After studying woodworking in the mid-1990s at Parnham College, in Dorset, England, Brian Reid returned home to Seattle with a gift from his teacher, Robert Ingham: a stack of planks from a flitch-cut yew tree. In the ensuing years Reid built furniture in Washington, then Colorado, and now in Maine, yet never touched the yew. “I carried that log through 10 moves,” Reid says. “For many years I thought I wasn’t good enough to use it.” When he found himself with a six-month residency at Purchase College in New York in 2017, however, the time came. He built the first of three tansu there (top photo) using solid yew for the carcase and shop-sawn yew veneer for the drawers and doors. Riffing further on a theme of Asian forms and proportions, he built a second tansu in English sycamore accented with birch-bark panels and elk-horn pulls. And for a third tansu he dipped into another special stash—of ink-black bog oak, also brought from England—to create a parquetry pattern of overlapping ripples as of two stones tossed into a pond. Reid reflects on building them: “It was joyful. Being alone at Purchase I worked from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week. I told friends who wanted to visit, ‘Nope, I’m busy.’” And how did it feel to use his precious wood? “I think these are the best things I ever made.”

—Jonathan Binzen

 

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