For the past several years, our preferred way to greet the New Year has been to indulge in a few days’ soak in the Calistoga hot springs at the tip of Napa Valley, just 30 miles east of the wowhaus studio on the other side of the Mayacamas Range. The annual ritual gives us a chance to recalibrate and slow down, modulating our body temperatures as we shift from pool to pool and follow the sun on its low arc across a clear winter sky. The days pass in pace with the conduction of heat and the evaporation of mineral-rich water, leaving us feeling like much simpler, happy organisms.

Tagged: calistoga, hot springs, napa, new years, wowhaus

Two identical bases of green pecan, ready to receive the top, a giant slab of sycamore.

Whenever I design and make a new piece of furniture, I’m always keenly aware of how it will age, and how the piece might transform over time to encourage and support future, as yet unforeseeable patterns of use. I’ve been collecting choice local woods over the years, all neatly stickered in the barn, so my design process usually begins with rummaging through my piles for inspiration, making measurements and drawing directly onto the wood with white chalk. My primary criteria at this early stage is whether the piece of furniture I have in mind is the appropriate final destination for the wood- will it do the tree justice? I’ve always thought of my furniture as a way of extending the life of a tree, as a way of simultaneously storing and appreciating wood by putting it to good use; living daily life as an extension of making.

As I continue to collect and store local woods, and especially as I begin to mill trees myself, I’m becoming more attuned to the value of locally sourced, well-sawn, air-dried wood as a commodity. An increasingly scarce resource, fine wood is a good investment and increases dramatically in value, especially if it has the added cache of ecological responsibility, streaming from the urban forest, or as ‘horticultural salvage’. Because handmade furniture ultimately needs to compete in the marketplace with an increasingly sophisticated range of mass-market comparables, it can be challenging to offer a price point in proportion to the value of the material itself, which is a dilemma, even if the quality of the finished product is markedly higher. This is especially the case when ’studio furniture’ needs first and foremost to meet rigorous functional, as well as aesthetic requirements.

I milled grooves into the stickers for better air flow and to allow for movement.

While my way of thinking about wood-as-commodity has lived quietly in the background of most of my furniture design to date, I’ve been wanting do make a new body of work where the concept is front and center, both in the process of making and in the process of using the furniture. To this end, I’m grateful to my friend Cindy Daniel, who commissioned a ‘Community Table’ for Shed, her Healdsburg-based café/retail/community hub offering local foods, goods and quality wares. Shed is Cindy’s contemporary spin on the traditional country mercantile store, and I’ve enjoyed working with her over the past two years designing interior scenarios for the new building currently under construction, a large, open air metal structure designed by Mark Jensen.

My original thumbnail sketch for the Stickered Table

As much as my Community Table for Shed will serve as a gathering place in the café, it doubles as a process piece for the duration of the enterprise, establishing a kind of invented tradition. The table’s base consists of two nearly identical stacks of green pecan wood I recently milled from a dying tree, neatly stickered to allow the wood to naturally air-dry. The table’s top, a massive slab of sycamore, rests on top of the two piles, acting as a gravity clamp to keep the material from cupping. I milled V-grooves into the stickers to allow for better air flow and to decrease friction as the boards inevitably shrink. After one year, when the stock is adequately dry, the top will be lifted and the material removed and converted into functional wares for Shed, either to be used in the café or sold as product to customers. This first batch will likely make small table tops for the Shed café, slated to open in October 2012.. The two bases will then be re-constructed, stacked from freshly milled wood each year, that will in turn be made into a small production run of whatever item surfaces in the course of its drying.

I typically shellac and wax the ends of boards to prevent undo checking.

I like the idea of adding an element of ‘crowd-sourcing’ to the design development of an annual product, taking advantage of a constant flow of people gathered around the table while the material slowly cures beneath. I also look forward to maintaining an ongoing relationship with Shed as a kind of artisan-in-residence, collaborating with Cindy to design products that exemplify the Shed ethos.

Please click here to see the table with the top installed.

Tagged: appropriate technology, craft philosophy, deep craft, furniture design, green design, green woodworking, innovation, Jensen Architects, scott Constable, sculpture, Shed, slow design, sustainability, vernacular, woodworking

Each fall I sweep the dry duff off of our funky barn roof before the Dampness ensues

One of my September rituals has been clearing the corrugated roof of our funky back barn. The rambling, open-air structure is an explosion of three dissimilar building concepts, fused together with the oddball valleys and warped pitches of an under-planned roofline, one that collects piles of fallen duff of the redwood trees overhead each year. Though it’s a bit of an eyesore to most sensibilities, the building is structurally sound, and I’ve enjoyed studying it over the years whenever I clear the roof during the dry season, thinking about how best to put the barn to good use before the Dampness ensues until the next spring. I’ve learned to appreciate the improvised mess of its design with the same happy reluctance I reserve for the work of Frank Gehry.

The barn’s deceptively vast interior spaces are multi-functional and well-suited to our needs: a portion of the building is where I store paints and hardware, metal-working tools and surplus gear; a portion houses one of our wells; a portion we use as an annex to our sculpture studio; a portion is to store large equipment, a boat and other materials. Over the summer I’ve been trying to clear space inside to better support the increasing scope of our wowhaus projects. We recently sold our broken down McCormick-Deering tractor, which got me thinking about using the barn as a drying shed for the wood I’m about to have milled from our land. In conjunction with my new woodshop and a related body of work I have in development, I plan to source and mill more of my own logs, and have just enough room in the barn to air-dry a few thousand board feet. This spring I plan to build a solar kiln for a final kiss of dry heat.

Taking a break from the work, I lie on my back on the roof and stare up into the redwoods

Tagged: california flora, coast redwood, deep craft, vernacular architecture, woodworking, wowhaus

I recently completed a new deck at the entry to my dedicated, 20′ x 30′ wood shop

After over five years developing our rural home and studio on the Sonoma Coast, the constant challenge has been to both maintain and improve our facilities to meet the increasing scope and scale of our projects, while optimizing the compound to allow for a new round of aesthetic inquiry and exploration.

I’ve devoted the second part of the summer to converting an out-building on the compound from our wowhaus office into a dedicated woodshop. I’ll keep the heavy machines in the open-air atrium of the main house, and use the new space as a bench room for handwork- assembly, laminating, steam-bending, etc.. A portion of the space will be dedicated to producing the Deep Deck longboard I’ve been developing over the past two years, using hand-milled logs from horticultural salvage. I’m also eager to begin realizing some new ideas I’ve been brewing for sculpture and furniture using wood milled and cured on our property.

Tagged: deep craft, deep deck, longboard, scott Constable, skateboard, vernacular architecture, woodworking, wowhaus

It’s been a bumper year for wild plums, and our few trees, bent to capacity with ripe fruit, have been feeding the birds, raccoons and a solitary bobcat, who harvests from our rooftop at night. We’re eating our share as well, and Ene has already prepared a few gallons of ‘plum brandy’ that should be ready for Christmas.

On or way to the beach we pass the Pozzi Ranch, some of Straus Creamery’s grazing meadows, and several smaller family farms, all of who have been cutting hay over the past few weeks. Just as the grasses turn gold, they’re cut into rows where they sit for a week or so before being baled. I love the haphazard architecture of the bales as they cure before being collected and loaded into barns. The ride to the beach smells of sweet cut grass drying in the sun.

Salmon Creek and the Russian River are still feeding the Pacific at high tides, so the surrounding beaches are loaded with driftwood. This year I’ve discovered some surprisingly sophisticated structures built of driftwood. I’m not sure if it’s due to an abundance of good material after later than usual rains, or to an increase in leisure and anxiety given the current joblessness crisis.

Tagged: aesthetics, california coast, deep craft, phenology, pozzi ranch, slow food, sonoma coast, straus creamery, wowhaus

I love my vintage Craftsman “60″ one speed drill

As challenging as it can be, it’s always wise to extract as much satisfaction from the task at hand as from what the task yields. This is especially true in production woodwork, where tasks are sometimes tediously slow, repetitive and physically demanding. My approach is to have particular tools dedicated to specific processes, allowing me to build a relationship with the character of a tool and a level of expertise in knowing how best to optimize its inherent attributes.

I love the vintage Craftsman “60” drill I inherited from my grandfather and have relished using it since I was a kid, but with its one speed operation and 1/4” chuck, it became somewhat obsolete with the advent of cordless drills, kind of like Mike Mulligan’s steam shovel. I could never justify using it out of sheer nostalgia, despite its no-nonsense aluminum casing and graceful mid-century styling. Gratefully, I’ve recently discovered that coupled with a wire brush, my childhood drill is the ideal tool for removing bark and stray fibers from the ‘live edge’ of my slab constructions; the speed is just right, it has just enough power but not too much, makes a pleasant sound, and warms to the touch. Plus, I feel a connection to my grandfather and recall happy times making stuff with my dad whenever I plug it in.

Tagged: aesthetics, craft philosophy, craftsman "60", deep craft, vintage tools, woodworking

the 30′ long table returns home, after weathering 5 years at the Sonoma County Museum

When we first moved our home and main studio to West Sonoma County five years ago, Ene and I were commissioned to participate in an exhibition called Hybrid Fields at the Sonoma County Museum, curated by our friend Patricia Watts. We had been milling several storm fallen Douglas Fir trees on our property at the time and proposed installing a 30′ long harvest table constructed of rough timbers for the exhibition, to be sited on a lawn adjacent to the museum. We called the project Tree Trust True and organized a public feast featuring local foods that all grow on trees for the exhibition’s opening. The event lasted just one afternoon and evening, but the table remained at the museum for the next five years, becoming a popular spot for lunches and impromptu gatherings, weathering like a giant piece of driftwood.

The table is constructed of stacked and pinned timbers, topped off with 6″ thick slabs

We recently decided to bring the table back home, return it to the site where the tree originally grew. With the help of our capable friends Hus, Rob and Angel, we disassembled the table, loaded the parts onto a 16′ flatbed truck and reassembled it back at the wowhaus compound, where it will serve as the primary site for an ongoing series of secret dinners we’ve been planning, featuring guest chefs and handcrafted tableware. The first of these is tentatively planned for October First, with chef Leif Hedendal at the helm.

Angel, Rob, Hus and Scott unload the truck

Angel, Hus, Scott and Rob assemble the table, pinning the timbers with long screws

Installation complete, the crew takes a break to savor Ene’s homemade Pozole

ENE’S POZOLE
• Saute one chopped onion, 1/2 tsp cumin and salt and pepper to taste, in olive
oil. Add to the water in the pot, as described below:
• Place a whole chicken in a pot and add enough water to fill the pot double the
height of the chicken + 8 sprigs of fresh oregano; simmer for at least 2 hours,
preferably longer, at least until the meat falls away from the bone.  Add water
as needed along with 4 cups of canned hominy. Simmer until flavors blend.
• Clean the meat from the bones; add more fresh oregano and cumin to taste, if
desired.
• Squeeze in fresh lime to taste or serve as a garnish

Serve with the following as garnish:
• Chopped Avocado
• Fresh lime slices
• Sliced jalapeno peppers
•  Salsa
• Chips or toasted tortillas can be eaten on the side, but we like to add them to the soup as well….

Enjoy!

Tagged: contemporary art, deep craft, furniture design, innovation, leif hedendal, pozole recipe, scott Constable, slow food, sonoma county museum, wowhaus

The Occidental Yacht Club in 2009, before it began to seriously buckle

Maybe the Occidental Yacht Club was not such a great idea to begin with. At six hundred feet above sea level, the town of Occidental is a dozen winding miles down to the cliffs and breaks of Sonoma’s unforgiving shores. While I have yet to hear the story of the building’s true origins, I assume an element of comedy was at play, which only adds a veil of elegance to the building’s slow decay.

We’ve been watching the old red barn collapse since we moved up the ridge five years ago, wondering whether it would be rescued or torn down. When the Occidental Farmers Market is in full swing on Friday evenings during the growing season, the collapsing building has been a kind of secret fort for town kids, a site for hide and seek, ghost stories and games of dare. I’ve never been inside, but I’ve entertained my own fantasies wondering about what happened there, what’s buried under the planks. Understandably, the building has recently been cordoned off, condemned, and is now inaccessible to anyone, which got me thinking about the significance of ruins in our daily lives.

I’ve written before about a pattern common to West Sonoma County, the tendency not to maintain old outbuildings but leave them to the elements after they become obsolete. As a native Northeasterner, where old agricultural buildings are either carefully maintained, adapted, restored or disassembled, this has been quite an adjustment, despite the romantic visual appeal of distressed barns in the hay meadow.

I’ve since come to understand that poverty connotes an ethos of conservation that is tuned to regional conditions, material resources and a philosophy of labor. For example, the farmers who built barns and outbuildings on this stretch of the West Coast a century and a half ago typically arrived here by sea, and were familiar with the coastal vernacular of New England. Yet they were availed of open land, fair weather, giant straight-grained redwood trees that far surpassed the forests of yore, and the possibility of forging a new identity. The flavor of their subsistence had more to do with self-sufficiency than community, as is reflected in the ethos of their architecture. It was easier and cheaper to build than to maintain, where the opposite was the case in New England, with dwindling resources and land, and unified expectations for social comportment.

I’ve grown accustomed to the dominant attitude of the rural West Coast, especially as it manifests itself in a preponderance of roadside ruins. I believe the tradeoff of allowing for possibility and imagination, even danger, over expectations of tidiness and order speaks for itself.

a recent view of the roof collapsing

Tagged: aesthetics, california coast, craft philosophy, deep craft, innovation, occidental, scott Constable, sonoma coast, vernacular architecture

The final bend home on my return from the coast along Estero Americano

Some days I like to do things that help me maintain a Traveler’s Mindset, so critical to sustaining the enjoyment and success of our wowhaus projects. Yesterday I rode the tide down my favorite local waterway, Estero Americano, to the mouth where it drains to the sea. With the tide moving at about two knots and a rare land breeze at my back, I reached the coast with minimal effort and was able to enjoy watching birds and listening to the fields draining in rivulets and miniature waterfalls along the way. The route is becoming familiar and I knew just where to position the boat in the channel of the slough to take advantage of wind and wave.

A simple, half-day excursion like this has many parallels to the life cycle of our projects. The beginnings are straightforward, almost mechanical, following known protocols we’ve patterned through experience. The destination and goals are hypothetical, with room left for adjustments along the way as conditions change. The return trip can be more arduous than expected, but it becomes evident that the ultimate point of the journey is safe passage to home turf, and the clarity of perspective to recognize its beauty.

homeward stretch on Estero Americano

Tagged: aesthetics, california coast, craft philosophy, deep craft, estero americano, innovation, scott Constable, wowhaus

plate from ‘Kunsterformen Der Natur’ (1899-1904) by Ernst Haeckel

For the better part of the past two weeks I’ve stopped all production in order to spend time with family and nourish my exhausted body and brain. Over the holidays we’ve been making leisurely day trips, hiking the beach, cooking, napping and reading, seeing movies and spending time with friends.

I’ve been particularly re-invigorated by reading ‘Morphic Resonance’ by the brilliant and eccentric British biochemist, Rupert Sheldrake. Originally published in 1988 and recently revised, the book lays the groundwork for Sheldrake’s concept of morphic fields that might model “the means by which simpler organic forms synergetically self-organize into more complex ones, allowing a different explanation for the process of evolution itself, as an addition to Darwin’s evolutionary processes of selection and variation.” Though grounded in contemporary science, Sheldrake’s theories are not easily proven by experiment, and the book rings with a pre-modern sense of wonder and awe. Reading it has me researching the work of self taught 19th century naturalists, particularly Ernst Haeckel, who is also an accomplished artist and whose plates are shown here. Haeckel discovered several species in the course of his explorations and research, and was a major proponent of Darwinism in Germany.

Though we have yet to make any scientific breakthroughs, I’m beginning to appreciate what a productive year it’s been for Ene and myself as 2010 winds down and we enjoy a much needed respite from our busy lives on and off the wowhaus studio compound. Here are some highlights of what we’ve accomplished over the past year: two public art commissions for the cities of Oakland and San Francisco; an interior design commission for a new house in Marin County; a design commission for an observation tower/treehouse in Sonoma County; design commissions for a production dining chair, one-off conference table, and assorted stacking stools; an artist residency at Kohler; a visiting professorship at CCA; trademark registration of the ‘deep’ logo in three classes and a business plan for a Deep Craft product line. Some of these projects are recently completed and have been documented on these pages (see ‘project dispatches’ in the scroll-down menu in the sidebar). Others will soon be documented, posted and promoted as we forge ahead in the year to come.

Ene and I will soon be back in the studio and out in the field, laying the groundwork for another productive year. We’re looking forward to developing a new public art commission for the City of Santa Cruz, developing furnishings for the ‘Shed’ in Healdsburg, tooling up to manufacture my ‘deep deck’, and bringing our rural studio compound to the next level of functionality and conviviality. I wish everyone a healthy and happy 2011 and thank you for tuning in to my Deep Craft ruminations.

plates from ‘Kunsterformen Der Natur’ (1899-1904) by Ernst Haeckel

Tagged: aesthetics, deep craft, haeckel, longboard, morphic resonance, scott Constable, sheldrake, wowhaus