Yuri Kobayashi’s chair and table in bleached ash are a technical tour de force. The chair’s seat and back, and the table’s legs—which become its top—are each composed of narrow tapered slats that she steam-bent and coopered and then edge-glued. The chair’s spindles widen at the top to create the coopered crest rail, and down below they pass right through the seat before tenoning into the rear stretcher. To make the table’s legs appear to pierce a solid hoop, Kobayashi made three thin hoops—one for inside, one for outside, and a third that she cut into short sections to fit between the legs—then glued them all together. “That was ridiculously tedious,” she says. But technical challenge is oxygen for Kobayashi. “Sometimes problem-solving becomes my focus point,” she says. “It’s a great fuel for making objects.” But it’s not the only fuel. Kobayashi, who trained and worked as a furniture maker in Japan before moving to the U.S., struggled at first to express herself in English. When she did, she says, “It was a great discovery for me to use wood to communicate.” Asked what she was conveying with these two pieces, she says she wanted “to project my ideal nature onto them—the person I want to be … it’s hard to explain in English.” The chair and table express it beautifully.