So much of the modern world is lifeless, sterile, homogenized. Go to any freeway offramp and you will see the same handful of fast food joints. Drive through any suburb and every third house is the same, and that pattern repeats. Go into the average house and the furniture is what, IKEA? But even in the fabulous penthouse eagles nests above New York City, the ones that get in the perfumed magazines, even those have furniture that, although exquisitely made, just has no soul.
When I was first starting out as a carpenter, about 4 years in, say 20, 21 years old, I ran a furniture shop for the designer Ron Mann. It was all reclaimed Douglas fir and imported items from the Mediterranean --like fruit drying racks from Mallorca. I fell in love with the character of the wood and the feel of it seeming to pulse with energy like it had something to tell me. Those whispers got under my skin, and after 30 more years as a carpenter around the country working on every imaginable project from 57th and Central Park West to Post-Katrina apocalyptic hellscapes (scouring debris piles for trim to match a house and sleeping on jobsites, eating with first responders on the ship docked uptown}, I finally found myself at a place and at an age where that whisper won over and I knew that I had to go back to that first love-- the reclaimed wood 200 years old, the architectural salvage from the place I had settled -- New Orleans--the most vocal architecture anywhere in the U.S. The most spirit, the most culture, the most history. I can never go back..
This furniture I make; it tells me what it wants to be. I don't design it, I just learned to listen. And when it is in your house and you are feeling human, in need of connection, your eyes will fall upon it, and you will stare at it and wonder why it is you can't take your eyes off. And then you'll listen...
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