Whenever I meet someone for the first time and they find out
what I do for a living, invariably the next question they ask is, “What kind of
furniture do you make?” I always
answer the same way, “Wood furniture.”
Then they say, “But what style?” I hoped they wouldn’t ask, because my
answer always disappoints.
They want to hear Shaker, or Mission, or Colonial American,
or Modern, or something they’ve heard of.
They’ve got stories and opinions about these styles, they’ve got
specimens in their own homes, and all they need is a nod from me to begin
talking about them.
But my answer usually goes something like this: “Simple
furniture. I don’t like
ornamentation and I don’t like fitting into a style, I just draw until it looks
right to me, then I build it. I
used to try and mimic other styles, now I just do what looks right. And I like simple things, so, most of
my furniture looks pretty simple.”
Blank look. “I’m
sorry. You can go now if you
want.” Usually they take me up on
the offer.
So I need a better elevator speech.
But I also need to find a way to help people see what I see
in simplicity. I think simple
furniture, done well, is anything but boring. In fact I think it’s revolutionary, because it fights
against our worst instincts. It
calls us away from the busy-ness that fractures our souls. It reveals the phony-ness of gaudy
over-ornamentation. It shames the
poorly designed and cheaply constructed objects that most of us unthinkingly
fill our houses with. It stands up
for what’s right about the world, what’s good in people. It makes us feel more peaceful, more
confident, more whole. It speaks
to the honesty and humility that is buried deep within us and calls it to the
surface, centering our attention on the qualities we know to be right and
true.
In the history of furniture design there have been other
paths to simplicity. The Shakers
pared down their designs in furniture, as in everything else, in an effort to
clear their hearts of all worldly treasures so as to focus on heavenly
ones. They believed they should be
seeking beauty in God alone, and that any attempt to adorn themselves and their
environments would be distracting and ultimately fatal to their spiritual
quest.
The heroes of the Arts and Crafts movement found simplicity
to be the highest expression of human dignity. Furniture that looked honest and simple, with joinery that
could be seen and seen as beautiful, celebrated the quiet and persistent
dignity of the worker. Furniture
that was gratuitously adorned and over decorated smelled decidedly bourgeois to
these thinkers, and the attempt to hide structural elements under gilded layers
of bling represented nothing less than contempt for the craftsman himself. These philosophers, whose influence
reached across just about every genre of craft in the 19th century,
sought to bring work of the craftsman to the front, to make it visible, and
thus to celebrate simple things done well. A well cut dovetail joint, a precisely crafted through
tenon, was said to be infinitely more beautiful than the most jewel-encrusted
rosette that has ever been pasted onto an aristocrat’s chair.
I love these paths to simplicity, and I buy into them
wholeheartedly. But I also think
our present society, this post-modern pond in which we all now swim, offers yet
another angle, another argument for keeping things basic, spare, clean,
clear. To put it simply, life has
become incredibly complicated. The
number of things we carry in our pockets and purses and cars, the number of
dates and times we now have to remember, the number of bills we now have to pay
(not to mention the amount of those
bills), the number of sounds and sights and products that compete for our
attention, the number of objects in our homes that now seem like necessities rather
than luxuries, these things seem to have increased geometrically just in my
lifetime. And this increase shows
no sign of slowing down.
I think it’s making us sick. I think it’s fracturing our souls and dividing our attention
into ever smaller bits at the frantic rate of a nuclear reaction. I think if we don’t find a way to make
it stop we will eventually explode and dissolve into nothingness. We can’t keep splitting the atoms of
our selves for ever, eventually we will run out of self to divide. This is our crisis, I think. It’s not that we can’t find purpose,
but that even if we were to find purpose we’d have so little left of ourselves
to commit to it that it would not even be worth trying. We’re tired. We’re overstimulated, overinvolved, overdivided,
overextended, overentertained. We
don’t know who we are any more, where our ‘self’ is located amongst the many
fragments of our daily schedules.
I am naïve. But
I actually think I can make a difference in the way I design furniture. I do believe, as Winston Churchill is
credited as having said, that “We shape our dwellings, and thereafter they
shape us.” I believe that a person
takes an important step toward wellness by simplifying his or her environment,
by deciding to own fewer things, and only things that are simply envisioned,
carefully crafted, and extremely solid.
Broad horizontal lines seep into the subconscious as calm open sees or
quiet rolling prairies. Stark
slabs of wood create a feeling of stability, strength, and perfect balance. Exposed joinery puts the unconscious
mind at ease; for in seeing it, it knows a thing to be well put-together and
reliable.
As we nourish our instinct toward simplicity, our frantic
urge to complicate things will eventually starve. I believe it. Simple
things make for simple lives. I
could design complicated things, but it wouldn’t feel right. Not now.