From the Archive: How George Nakashima’s Kin Keeps His Legacy Alive

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s April 2008 issue.

George Nakashima Woodworker, the concern that since 1944 has produced furniture by “the one American blue-chip designer of the 20th century”—according to Sotheby’s James Zemaitis—occupies 8.87 lush acres at 1847 Aquetong Road in New Hope, Pennsylvania. The compound, as most people call it, consists of 15 structures, all but one designed by Nakashima himself. These range from utilitarian workshops and warehouses to the Reception House, arts building, and Conoid Studio, which combine modernist design and construction principles, Japanese architectural traditions, and wood craftsmanship with originality and elegance.

Though legend has it that Nakashima made every piece, in actuality he employed a group of artisans to help execute his designs. Today the operation remains much as it was, with Mira Nakashima running things since her father’s death in 1990. Three full-time chair makers, three finishers, and five multipurpose woodworkers produce classic Nakashima works, Mira’s Keisho line, and custom adaptations—everything from $750 stools (in a day or so) to 18-foot-long, $75,000 dining tables (in about a month)—at the rate of roughly 400 pieces per year.

Also unchanged is the consuming emphasis on wood. Just as the foundation of great cooking is quality ingredients, Nakashima furniture depends upon superlative material, whether it’s local black walnut or cherry, California redwood root, Carpathian elm burl, or French olive ash. No less critical is the cutting, which involves balancing a good yield with a sense of how to realize the timber’s aesthetic and structural potential. “Dad said that, when you cut a log into lumber, you’re like a sculptor,” says Mira, a disarmingly friendly, unpretentious woman, over tea and truffles in the studio. “You have to have an idea of what you’re going to make out of it.” After they’ve been flitch-sawn (to preserve the natural edge), the boards are dried for several years, then kiln-dried and stored in one of three warehouses, where they await selection by a client, often for decades. Though choosing can take a few hours, says Mira, “Sometimes we go back and forth for months before they make up their minds.” Once a decision is finalized, she produces a detailed drawing. Then the woodworkers have at it, converting their Grade A ingredient into one of the most recognizable furniture design styles of the past 100 years.

That style—characterized by free-form edges and vividly grained surfaces, butterfly-shaped splints that stabilize imperfections, and architectural support structures that express the tension between the natural and designed—seems inevitable, but it grew out of a decades-long dialogue between the designer’s creative spirit and a range of artistic and cultural influences. Nakashima’s voyage of self-actualization—he called himself “the world’s first hippie”—took him through many lives: from an Arcadian boyhood hiking in the Pacific Northwest (he was born in Spokane in 1905); to architectural training in France, the University of Washington, and MIT; to a job in the Tokyo office of architect Antonin Raymond. Faith played a part as well: In 1936, Nakashima journeyed to Pondicherry, India, to oversee a building project at the ashram of Sri Aurobindo, and was so taken with the influential Indian teacher that he became a disciple. So, too, did trauma: Nakashima ultimately resettled in Seattle, but in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, his family (including two-week-old Mira) was relocated to an internment camp in Idaho. There he learned traditional Japanese carpentry from a fellow internee. Luckily, Raymond—who owned a farm in New Hope—was able to sponsor the Nakashimas’ release, and they joined him there in 1943. A year later, Nakashima began making furniture in his garage; two years after that, he acquired the first three acres of land, and Nakashima Woodworker found its home.

These peregrinations influenced Nakashima variously. Exposure to Japanese culture strengthened his innate “kinship with the heart of a tree,” as he put it, and led him to fashion furniture from split, perforated boards; this amounted, he believed, to “an act of resurrection,” and offered the tree “a second life of dignity and strength.” But Nakashima was also motivated, Mira believes, by privation. “When we were put in camp, he learned to work with found materials—packing crates, or gnarly bits of bitterbrush he picked up in the desert,” she says. The butterfly splints, widely regarded as a Nakshima invention, are actually a centuries-old structural device used in European and Shaker furniture, though typically concealed. Nakashima’s innovation, inspired by his Eastern experience, was to expose them: “The whole idea of transparency is inherent in Japanese architecture. Dad just carried it over to furniture.” Nakashima’s formal training enabled him to craft elegantly minimal supports for his great gnarled tabletops. “He understood the forces and joinery so well that he was able to use as little understructure as possible,” Mira says.

The designer’s most profound influence, however, was spiritual: Sri Aurobindo taught him, Mira recalls, “that unless you get your ego out of the way, you can’t go to your highest potential.” And, as beauty is an expression of the divine, the artisan “is only a medium for transferring this energy from the universe to everyday life.” Yet despite his devotion to the Mingei ideal of the unknown craftsman, and what Mira calls “his anti-ego spiels,” Nakashima possessed an outsize personality and tolerated no interference—from anyone. “I can’t count the times I was fired,” says Mira, who studied architecture at Harvard and Tokyo’s Waseda University, and practiced interior and landscape design, before joining her father in 1970. “One time, I’d just finished an assertiveness course, and decided to apply what I’d learned. I was out the door.” So closely was Nakashima associated with his furniture that it nearly killed the business. “After he died, people who’d ordered things figured they couldn’t be any good without him,” Mira says. “We had fifty-percent cancellations.”