In spite of the imposing name, my corporation has only one employee--me. I started making furniture as part of my duties as a French teacher at the Choate School, from 1969 to 1973. The school had a student shop, almost completely ignored by the students, and I managed to get myself put in charge of it. With only a few students to supervise every afternoon, I made furniture pretty much on instinct alone, using the basic skills I'd picked up in the student shops as an undergraduate at Dartmouth.

When the time came to retire from teaching (1973), we (my wife was also a high school teacher during those years, although she lasted 5 years to my 4) moved to Vermont where I sought and found an apprenticeship with a cabinetmaker. He taught me as much in a year of non-stop production as I could have got from two years of graduate school, and when it was time to find a real place to live 12 months later, we settled near Utica, NY where my wife took a job as an administrator at Utica College. We bought a house and barn among the dairy farms of southern Oneida County, and I hung up my shingle in 1975.

The shingle blew down about two years later, but I'm still there in the same barn. I equipped my shop with old (some very old) industrial woodworking machines because they were cheaper and better (but much heavier and harder to move) than new ones. I also use many hand power tools, especially sanders, of which I own many types. I am by no means a wookworking purist, but I use hand tools every day as well, for those jobs that really can't be done as well with the help of a machine.

The reason I started doing this in the first place is that I turned out to be a very visual person. This means that the way things look has always made a big impression on me. I blame my mother for this. She is an art historian with strong visual opinions who was constantly pointing out the way things looked to us from our earliest years. Add to that the fact that my father is an engineer, who was always figuring out how things went together, and designing and building furniture was pretty much inevitable, I guess.

About fifteen years ago I tried having one employee for about 6 months, but I found I didn't want to spend any of my time organizing someone else's time, so I reverted to my one-man-shop status. I incorporated in 1984 so I could look bigger than I really am when facing down large organizations like trucking and insurance companies, and to get my business out of the family's finances.

The hardest part of these things is the "artist's statement", mostly because I don't consider myself an artist. I make really nice furniture, but I hesitate to call it art, mostly because while I don't know what art is, I think I know what it isn't. I'm pretty sure nobody ever defined art as what you store your clean socks in, and that's what I make--furniture that people will use and get pleasure from using, partly because it suits their needs and partly because they know that I took pleasure in making it for them. How about we call me an artisan. I like that.

"Je pense, donc je suis." - Descartes

"Je ponce, donc je suis." - Steve Mackintosh

This is a question that begs to be answered, given the fact that my furniture costs more than the factory-made equivalent (I use the term loosely, because I don't really think they are equivalent). It's a fact that artisan-made furniture is more expensive, and this is why:

Have it your way...

Before we look at the details, let's examine the big picture. I'm going to use a piece of furniture I finished in February, 1999 to illustrate. This linen press is a design I've made before. Look at it at the top of the tall cabinets page, and then come back here. Notice that while the general design is the same, the proportions are quite different. This is difference number one -- you can get exactly what you want when furniture is made one piece at a time. The only limits are size (I work alone, so I can only make things that I can handle by myself) and certain proportions that are so ugly I won't build them. They're hard to describe, but I know 'em when I see 'em. Otherwise, I'll build it just like you want it.

Wood selection...

Take a good look at the cherry I used to make the linen press. Notice that it is very light and that the color is consistent throughout the piece. Because I don't use stain to alter the natural color of the wood, I take great care to choose boards that are the same color as each other -- a time-consuming process which is a avoided in mass-produced furniture by staining the wood to achieve an even color. A side benefit of using unstained cherry is that the owner of the piece has the pleasure of watching the color deepen over the first few years of its life. This is one of the woods that just keeps getting better and better looking as it ages, and it's a pleasure to watch.

Another element in wood selection is how the maker uses the figure of the wood to make the piece more special. At left is a close-up of one of the door panels. The beautiful figure you see isn't an accident. I save my best boards for places like this. This rare curly cherry board had just enough of this figure to make two bookmatched panels. Each panel came from a single 6" wide board that was sawn through its middle and opened up like the pages of a book. This yields two nearly mirror-image pieces of wood that are then glued together to make the 12" wide panel.

A closer look at the linen press would also reveal that the two top drawer fronts were made from a single board so the figure is continuous across both, and that the adjacent stiles (vertical frame pieces) of the doors are also made from a single board, so their figure matches as well.

Joinery...

People who do what I do used to be called joiners, not because of the clubs they belonged to but because of the skill needed to join two pieces of wood together in the days when glue was made of horse's hooves, fish offal and wheat paste. A good, tight joint, preferably with interlocking elements, would withstand the seasonal expansion and contraction of the wood better than a sloppy, ill-fitting one, especially after the glue dried out and failed as it inevitably did.

We are lucky today to have the benefits of synthetic chemicals (plastics, if you must know) in the glues we use, so glue failure is much less common. But we still use some of the old joinery techniques for maximum strength and long life (of the furniture, not us).

Most of the time you can't see the joinery involved in a piece, because it's inside holding things together. But when you can see it, look for a tight fit with no visible glue lines, like the dovetail joint on the drawer at right. There are usually several joints appropriate to each situation, and usually more than one method for making each joint. I choose the ones I deem best for both purpose and economy, and I almost always use a combination of power and hand tools to form the joining pieces. Each joint is fitted individually - no assembly of identical parts. I wouldn't say that the result is perfection - that's pretty hard. But I try for it every time.

Hardware...

There's hardware, and then there's hardware. This hinge is a good example of what I mean - it's made of cast and machined brass, about 1/8" thick, and there's not an iota of slop in the action (most hinges are stamped and formed from steel or brass sheets). I use the best-made hardware I can find, because I want it to work perfectly and never to fail. Of course it's expensive, but a fine piece of furniture deserves no less.

The knife marks at the corners of the hinge show that it was fitted individually, to make sure it works as well as it can. Note that a knife is used to mark the wood because it is more precise than a pencil, and the groove tells the edge of the cheisel where to go in a way a pencil line can never do.

 Details, details...

The last and perhaps most telling difference between what I do and what comes off an assembly line is in the details. Everywhere you look is evidence of an attention to the little things that is so important in defining what makes a truly fine piece of furniture. At right you can see the faceting on the door pulls that turns them into black diamonds, the crisp inside bevel on the edge of the door frame, and the way the hinge fits precisely into its mortise with no gaps. I hope that if you haven't yet had a chance to see my work up close, you will some day soon. I'll look forward to it.