Conscious Building BY CHRISTINA PROCTER PHOTOS BY CAITLYN OTTINGER
Two far-flung childhood friends join forces to put a character of their own in contemporary furniture design
I
t’s funny how a phone call can change your life. One day after college, Pennsylvania-born Damian Allister Arndt had just gotten home from a shift at his hometown health food store when his mother said: “Someone called you from Hawaii.” The anthropology major had recently applied for a federal job, and, as it turned out, a new park on the Big Island wanted him to work for a few months. Arndt soon found himself in the quickly emptying airport of Kailua-Kona, assembling his bicycle amidst land more desert-like than expected. A couple of sympathetic women clucked at him like aunties, gave him the number for a hostel, and pointed him toward the miles of highway into town. Nine years later, after two National Park Service jobs, one moped, and lots of banana-leaf bundling, he managed to help rebuild a temple structure at one of the island’s sacred sites. He also stumbled into an informal apprenticeship with an oldschool furniture maker in the off-the-grid beating heart of the jungle. If his eager questions sometimes went unanswered by his sarong and flip-flop– clad mentor, in time Arndt was trusted with projects and brought in more. He learned to execute fine joinery with basic tools, creating pieces ranging from handmade window screens to doors for local homes. A small solar generator powered a table saw, but most of the work was done by hand. The two men made a specialized jig system to construct the screens, a fingersaving device that held each piece of wood in place to create lasting joints. Arndt was
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amazed at his mentor’s resourcefulness. “I remember him saying that real craftsmen make the tools they need from the tools they have.” But as the years passed he grew concerned about the scarcity of local lumber and low price of rare tropical woods shipped over the Pacific. Plus, with his training in the craft, he was curious to see “just how high-end it could get.” That’s when Arndt got another phone call. This time it was Jonathan Boyd Katzman, an old friend from Allentown, Pennsylvania, with whom he hadn’t spoken in a decade. Katzman had called just to catch up, explaining to Arndt that he was now in Santa Fe looking to start a furniture company. By the end of the conversation, the two twenty-somethings were partners in the firm that would become Boyd & Allister, the New Mexico-based custom furniture company now supplying handmade beds, tables, credenzas, and the like for clients from New York to Los Angeles. It happened that while Arndt was putting his degree to use in the lava fields of Hawaii, Katzman found that after his classics training at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, he wanted to work with his hands again. In a way this was no surprise: as a kid his parents would drop him off on weekends at a friend’s farm outside of town, where he learned how to be generally useful. He recalls an early reverence for wood—especially upon noticing work by another friend’s father, who turned the raw material into free-form vases. Not long after college, he heard about an adobe builder who needed an extra
laborer to sling mud for the weekend, and Katzman showed up. He liked it so much he stayed for the entire project and eventually worked on other green building projects. Just as Arndt had been fortunate to work side-by-side with a master craftsman, Katzman likewise learned the art of being useful with his hands, often living on job sites out of his Volkswagen van and working with his mentor from dawn to dusk. But after a serious hiking accident, Katzman stopped building and decided to pursue real estate investment. When he had enough funds, he took a year off to learn how to build things, like a roughshod bed and bookshelves for his new house. “I made things, they failed; I made things, they failed. Then I started learning,” he says. He took a couple of courses at the Santa Fe Community College, where he studied classical methods and made use of the woodshop. It wasn’t long before he thought that what he was making would sell, and he started reaching out to contacts to see who’d buy. His phone call to Arndt, which had begun as a lark and ended as a business partnership, was his most fortuitous move yet—the juncture of good timing and two young artisans with unconventional training and the instincts to leap. Arndt returned stateside just as the economy Jonathan Boyd Katzman (left) and Damian Allister Arndt of Boyd & Allister work out of a former auto repair shop on Hickox Street, where they’ve now partnered with ceramist Jennie Johnsrud of Modern Folk Ware to open the front area of the shop as a boutique space for handmade contemporary designs by local makers.