Summer Vacation 
The Handmades’ Tale
Want a whimsical forged-iron gate? an imposing limestone fireplace? a sleek pecan table? these twelve texas artisans are making tomorrow’s heirlooms today.
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Colca soon discovered the Arts and Crafts style and fell in love. “Everything you do, you do for a reason,” he tells me as we crawl around under one of his dining tables at his workshop in Driftwood. He points out a mortise-and-tenon joint on the side of one leg whose securing wedge has been overdriven to create an attractive bulge. “When you do something like this, you’re not doing it just because it’s pretty,” he says. “You’re doing it because it’s strong and provides a visual focus for the strength of the piece.”
In an attempt to find some balance between perfection and affordability without compromising his standards, Colca has designed a furniture series that he calls Medina. The dining-room and bedroom suites, highboys, and hutches made of cherry, pecan, and maple—with unobtrusive hinges and book-matched grain—give a reverential nod to Arts and Crafts but transcend pure imitation. “I’m a fanatic for book-matching,” says Colca of the process of splitting open a piece of wood to reveal mirror-image grain patterns. And if there’s one thing he learned from Maloof, it’s that there are no rules. “Maloof doesn’t get stuck in tradition,” he says. “He knows you’re going to come up with better stuff if you don’t get locked into the way things should be done.” Although he’s basically happy with his Medina designs, perfectionist Colca says he can’t stop “fiddling with proportions, playing with it, deciding how big to make the feet, driving myself absolutely crazy.”
SummerTree, 711 Turtle Hill, Driftwood 78619 (512-847-5238, 800-972-5940). Pieces from the Medina line are about $1,200 for a chair, $1,950 for an end table, and $3,250 for a dining table or a queen-size bed.
TUCKED AMONG THE CEDARS AND scruffy oaks outside Henly, Louis Fry’s unassuming woodworking shop is like an oyster, rough and functional on the outside but capable of producing luminous jewels. Drop in a few pieces of cocobolo or curly maple, and four weeks to four months later, out comes a pearl in the shape of, say, a massive desk with piston-fit drawers and hand-carved dovetail joinery or a dining table whose finely carved curved legs, called cabrioles, reflect the client’s love of seashells and wildflowers.
Of course, it’s the man inside the shop, 49-year-old Louis Fry, who is responsible for such amazing transformations. Fry says he knew he “wanted to create things” after attending his first crafts fair, in San Francisco in the early seventies. So he bought a little house in South Austin with a detached garage, the cheapest Sears table saw, a drill, and a router. “I’d stay up until two o’clock in the morning, making noise and learning from books like the Sunset manual on making bookcases and hobbyhorses,” he says. Providentially, his initial commissions never seemed to exceed his abilities—and now, after 21 years of concentrated self-instruction, nothing seems beyond them. Fry, though, is self-effacing. “For me, this is a very humbling occupation,” he says. “Every time I think I have something mastered, it comes around and kicks me in the butt.”
Photo after photo in his fat portfolio attests to his mastery of styles, including contemporary, deco, modernist, and classical, rendered in an alphabet soup of woods—bubinga, cocobolo, curly maple, mesquite, pecan. And if the devil is in the details, his work is possessed. Consider the legs on a curved-front walnut china cabinet Fry calls “one of my most ambitious pieces.” Each shapely turned leg is inlaid with eight strips of wenge, a chocolate-colored wood with a black grain, that protrude slightly. He had to rout the grooves, cut the strips to the exact length of the grooves, then round the ends of each strip to tolerances that would make a NASA engineer swoon. Ponder the elliptical cutouts in the cabinet’s cornice, fitted with slices of moss agate, and its wavy wenge inlay, and you begin to wonder if his brain looks entirely different from everybody else’s. “Very tedious,” Fry says proudly of the four-month project.
Louis Fry, Craftsman in Wood, 1825 Pursley Road, Dripping Springs 78620 (512-894-4112). One of Fry’s signature dining chairs with cabrioles is around $1,500. A simple dining table is $3,500 or so, a cocobolo desk fit for a king about $15,000.
WHEN STUNNING TECHNICAL EXPERTISE and creative talent collide—as they do in the realm of handcrafted furniture—the question inevitably arises, Is it art or is it craft? On this issue, Daniel Kagay and Robert Peeples, Jr., don’t necessarily agree, although they share shop and office space and are both exceptional craftsmen who probably use an electron microscope to inspect their miter joints. “I can’t stand it when people call us woodworkers,” insists the 37-year-old Peeples, who considers his “fine-art” furniture “one more intellectual level up in artistic intent and statement” from plain old furniture. The 45-year-old Kagay, on the other hand, calls himself a “laborer” and seems content with whatever label a client pins on him—artist, craftsman, even woodworker—as long as he can earn a living making what he wants to make.
Peeples explains his point of view with an anecdote: When his exotic maple-and-padauk desk, which reminds me of an Oriental temple, was exhibited at his now-defunct R. Peeples, Jr., Gallery, he says he often heard the comment, “Yeah, it’s really neat, but my computer won’t fit on it.” His reaction? “I wanted to just bash my head against the wall because that was the farthest thing from my mind. I meant for it to be something visually attractive; it wasn’t meant to be heaped with monitors. A lot of these pieces serve no other purpose than to be a design element.”
The same art-for-art’s-sake argument could be made for Kagay’s creations—beautifully detailed jewelry cases, benches that evoke Japanese architecture, and collector’s cabinets of mesquite, longleaf pine, cherry, and pecan. But what’s the point of the precision-fitted drawers and invisibly hinged doors if they’re not used? Kagay’s work occasionally “makes a statement,” he says—as when he uses fiberboard and wood in a cabinet to contrast natural and man-made materials or ties split pieces of wood together with rawhide to “confront the material’s tendency to always be moving.”
I look at pictures of Peeples’ “Frio County Seat,” a bench with a trompe l’oeil cushion carved from mesquite, deceptively complete with piping and inviting sags. And then I look at pictures of Kagay’s “Sushi Anyone?,” a table with a book-matched chopsticklike pattern in the grain of the poplar. And the notion of trying to determine whether these pieces are art or craft seems beside the point. Clearly, to me, at least, they are both. “Our ideal client is someone who appreciates the work for what it is,” says Peeples. “They’ll rearrange the room to fit the piece instead of the other way around. Most good art is like that. You look at it and say, ‘I gotta have this. I don’t know what I can do with it, but I gotta have it.’”
Daniel Kagay, 777 Shady Lane No. 1, Austin 78702 (512-389-0099). Kagay’s exceptional jewelry cases run from $1,000 for a tabletop model to $3,000 and up for a collector’s cabinet.
Robert Peeples, Jr., P.O. Box 1669, Austin, 78767 (512-385-3528). Peeples will design and make a simple, elegant writing desk for around $3,000, while a multi-drawered executive number can cost twice that. A mahogany stereo cabinet would be about $5,000.
BLACK-WALNUT SAWDUST FILLS the air at Mark Landers’ Central Austin studio as his assistant planes and shapes raw planks for a seven-and-a-half-foot round tabletop. The dust is choking me, but I don’t care because I can’t stop stroking the base that will support this mammoth 210-pound top. My fingers crawl like curious spiders over the burled veneer, the hand-carving and rabbeted, or stairstep, detailing. The geometry of this French Provincial—style table is so complex my mind boggles when Landers tries to explain his formula for determining the length and angle of the leverage arms needed to support the massive top: the 20 7/8-degree miter cuts on the 4-inch-thick walnut boards, which had to be held at a 45-degree angle “so we could present them to the miter gauge adjustment as well as a saw-blade tilt adjustment,” all working within a tolerance of 1/64 inch . . . Before I fall into a complete mathematic coma, I manage to blurt out a question: Why have you done this for 23 years? Landers, who is 48, pauses, then says, “I have to. I’m still drawn to it. Every time I open up that shop door, I’m looking forward to what I’m doing that day.”
We retreat to the office, where his wife, Christina, who helps put the finishing touches on his woodwork, is fielding phone calls. One wall is covered with photos of his varied projects: a stunning four-by-ten-foot walnut table with East Indian rosewood banding for a client in Elgin, a sleek mesquite desk for writer David Lindsey, and an upright collector’s cabinet in oak built for a great-great-great-grandson of Herman Melville.
Landers has as much respect for his clients as for his craft. “Most people don’t know that this is available, that there’s something else out there besides what you can buy in the store,” he says. “It takes a lot of courage to come in here, look at a thumbnail sketch I just did, and say, ‘That’s it!’ And trust that we’re going to produce what they really want.”
Landers’ Studio, 404-B Baylor Street, Austin 78703 (512-472-9663). A straightforward dining table might cost around $3,000, and an engineering feat like the black-walnut table can cost upward of $19,000.
Keepers Finders
THE WORST THING ABOUT DOING an article like this is knowing how many deserving craftspeople and artists have been left out. To ease my conscience, here are some sources to help you find other gifted artisans:
American Society of Furniture Artists (ASOFA), Adam St. John, President; P.O. Box 35339, Houston 77235-5339 (713-721-7600). St. John founded this organization in 1989 to advance the field of art furniture by staging competitions and exhibitions. (The catalogs from these shows are works of art in themselves and document a wide—and wild—sampling of American art furniture.)
Architectural Artisans Collaborative (AArC), P.O. Box 3008, Austin 78764-3008. This organization’s membership includes stone carvers, metalsmiths, and woodworkers and represents a range of architectural arts and crafts, from faux finishes and murals to ceramics and blown glass.
R. Peeples, Jr., Art Services, P.O. Box 1669, Austin 78767 (512-385-3528). Peeples represents the work of more than a dozen furniture artists around the country.
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