Mass Vs. Class in the Age of Custom

Inside New England’s Design World

Mass vs. Class in the Age of Custom

By Louis Postel First published in New England Home September 2011 issue as “Trade Secrets”

C

an life be messier or more flawed?

Take, for example, this most flawless of magazines. Examine its logo. What are all those scratches and curlicues on the N, the E, and W and on and on? Call Editor Hoepner and get him to clean them up.

We exaggerate, of course.

In our heart of hearts we actually like the curlicues.

Because they represent the marks of a man with a chisel carving letters into stone. Such flaws could only come from a sweaty, skilled hand attached to a highly concentrated mind.

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So let’s let Hoepner off the hook. Such flaws, marks, curlicues comprise the DNA of the design business, after all.

The very definition of custom is that it’s not off the shelf, that human hands and eyes and brains were involved in making something unique.

We all know this. Influential baby boomers in particular value custom. The 60’s was the dawn of the custom-era (if not Aquarius), no two selves alike: individuality, character, nonconformity. Nevertheless, non-conformity in our mass-market, wrinkle-free culture remains a struggle and the struggle seems to be getting more difficult, not less.

Consider for a moment the perfectly spherical, electric green granny smith apples arrayed in so many glass cylinders in interior design spreads. Though packed in plastic containing estrogen-mimicking, manboob-creating synthetic chemicals called phthalates, who can argue with perfection? Compared to the bruised, misshaped little devils at the farmer’s market it’s a no brainer. The point is: if we in the design community find factory-produced flawlessness hard to resist, how then to convince our clients that hand-made custom with all its inevitable curlicues is the way to go?

Peter Polhemus of Polhemus Savery DaSilva Architects Builders in Chatham, MA is custom all the way, accepting little from off the shelf. What’s more: clients of his burgeoning practice on the Cape are right there with him.

“When I was in architecture school I began to see and understand the vast range of human experience it was possible to express through design. On Pleasant Bay here in North Chatham, there’s a house designed by my partner Robert DaSilva on Pleasant Bay where the spaces are especially inspirational.

“Think Alvar Aalto meets Antoni Gaudi.

“What could have been an ordinary sunroom, for example, is like a chapel shimmering with light from the sea. Bob designed white gothic arches rising to a geometric ceiling, all in rich cedar. Our finish carpenters did an amazing job in precisely aligning and angling those cedar boards to a point where they meet at a skylight.”

Seventeen years ago DJ Travers began work at South Shore Millwork in Norton, MA sweeping floors. Today he is the plant manager with 40,000 climate-controlled feet of lumber and computerized machinery at his disposal. Where does craftsmanship come in?

For Travers, it comes in everywhere. “Take a door. You can tell a production door right away because they come off the machine with rounded holes to accommodate cheaper hardware. Same with the hinges. A high-end door is all squared off. For that we need a guy with a chisel. It’s the same with cabinets and decorative panels. They come from a machine, but it takes a seasoned cabinetmaker to assemble them, square them off. The machinery salesmen come in and say: ‘there you go – all you have to do is press a button.’ But it’s not true. It takes months of fine tuning. And, even then, it takes a fine craftsman to operate the machine; someone who knows what the piece is supposed to look like. That kind of knowledge takes years of working by hand,” says Travers.

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He’s just finished a complex curved window grille. “I could have used the CNC (Computer Numeric Controls) but chose not to. I wanted to feel the cutting vibration in my hands. That way if something’s just a tiny bit off I’ll know right away.”

Karla Little

Design impresario Karla Little founded the Fine Furnishings and Craft Shows in Providence, RI where the 15th Annual will take place this October 21-23. “Custom,” says Little, “is the new vintage.” You just have to wait awhile.

What’s new with her exhibitors?

“Housing for electronics that doesn’t look like an entertainment center: like automated bookshelf tops bringing up flat screen TV’s, and cabinets with glass doors in unusual opacities.

“Tables and chairs with hidden, easy to use leaves for expanding families.

“Custom pieces to hold growing collections: glass, dolls, rare books.

“And stools of all kinds.”

New to the Providence show this year will be thirty or so alumni of the North Bennett Street School in Boston’s North End, arguably the leading crafts school in the country. Founded in 1885 by Pauline Agassiz Shaw, the school fosters a Swedish system of manual training known as “sloyd” which means “craft” or “hand skills.” The sloyd method focused on the development of character and intellectual capacity as well as technical skills.

Miguel Gómez-Ibáñez of Weston, MA is North Bennett Street’s Director. A successful Boston-based architect who’d studied under Louis Kahn, Gomez-Ibanez sold his practice and took up woodworking full-time. All it took to make the move was a casual visit to the Boston Architectural Center’s 1996 landmark North Bennett Street exhibition. As Director, Gomez-Ibanez is seeing NBSS’s Preservation Carpentry program impacting all New England. “A lot of historic stuff just got trashed. Especially the molding around doors would just get ripped out to make room for more modern ones, sliding doors, etc. Or to make two 3

small rooms out of one large one, there was a tendency to just butt a new wall into the old one.”

“Now to, say, adjust some crown molding, you don’t have to go through a catalogue to try to ‘get close.’ Our Preservation Carpenters use the old tools; in this case what’s called a ‘shaper’. A ‘shaper’ is basically a rotating spindle sticking up from a table. They place their knives in the spindle which enables them to mill any shape molding; the classic concave/convex ogee profile is just one example.”

There was some high anxiety a few years ago that custom rugs involved child labor in slavery-like conditions in India, Nepal and Pakistan. A group of high-end rug dealers formed to vet rugs before they came to market in the West, Rugmark. During all this an interesting fact came to light: high-end rugs by their very nature require the strength of an adult to tie the knots. Child slaves just couldn’t do the work.

Designer Kristin Rivoli of Winchester, MA shopped a lot of machine made carpets for a stair runner and foyer. Finally, Rivoli and her clients worked with Stephen King at the Boston Design Center to create a hand-tufted rug that “would look like it was made for those stairs.” Chocolate brown with taupe interlocking squares and rectangles, the rug took eight Nepalese weavers working a single loom months to complete. But according to Rivoli well worth the investment.

“It’s not as though my clients and I weren’t budget conscious. But we decided to put the moneyed items in public areas such as the stairs and foyer. An off-the-shelf rug would have come in twelve foot standard width. The colorways and border would have been preset.

The installers would have cut it in place, banding on an edge.

“Because back and front are separate it probably would have come apart in five to ten years and need to be replaced. The one we had made is one piece to last a lifetime. There’s no cutting and pasting. Our installer used a big sheet of paper to outline the steps, just like a tailor making a couture dress – then shipped it off to the mill. The crisp patterns you see are only made possible by making these very small, very tight, handmade knots.”

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Boehm with prison panel prototype

Architect Bill Boehm (pronounced Beam) of Boston sent his plans for insulated wall panels not to Nepal, but to the Department of Corrections here in Massachusetts. In a pilot program with the Boston Architectural Center where Boehm is an instructor, prison inmates built the insulated panels at a prison workshop in Shirley, MA. While the training in the latest green technology skills was a plus for prisoners about to be released into a tough job market, there was a huge upside for Boehm as well. “It would have been highly impractical to take up a master carpenters’ time on the site itself to make these panels, especially in rough weather. Having them delivered to the site really helped.” One can see Boehm’s finished house just outside the medium security prison for women Framingham. It replaces a trailer used for family visits.

Now if one were truly obnoxious, one could employ an electron microscope to inspect these hand-crafted panels for irregularities, then check Rivoli’s rug for possible flaws. And flaws there would be; evidence perhaps of a wood knot, or errant sheep whose wool spent the Nepalese night in the rain. One could go on from there to detect a sliver variation in the cedar ceiling and the chiseled door from South Shore Millwork. Or, what’s far more likely, one would come to love these imperfections as signs of what Peter Polhemus calls “the vast range of human experience” and leave it at that.

lpostel@verizon.net

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