Vendor of the Month

Jason McCloskey, Jason McCloskey Fine Woodworking

Jason McCloskey didn't plan on being a furniture maker. Actually, he was working on a degree in writing symphonies, which can be a formidable task with pretty enjoyable results. But then, to blow off steam during a break from graduate school, he started hanging out in a friend's shop, and he made a few pieces of furniture. He started small: a bookcase and a couple of armoires (okay, small from his point of view, not for those of us who are still jamming the broken drawer back into the bureau). Along the way, something amazing happened. While working with his hands to create furniture, he found that every step of the process was extremely enjoyable - unlike grad school, which he walked away from without any regrets.

He was hooked on woodworking, and he found a job in a furniture production shop. Soon, he realized that in order to become a master woodworker, he would need to apprentice himself to another master, in the traditional style. He looked online and found James Bowie, a Scottish furniture maker in California. He liked James immediately, with his Scottish brogue and friendly manner, and he joined him for a one-year apprenticeship at The Masterpiece School in Fort Bragg. In their second year together, Bowie and McCloskey became collaborators. McCloskey aided in teaching machinery and handwork at the school, and he and his mentor worked together on beauties like this stunning Queen Anne bureau, McCloskey's "master's thesis".

He now works out of a drafty, two-level shop in Sodo, Seattle, with two dogs scampering underfoot and everything from classical music to Josh Ritter on the radio. He made most of the furniture himself, including his enviable rock maple workbench. Here he makes top-quality contemporary and period furniture, rough-milling pieces by machine and then hand-planing them and doing the finishing work all by hand. He's in the shop generating mountains of sawdust four to five days a week, and when deadlines approach, you'll find him working until the wee hours seven days a week.

His partner, Lisa, works at the next table over. She also began as his apprentice, and they are currently building a new furniture business together, called Grain, which will include Lisa's design work as well as Jason's.

Jason is tall, blonde and bearded, with a craftsman's large hands. He's a loose-limbed, thoughtful-looking man who seems like he would be just as comfortable rocketing down the ski slopes as doing a delicate veneer in his workshop. In fact, he's begun making his own custom skis, which he can tailor for flexibility, desired shape, and inlay. He dreams of fashioning skis all summer and making dozens of Aspen skiiers very happy in the winters. Eventually, he says, he'd like to have a farmhouse with a workshop in a barn out back, where in the mornings he would drink coffee, watch the sunrise, and then go into the shop all day. But, before the farmhouse, he says he'd at least like to have his shop all on one floor, so he wouldn't have to drag heavy wood pieces up and down the stairs all the time.

He adores making all styles, from inlay to period to contemporary, a versatility that you can see in his online portfolio, which spotlights rough natural wood benches, sleek contemporary dining sets, and venerable carved chairs that would stand out in a lawyer's study. He deeply enjoys studying and making period work, which he says is "very well-proportioned," and that study, in turn, has improved the design of his contemporary pieces.

Using years of highly specialized training and endless hours of careful work, he turns out a massive, functional piece of art whose proportion, materials, construction and finish are impeccable: a piece that, if taken care of, will last for hundreds of years. "There's such a broad range of what you can do with a piece of furniture," Jason says. "You can do anything. It can be a piece of sculpture. It an be a functional piece. It can be both."

Of course, the modern consumer can go to any big store and, for a fraction of the price, pick up a piece of furniture that's made of cheap materials, one which is poorly designed and constructed in a foreign country, and that will fall apart after a few years. Most contemporary furniture, Jason says, is not built well. It's done by poorly paid workers in other countries who are working as quickly as possible. Well-to-do Americans tend to redecorate every couple of years, and they throw away this dispensable, cheaply-made furniture. Ironically, a lot of this furniture touts itself as "sustainable" because it's made with fast-growing material like bamboo - but if it's going to fail and be thrown away only to be replaced by another poorly made piece, that's only using more resources. "They talk about being sustainable," McCloskey sighs, "but they make pieces that are falling apart - out of sustainable products."

Jason chooses to make his furniture from the highest-quality wood from local vendors like Urban Hardwoods and Steph Baxster, a miller in North Bend who ships "amazing woods" back from Hawaii in containers that would otherwise be returning empty. McCloskey chooses woods such as walnut, which carves beautifully, joins and planes well, and can be stained black using a combination of rust and vinegar. He uses maple and elm, and occasionally Brazilian cherry, though he says it's so heavy that it dulls his tools. "This wood doesn't grow as fast," Jason says, but, in terms of long-term, its higher quality makes it a more sustainable choice. "You don't ever have to buy that piece of furniture again."

Jason takes these raw materials and rough mills them into the right shape on a machine downstairs in his shop, and then lugs them upstairs to handplane them to a silk-smooth finish. When he joins pieces of wood together, he uses traditional wood glue as well as old-style animal-hide glue that must be heated to a precise temperature in order to be worked. The smooth surfaces he achieves by handplaning makes a join between pieces of wood that is so tight, it's stronger than the wood grain itself. "If this piece breaks," he says, "it will be in the pieces of wood, not at the join." For hand-carved pieces like table legs he cuts the rough shape with a bandsaw, and then carves and finishes it by hand. He spends countless hours on each piece, researching and planning his design, choosing his wood, preparing and milling the pieces, planing them, hours even getting the joins just right. His finished products are breathtakingly beautiful, and they become that much more so when you consider that they were made by hand, with the deepest attention to every last detail.

There are two ways we can think about sustainable living: we can try to maintain our current rate of consumption, production, and energy use, but with renewable resources and energy sources. Or we can rethink the way we spend energy, materials and money, so that we buy less and think harder about the things we do buy, so that we can use them longer and pass them on to new users. The first requires new technologies being made available to us - a top-down approach, one that continues to feed into the cogs of capitalism and consumption. The second requires a personal re-consideration of what we need, how we buy, and how we use our possessions - a bottom-down, individualist shift of values, one committed to high-quality craftsman goods, high-quality materials, and a valuing of things we have rather than those we want. Truly sustainable choices are ones that don't have to be repeated. Those $20 hand-knit wool socks from the farmer's market are going to last a lot longer than the $3 bamboo socks from the drugstore. Which, in the end, uses less resources than the "sustainably" grown bamboo.

Here at Sound Trading Company, we know that you are committed to investing in the highest quality work, as well as supporting local, highly trained craftspeople and your local economy. We know that you will treasure work by an artisan like Jason McCloskey, exquisitely wrought pieces of furniture that are, in his words, "for clients who appreciate lasting work, who know that they're buying this for their great-grandchildren. If they're taken good care of, they'll last centuries."

shop