My workshop produces no waste. When I make furniture I do my best to optimize the beneficial end use of the material that flows through my hands. I apply the same paradigm to wood scraps and shavings, and often derive as much pleasure from managing waste streams as from making functional objects. Deep Craft is all about stewardship of waste streams.

The woods I use are from horticultural salvage; primarily native trees harvested from windfall, street trees and orchard groves including monterey cypress, claro walnut, acacia, madrone, elm and bay laurel, cut and air-dried by local sawyers.

Dust and shavings from milling are composted, or used as fill if they contain toxins such as ‘juglone’ found in walnut. Small scraps become kindling for our woodstoves and fuel my wood-fired steambox for bending operations. Fruitwoods flavor foods cooked in our smoker or over the open coals of sweet embers.

Larger scraps and oddly-shaped cut-offs (pictured at the top) often serve as inspiration for new ideas or find their way into models and fixtures for new projects. If I lack storage space, I give scraps away to friends and love to track how they are used. Sometimes my wood is returned to me in a new form as a gift, which I always find inspiring in unexpected ways. I hope to use this site to initiate a ’scrap exchange’ along these lines, and will create an archive and database for the free exchange of ‘waste’ for products so realized. Some of these will be featured as GOODS for sale on these pages in the coming months.

An important component of designing a new chair (the California Windsor) is how its manufacture integrates with the seasonal management of our property on several levels. I am beginning to study biodynamic farming techniques pioneered by Rudolf Steiner as a model for Deep Craft to serve as a potential extension of his agricultural insights.



Over the past few weeks my focus has shifted to developing new projects for wowhaus, my public art and design collaboration with my wife, Ene Osteraas-Constable. Many of our projects have their origins as ’social sculpture’, where we create structures and situations designed to bring people together in convivial exchange.

Yesterday we introduced MIX, our human-powered, urban compost tumbler at Southern Exposure, a community-based gallery in San Francisco, temporarily sited in a residential block in the Mission District. We’ve been working in collaboration with a group of artists to develop a curatorial component for the gallery’s tiny garden, and proposed to kick things off with a community ‘pot luck’ around the topics of compost, soil and urban gardening. We set up tables and chairs in the gallery, decorated with hand-embroidered tablecloths, and invited neighbors to bring a home-cooked dish to share as well as their kitchen scraps to feed the composter. Most people arrived with a salad or fruit, and we spent a lively afternoon hanging out, swapping stories, feeding the composter and discussing the garden’s potential.

Kristin Palm, a San Francisco-based writer who recently wrote a feature on Deep Craft for Metropolis magazine’s POV project, showed up with clippings of her own hair for the composter. Human hair is loaded with nitrogen, a key ingredient in making fertile soil.

With the help of my friend and neighbor Steve Shoulders, I designed and built the composter with ready-made materials culled from the waste stream, including a Spanish-made exer-cycle, an olive barrel, and a bicycle wheel donated by The Recyclery Bike Shop of Oakland. Pumping the handlebars pulls a ratcheted cable, which spins the wheel with barrel attached, mixing and aerating the contents for rapid and even decomposition.

Much of the discussion centered on how to optimize the pedal power potential. Our original plan was to spin a 12 V generator to charge a battery to power a laptop or equivalent, but we decided to allow the site and situation to determine the best use. This method of composting produces a liquid ‘tea’ that, when drained, is very nutritious for growing plants. A few of the garden-savvy participants suggested collecting the ‘tea’ drained from the decomposing matter, and using the pedal power to pump it to a mister which could be moved around the garden. Regardless of the thing powered, simply providing exercise for the gallery staff during a stessful restructuring and growth cycle is a worthy outcome of ‘pedal power’ for now.

For the event, I made cole slaw from cabbage and carrots grown nearby. I sliced 3 heads of cabbage, chopped up 2 bunches of carrots, and mixed in a sauce made from 1/2 cup Vietnamese garlic/chili sauce (sambal oelek), 1/2 cup rice vinegar, 3 tablespoons sugar and 1 cup of olive oil, slowly whipped in.

The MIX composter will be installed in Southern Exposure’s garden for the entire summer, and the gallery’s community will determine how best to utilize the soil generated from neighborhood kitchen scraps. MIX is the latest in a series of wowhaus’ community-based interventions; others include Friesel, Tree Trust True, Life on Market Street, and the Ecology/Expedition Survey. Wowhaus public projects model community production strategies, a hallmark of Deep Craft.



Tagged: appropriate technology, compost, social sculpture, southern exposure gallery, urban gardening

It is High Spring on the Sonoma Coast and I’m finding my interest in woven structures is shared by birds, whose nests are literally dropping from trees with the afternoon winds from an unseasonably high barometric pressure.

My initial experiments with bull kelp were a success. Wrapped around a tapered round of driftwood, the material dried to a flexible hardness, keeping its shape but reducing in diameter by about 75%. The taper allows for easy removal of the shrunken, dried kelp form.

My concern now is how best to preserve the dried kelp form from its naturally intended decay. I have been experimenting with biodiesel as a non-toxic wood finish and have soaked my dried kelp form with the fuel as a potentially ideal solution. Biodiesel is produced locally here, and is available at several nearby pump stations for a fraction of the cost of comparable oils and varnishes.

Meanwhile, I’ve been documenting woven structures and studying the cultures that consistently produce functional objects from ‘knitted’ or ‘woven’ grasses.

I’m not entirely confident kelp will find its way into the California Windsor I am developing, but it will certainly inform its design and may surface as a small basket for eggs or similarly harvested goods. Kelp is like wine to the compost.



In summertime when I was a kid my family would make the annual pilgrimage to the Connecticut coast to visit my mother’s parents, who lived in a converted ‘pony barn’ a few hundred yards from the Long Island Sound. My grandfather was an accomplished woodworker, and their humble home was filled with furniture he had made from local maple and pine. His chairs and tables were fastened with exposed dowels and had soft, curvy contours after the Heywood-Wakefield furniture he emulated. He would burn his shop scraps for the morning fire, and I remember watching the knots and wane burn brightly in the fireplace, smelling the sweet smoke of New England sapwood.

My grandfather was a retired aeronautical engineer, and graduated from one of the first degree programs at Pratt Institute in the early teens of the last century. He designed zeppelins during their heyday and kept piles of photographs from the shop floor, showing dirigibles and other early aircraft under construction and being tested.

I liked how the photos looked like a past long gone but at the same time futuristic, the ‘old world’ of horses and hand tools giving way to machines. I liked the attitude of the workers and draftsmen- wiry guys with gleaming eyes, wearing hats, neckties and field boots, working in teams to design and build the amazing new flying machines.

But most of all I liked seeing that wood featured so prominently in the realization of something so innovative. I developed the notion that if you could imagine something, you could probably build it with wood.

Along with these photos I inherited my grandfather’s drafting tools, his technical books and a few of his planes and chisels, all of which I use to this day. They share a distinctive “W.A. Martin” engraved by his hand (’Jay’ was a nickname presumably adopted to lighten the more formal ‘Wilbur’).

I designed The Jay Martin Chair as an homage to my grandfather, who died when I was eight years old. Though still in prototype phase, I plan to have a limited production available for sale this fall, based upon the prototype pictured above.

Tagged: beach chair, dirigibles, folding chair, zeppelins