I love books, photos and drawings, but if you want to quickly learn a lot about making and designing chairs, there is one path: Study the suckers in person every chance you get. Up close and slowly. Last week, Welsh chairmaker Chris Williams arranged for me and some friends to study four old stick chairs…
Read moreEarlier this month a John Brown chair surfaced at auction that was a highly unusual form: a comb-back rocking chair. Commissioned in 1988, the chair was made for a family with a newborn and served as a nursing chair. From the seat up to the comb, the chair resembles JB’s cardigan chair, the chair he…
Read moreBetween 1995 and 2001, chairmaker John Brown and Drew Langsner carried on extensive correspondence about JB’s classes at Country Workshops. In addition to discussing flights and fees, the two men wrote a lot about how they viewed the craft and the world today. During our research for “Good Work: The Chairmaking Life of John Brown,”…
Read moreWhen Welsh chairmaker John Brown put down roots in Pembrokeshire, Wales, he and his wife, Anne, lived in two railway cars – Fyffes Banana wagons – that had transported fruit around the U.K. up until the 1950s. The railway cars were used as living spaces for many years, until the 1990s when they fell into…
Read moreWhen I came to “A Vampire Chair,” while copy editing Issue No. 1 of The Stick Chair Journal, I side-eyed my own stick chair in my house. Without even reading the first sentence, I thought, There’s more than one? Turns out the story in The Stick Chair Journal is about a fabled chair in Tennessee…
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