known as a furniture maker as well as one of the leading innovators of 20th Century furniture design and a founding father of what has become known as the American Arts and Crafts Movement.

In his early career, Nakashima was an established architect associated with Frank Lloyd Wright as well as a budding woodworker. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the US government imprisoned Nakashima, his immediate and extended family, and other people of Japanese descent in internment camps. It was during his detainment that Nakashima learned traditional Japanese carpentry, mastered traditional Japanese hand tools and joinery techniques, and strove for the perfection that is a mark of Japanese craft.

His approach went against commercially mass produced furniture lines, as his pieces could only be achieved via laborious hand-crafting and attention to detail; a unique process that successfully blurred the lines between design, craft, and art.

Nakashima received many prominent awards during his lifetime, including the Third Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Emperor and Government of Japan in 1983.  During his last exhibition before his death in 1990, the American Craft Council marked him as a “Living Treasure” in the United States.

George Nakashima was a spiritual man who cared about the soul of a tree and believed that a woodworker owed a sacrificed tree a noble life as a useful, beautiful object. He believed that each plank cut from a tree had only one ideal use and it is the woodworker’s responsibility to find that use and shape the wood to realize its true potential.

Long before ergonomics was a popular word, Nakashima’s furniture exemplified his belief that a firm design is real and utilitarian, based on principles as universal as possible.  One of his most popular pieces, the Conoid Chair, was designed with the contours of the human body in mind.  His cantilevered Conoid chairs have hickory spindles and a slanted back. The seats jut out and are supported by only two legs that rest on blade-like feet. Not only are the chairs visually intriguing, they are comfortable.

This chair was built by local artist and woodworker, Tyler Smutz.  True to George Nakashima’s original Conoid Chair in design and process, it was hand crafted with meticulous attention to detail.  The wood was mindfully chosen so that the grain and figure of each piece is an appropriate match for its placement within the chair’s structure.  The back spindles were carefully shaved by hand rather than machine sanded into shape.  Just like the original, it is made of solid walnut and hickory.  You are welcome to touch this piece of art, even sit in it (being mindful to remove any sharp objects in pockets).  Notice how it combines Japanese joinery with traces of Shaker design.  It is a unique blend of East and West, the traditional and the modern. It embodies the legacy left by this influential Japanese-American artist, much like the strongly rooted cherry blossom trees in our country.

Additional links and resources:

The Soul of a Tree: A Master Woodworker’s Reflections, by George Nakashima
http://www.amazon.com/Soul-Tree-Master-Woodworkers-Reflections/dp/0870119036 

George Nakashima Foundation:
http://www.nakashimawoodworker.com/

Nakashima’s Foundation for Peace:
http://www.nakashimawoodworker.com/foundation/

Craft in America – George and Mira Nakashima:
 http://www.craftinamerica.org/artists_wood/story_176.php

To read more about woodworker George Nakashima and his famous chairs, check out our latest newsletter, Killstress Designs and American Craft.

Well, that’s not exactly how it happens. True, we start with good designs but then we make the parts that make the whole. That means we saw through raw wood and metal, weld, grind, solder, sand, drill, rivet, chisel, plane, and anything else that needs to be done to prepare all the pieces that go into our products.

It’s not glamorous and it’s not work that you can keep clean doing. It’s the kind of work that Mike Rowe details in his show “Dirty Jobs”, where the ordinary but necessary labor of men and women in America are humbly put to light. In his testimony about the skilled trades before the US Senate, Mike Rowe defends the hard and hardly recognized work that is so vital to America’s success. If we lose the skilled trades and the ability to appreciate it and educate others, we lose much of our identity.

People like to call us designers, but my biggest point of pride comes from being the wife of a man who is so well-versed in the skilled trades that nothing in our little world is ever broken – it just needs to be fixed or built.

Tyler has since made a more boards with different knives, as you can see below.  We’ve sold a number of them but have a few more in our shop…  if you’d like to pick one up before they’re all gone, email us.

This rosewood espresso tamper was made with a Logan lathe from 1942.  We purchased the lathe from an older gentleman in the Bronx who inherited it from his father, a clock maker.  He was torn because he had no use for it but didn’t want it ruined by a stranger…  it was his father’s, after all, and it was a solid piece of equipment with a great clock-making history.  He wanted the next owner to be someone who could appreciate it for what it was worth.  Needless to say, Tyler was his guy.

When we moved from NYC to California, there was no question that it was coming with us.  We packed it up alongside a few other tried and true machines (like Tyler’s drill press from 1921 passed down from his grandfather) and drove it across the country in a 26-foot moving van.

It works on both metal and wood and is a joy to use. To make this espresso tamper, Tyler bought a standard set of chisels for woodturning and sharpened them to perfection with his Tormek.

Want to see the espresso tamper being made on the lathe?  Check out this timelapse video.

Hey!  What do you know?  Before I could publish this post the tamper was sold!

To order your own, send us an email.