Tell us about your practice and how you came to making?

My path to becoming a maker is really a pretty direct line from getting my first lego set to building tiny houses and furniture and everything I've done as an adult. I’ve always loved to create things, and that combined with me discovering my passion for environmental activism and conservation as a teenager led me to study environmental design and then work as an environmental designer. While I’m currently working on the furniture scale, the idea behind my design philosophy can be applied to working at all scales. 

Do you have a ritual when it comes to making/designing work?

I like the work philosophy that Nick Offerman talks about where he spends the morning thinking and planning while his mind is sharp and then executing in the afternoon his well laid plans. 

In reality though my ADHD brian is kind of like “go for it” and often I will just dive into a project and work out the details as they come up. Although I still make drawings and sketches, a lot of times I figure things out as I go. I also am usually working on 3-4 projects at a time, and the main ritual is just drinking lots of coffee. The coffee is important!

Your chairs have a particular visual clarity — clean joints, considered proportions, nothing extraneous. Where do you look for inspiration, and which influences or traditions feel most alive to you in your own work?

My work is influenced heavily by Danish design and new nordic ideas. While I was studying architecture and furniture design in Copenhagen, I was also taking a class on the anthropology of food. I wasn’t expecting it but the biggest insight from my time there was actually from the food class and not the furniture design class. 

The concept behind new nordic cuisine is to embrace time and place as the basis for the product you are producing. In the context of Good Chair Co., this is reflected in using what's available, in my case the ash trees killed by emerald ash borer. Time being a culture of mass consumerism and the subsequent yearning for a return to a time where craft and quality were expected from products and not seen as exceptional and luxury. 

You started with chairs and have since moved into tables, desks, and lighting. How do you decide what to develop next — is it driven by the wood, by a design problem you want to solve, or something else entirely?

I’ve had to slow myself down when it comes to developing new products because I have so many ideas all of the time and access to the materials and tools to make really whatever I can imagine. The materials are definitely the driving force for me as it’s hard not to see the potential that things can become! Right now I am working on a side table made with reclaimed marble slab remnants from demolished kitchens, and also a very exciting new lamp made from lobster buoys that have been lost and washed up on shore. 

Sustainability in woodworking is more complicated than it might appear from the outside — the sourcing, the lifespan of the object, what happens at the end of it. What does working sustainably actually mean to you in practice, beyond the origin of the material?

Beyond sourcing, (which, I think, is the most important aspect of wood sustainability) there is also the idea of conservation or minimizing waste. While that is usually a priority for most woodworkers just because wood is expensive, there is also the aspect of honoring the material you’re working with and sharing it. Woodworkers tend to hoard material, and I’m guilty of that too in that I save scraps that I will probably never use. But I think a lesson I’ve learned from Roger, who has been a mentor to me and allows me to share his shop space, is that the wood is meant to be used for a purpose and should be shared if someone needs to use it. 

I think there are lots of lessons for us to learn from the native people that came before us about our relationships with our resources, not to view them as things to be exploited to make a profit but as a collective bank that can bring prosperity to lots of people and be renewable with responsible stewardship. 

Committing to a single wood species is an unusual constraint. Has working exclusively in ash changed the way you understand the material over time, and has that constraint ever pushed the design in a direction it might not have gone otherwise?

While I still use other species for custom projects, all of my core products are all made of the reclaimed ash wood. This can be quite challenging in terms of aesthetics, where there are discolorations and holes that would make the wood fall into more of the firewood category than furniture grade lumber. 

You can see on the live edge of the Risby desk the paths left by the ash borer, although they have been sanded and sealed. I think seeing the story of the materials and how they got to be in the product you have is beautiful. And I think my clients would agree that this kind of wabi sabi character is what makes my furniture stand out.

Is there anything you’ve dreamed of making, but haven’t yet?

I would love to build my own house and workshop someday. Even though I already had a first pass at that with my tiny house it would be awesome to build every part of a full sized house and everything that goes in it. That’s not a simple task but I think when the time is right I’m excited to make that a reality. 

What’s next for you?

Like I mentioned I have the lobster buoy lamp, which is already looking really cool halfway through the initial prototype, and also the reclaimed marble tables which are all unique and one will be on display at ICFF this May. I’ll also be showcasing some of my work at the DUMBO design day also in May at M Collection Home + Design.