David Wermuth, Woodworker and Artist
Woodworker David Wermuth and I spoke together while attending the Mountain Music Festival at the K-Diamond-K Ranch and continued our conversation at the Sportsman's Roost in Republic, Washington. Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1947, Wermuth lived in Bennington, Vermont and then Seattle, before moving to Republic, Washington in 1996. He started building wood furniture 30 years ago, and studied fine woodworking at the renowned Kirby Studio in Bennington, Vermont. His work has been featured in Fine Woodworking Magazine, and he's won awards and best of show at county fairs for many of his pieces. He sells his work online, and through direct sales and fine furniture shops in the U.S. and overseas.
“I nearly left woodworking a few years ago,” David Wermuth says, shaking his head at the memory. “True masters in any field have big egos to help them through moments of self-doubt, but I’ve always had a problem with ego. I began to question why would anyone buy my chairs for five-hundred dollars when they can buy a similar-looking chair for fifty?” When asked what changed his mind, he mentions a book that altered his philosophy of woodworking. “I read a book called Soul of a Tree by George Nakashima. He developed the concept of using large pieces of wood in furniture design. He proposed that woodworkers should let trees reach maturity and cut them down just before they die and then leave edges of the wood in their natural state.” The book reminded Wermuth that high-quality, heirloom furniture isn't simply manufactured...it is born of silviculture, thoughtful design, and master craftsmanship that “honors the wood."
When asked, Wermuth is a bit hesitant to apply a style to his own furniture, though he happily admits that the roots of his furniture design are in Shaker-style carpentry. Early in his career, he toured an extensive collection of original nineteenth century Shaker furniture at Shaker Village in Kentucky, and “…fell in love with Shaker-style furniture design.” He shakes his head in admiration, “Their joinery was perfect.” Since then, Wermuth’s made a point of touring every Shaker house that’s open to the public to learn all that he can about the Shaker design and construction techniques.
Though already a seasoned carpenter, in 1977 Wermuth began a six-month tour of wood working schools, looking for a master woodworker to teach him the art of hand crafting wood furniture with dovetail, and mortise and tenon; and joinery using traditional hand tools and methods. He first considered enrolling at the Rhode Island School of Design, but changed his mind. “I was put off by the program’s dependency on expensive machinery that I knew I’d never be able to afford. I couldn’t start with that kind of investment.” Instead, he moved to Bennington, Vermont and enrolled in the Kirby Studio where he studied woodworking and design from noted woodworking designer, educator, and author Ian Kirby (who previously taught at London University). The three-year program included no more than twenty students at a time, and stressed methods and hand tools over machine operated tools. “Ian did everything by hand,” Wermuth said, “and first-year students had it pretty tough. They had to build the same furniture as the third year students in the same amount of time.” For their first project, students were required to design and build their own version of a high-backed chair using hand tools alone. Eighteen of the resulting chairs -- including Wermuth’s -- were of such high quality; they were featured in “Fine Woodworking Design, Book 2.”
"Ninety percent of my work goes into design. Ten percent is in the build."
In addition to the fundamentals of woodworking, the Kirby Studio taught students to approach woodworking as an art form, rather than that of a craft or technology. “Ian’s philosophy was that he could make a wood worker out of anyone in a year, but it took a lifetime to learn design,” Wermuth says, quoting his mentor. Influenced by Germany’s Bauhaus School, Ian Kirby’s wife, Rosalind Kirby, taught her woodworking students principles of design that moved beyond decoration and stressed clean lines of function. She also encouraged her students to interact with other disciplines, such as glass design and guitar making which were taught at the school. It was during this phase of his education that Wermuth discovered the work of Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868 to 1928). Wermuth was attracted to the way Mackintosh blended traditional spare Scottish furniture styling with simple Japanese forms and Art Nouveau to create a new art form.
Because of his training and love of Shaker-style furniture, most of Wermuth’s work makes use of mortise and tenon joints, and dovetailing. For a brief time, he tried using a dovetail jig as a time saver, but decided soon after to throw it away. He found he worked faster and with as much accuracy sawing them by hand. He also likes hand planes. “Run your hand over 100 year old furniture and it is still smooth. That’s because it was cut smooth.” Within his 1200 square foot shop, he works with ten planes: a standard, a joiner, a jack, three styles of finish, a compass, and a Stanley 45, with twenty to twenty-two blades.
Wermuth doesn’t stain his furniture. He says stain clouds the wood. Instead, he prefers to build entire sets of furniture from lots of wood taken from the same tree. This allows his furniture to age gracefully. Wermuth explains that mass-produced furniture, even the expensive variety, is typically made up of mismatched woods, and then stained to give it a uniform appearance. He adds, “but as [the stain] ages and fades, the mismatching becomes evident.” Because matched wood is so important to Wermuth, he once set wood aside for a young couple who wanted, but couldn’t afford to buy a complete dining room set in a single purchase. Wermuth describes it “…as a sort of layaway plan.” Rather than buying the whole set, they bought a table and two chairs. Then over the next three years, they commissioned two more chairs from Wermuth until their dining set was complete.
WERMUTH ON LABELING FURNITURE
Wermuth was nonplussed when I asked him to provide me with names for the furniture I planned to feature in this article. He thought a moment and said, " I don't like to limit furniture with labels." He went on to explain that it's been his experience that if you label a piece of furniture as a coffee table, it will never be used as anything else, and he believes that "furniture should be multiple use." Though I agreed with him in theory, I still needed titles to place beneath the photos I planned to include in the sidebar of the article, so Wermuth gave me permission to create names that were meaningful to me, cautioning me not to get too carried away. "I once saw a chair being sold on the Internet," he said, sounding a bit bemused. "It was called 'The Odyssey.' I still don't know what to make of that."
Wermuth also doesn’t have a favorite wood. He prefers domestic woods, and avoids working with environmentally sensitive or exotic woods. He procures most of his materials through local sources. “I’m particular about my choice of woods,” he says. He works with suppliers who recognize his need for high-quality, matched woods, and allow him to pick through their inventory for just the right pieces. He’s also lucked across the occasional property or estate sale, where he’s been able to purchase large slabs of cut lumber such as walnut, maple, redwood. One of a number of particularly beautiful slabs made its way into a desk purchased from Wermuth by an attorney with a practice located in Washington State. “She called it her ‘power desk,’” Wermuth recalled. “She was attracted to the desk, because it was beautiful, unique, and would impress her clients.” To create the desk, Wermuth suspended the massive tabletop 30 inches from the floor, and then arranged and rearranged the legs below it until he created just the right look. The result was “…the perfect balance of form and function.”
Form following function is a key design principle for Wermuth. The phrase recurred several times as he described his signature side chair. “Make sure a chair’s form is right and the function will follow.” He explains, “Chairs at fast food restaurants are designed to be comfortable for fifteen minutes, and then they want you to get out. Fine restaurants provide chairs that keep you comfortable for two hours.” Wermuth designs his chairs to feel comfortable for hours on end. “I learned through trial and error that a comfortable chair is one that flexes.” It took time and experimentation to develop the perfect chair. As his model, he cobbled together a rough chair, using a barrel as a base, a roughed out seat, and spindles that he could vary in placement and diameter. He then used his friends and family to test varying configurations, until he found the optimal slant and arrangement. The result was a well made, Shaker-style chair with simple lines and a spindle back. Wermuth laughs and slaps the table in front of him, “It’s a damn comfortable chair!”
When asked how folks can see examples of his work, David displays a wry smile. While a resident of Seattle, he displayed his work in a number of high-end galleries, including Artwood, a cooperative gallery in Bellingham Washington that he helped found. He admits that when he moved to Republic from Seattle, it became more difficult for potential customers to see and purchase his work. But after spending seven years of summer vacations at Curlew Lake, in Eastern Washington - a place where the summer breezes reminded him of boyhood summers in Louisville, Kentucky - Wermuth and his wife made up their minds to break with big-city life. “[We’ve] always liked a small community. I can walk into any place in Republic and know everybody.”
He and his wife have lived in Republic for seven years now. They are both artists. Her medium is based on canvas and his wood. He thinks it has improved both their work. “Republic facilitates a slower lifestyle. It’s a place where there’s time for patience and for focus…where there’s a balance of trees, animals, and people. Just enough of everything.” Though he still makes use of West Coast galleries to show his work, by-and-large most of Wermuth’s furniture sales are now generated by word-of-mouth, through Internet sales, and at regional county fairs.
Samples of his cutting boards, side chairs, and tables are currently on display at the Gold Mountains Art Gallery in Republic, Washington. Visitors to the gallery will learn first hand why customers from as far away as South Korea have purchased his furniture. Recently, Wermuth sold ten dining room sets to the owner of a fine woodworking store in Seoul. Soon after, the storeowner returned to commission the building of a 12’ x 6’ conference table with a “book matched center.” It was a hectic time, taking Wermuth three months to deliver the tables. He remembers, “I was awake for 48 hours just getting the furniture to the container ship on time.”
It’s worth a trip to Republic, just to sit in one of Wermuth’s beautiful rocking chairs. You won't be able to sit in one and not imagine how perfect it would be for rocking a restless child to sleep. One of his rockers takes three weeks to build; he typically builds six at a time. Based on the design of his side chair, he band saws the seat of the rocker and then uses templates to determine where to grind out the basic shape. He completes the chairs using hand awls to smooth the wood. The resulting chairs rock effortlessly, and mold to your back and seat like a glove. A psychologist in the San Juan Islands purchased two of his chairs. She later wrote him to say that she and her patients loved them, “because they felt like they enveloped them.”
“I make affordable, beautiful furniture,” Wermuth says simply. After seeing his joinery, running my hands over the planned surfaces of his table tops, and resting in one of his comfortable chairs, I concur.
Contact Information
David Wermuth
Fine Furniture
P.O. Box 934
Republic, WA 99166
509-775-2507
davidwermuth @ hotmail.com
References
The Soul of a Tree: A Woodworker's Reflections, by George Nakashima
Publisher: Kodansha International; Reprint edition (October 1988)
ISBN: 0870119036
"Fine Woodworking Design, Book 2" by Fine Woodworking Magazine
Publisher: Taunton Press (January 1980)
ASIN: 0918804078
Acknowledgements
Ferrycounty.com wishes to thank David Wermuth for providing us with photos of his furniture. Article by Sarah Lawrence, published on September 20, 2003. Article updated to include new gallery information on June 19, 2005.
See more artist interviews on our Arts and Culture page.
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