the Greens management team loved my prototype Greens Chair

Like the Golden Gate Bridge that looms across the Bay from San Francisco’s historic Fort Mason Center, Greens Restaurant is a Bay Area icon. With close ties to the San Francisco Zen Center, the restaurant has embodied an ethos of attentive living and eating for over thirty years, heralding a new age of vegetarian cuisine. I recently presented my prototype Greens Chair, which I was commissioned to design by the restaurant’s management team, and was truly honored to have it pass their rigorous requirements of functionality and aesthetics. The Greens management team includes acclaimed chef Annie Somerville and at least one ordained zen Buddhist priest, and everyone took turns testing the chair with earnest focus. The team agreed that the chair encourages mindfulness for both diners and staff, which is the highest compliment to me.

Tagged: aesthetics, chair design, deep craft, furniture design, green design, greens restaurant, scott Constable, slow design, windsor chair, woodworking, zen center

My humble ESY stool can hold its own in a room full of Danish Chairs

As I begin to make small production runs of my ESY stool (pictured above) to fill an increase in demand, I’ve been enjoying sending them out into the world and seeing where they land. Last week I delivered a sample to the office suite of a commercial real estate developer, and left it in a conference room under construction, nestled amongst a cluster of elegant Danish chairs. The stool worked perfectly with the setting, which got me thinking about what makes for a kind of universal style, or a style of no style. In my experience, the style of no style is a consequence of Radical Pragmatism.

I originally developed the stool as a minimalist seating solution for the Middle School Dining Commons associated with Alice Waters’ acclaimed Edible Schoolyard project. The stools stack up to 7 high, consist of just three repeated parts, and use a bare minimum of native, California hardwoods, traditionally joined into a lightweight but durable seat. The ESY stool doubles nicely as an occasional table. Most important, I prototyped and manufactured the original batch of 120 stools myself, and designed it around my minimal production capabilities, knowing I would need to keep costs down to compete with comparable products already in production. The stool is now made in small batches by a local shop, each batch sequenced with wood from the same sustainably milled logs. Sales have increased as the stool becomes available, and I look forward to scaling production in respect of the stool’s original ethos, eventually making it available on the Goods pages of this site.

Tagged: aesthetics, alice waters, chair design, craft, deep craft, edible schoolyard, furniture design, green design, innovation, sustainability, woodworking

With enough rainfall, Estero Americano drains to the sea, becoming seasonally tidal

My favorite chair, by far, is an ocean kayak. To unwind after an intense week of new projects, I spent a quiet afternoon idly paddling down Estero Americano, my favorite local slough, now flooded to the coast. The marshy, seasonally tidal estuary is like a living almanac of coastal California birds, evidenced by my encounters with numerous cormorant, dowitcher, egret, snipe, willet, loon, night heron, bufflehead, black skimmer and, closer to the beach, a flock of white pelican.

It’s coming up on two years since I created this site, whose first post was inspired by a paddle down the same stream. This time around, my voyage taught me less about the material provenance of my chair design, and more about the simple pleasures of sitting with nature.

The white pelican takes flight over Estero Americano

Tagged: aesthetics, birding, california coast, craft philosophy, deep craft, furniture design, phenology, scott Constable, sonoma coast

1/4 scale model of my new dining chair concept for Greens Restaurant

I generally try to avoid working under pressure, but find I often do my best work with my back up against the wall. When our Wowhaus Interview was published in San Francisco magazine last month, I was just beginning to clear the decks and shift my focus to a demanding interior design project. To my surprise and delight, the article inspired a bevy of inquiries about my furniture design, leading to several new commissions, including a new dining chair for the famous Greens Restaurant in San Francisco.

Over the holidays, I’ve designed a simplified, affordable adaptation of my Elder Chair, located a manufacturer and built a 1/4 scale model (pictured above), which I will present to the Greens management team later this week. The new chair combines the open-quadrant-backrest styling of my Elder Chair, which I originally developed for Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard Dining Commons, with the structural program of the Pilot Chair I recently designed and made for Becoming Independent. To mimic the wall of rectangular window panes looking towards the Golden Gate from inside of Greens, I elongated the open quadrants and narrowed the backrest, emphasizing the chair’s verticality. I also added an upholstered seat as a concession to comfort, considering the typically fit, lean patron of Greens.

Tagged: deep craft, edible schoolyard, furniture design, green design, greens restaurant, innovation, scott Constable, slow design, woodworking

the underside of this pallet reminds me of a Mayan city

At some point when making a sculpture or piece of furniture, my job is simply to convey a load to the ground. The perennial challenge is to invent or interpret a structural program that gets the job done but adds something new in the process. I usually begin by looking to natural forms- to the structural properties of a material, or to the material’s source- the tree in the case of wood. But I also find inspiration in engineered forms, like the pallet pictured above, whose underside resembles a Mayan city. The pressed form has me trying to make connections between the mundane task of conveying a load and the magical cosmology of Mesoamerica.

my chair for Becoming Independent conveys a load on two levels both laterally and vertically

Tagged: craft philosophy, deep craft, innovation, inspiration, mesoamerica, scott Constable