DESIGN : Stellar Role of a Craftsman : Actor Ron Barker creates beautiful wood furniture when he’s not in front of the camera on ‘Days of Our Lives.’

Tarrington, you know, is that stern Briton at the head of the International Security Agency who pops in when a case is heating up or when one of his agents needs a good talking-to.

This, however, only happens two or three times a month. The rest of the time, Tarrington can be himself--Ron Barker, 52, still British, but more amiable and busy crafting solid wood furniture in the company of his wife and four employees of his North Hollywood enterprise, Woodpeckers.

Nobody minds on the stage of “Days of Our Lives,” the NBC soap opera in which Barker acts periodically as spy-in-chief.

In a town where actors abound, many develop a sideshow, but their supporting performance usually gets a rave review only for pretension. To will and train yourself into a proven artisan is rare.

And Barker is not just any craftsman. When Graeme Morland, professor of architecture at the University of Southern California, designed the tables, chairs and lamps for the school’s Helen Topping Library, he picked Barker to build the furniture.

“There are very few left like him. We could not find anything else comparable in terms of price and austere quality that shows off the beauty of the material,” Morland said.

Most artisans learn their craft painstakingly over years of schooling and apprenticeship; very few parachute into knowledge. But Barker is not one for traditional routes.

In 1988, Barker made his first dining room table out of solid pine in his garage with the meager help of a circular saw. He had never before made a table, but that Thanksgiving the table was such a hit with his dinner guests that they asked him to make more.

So he bought a table saw, put an ad in the L.A. Weekly and started a shop in his garage. It was a quick start promptly followed by a visit from a building inspector, for running a business in a residential area. But Barker had just catapulted into the furniture business.

It wasn’t the first flight from the ordinary for this former aeronautical engineer from Sussex.

“I invented a high-altitude flight simulator that the U.S. Navy liked and bought while I was at the University of Michigan in 1961,” Barker said.

Next came a laser editing system that the Gannett Corp. used to publish USA Today. And in 1987, Barker received a scientific and engineering award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shared with Montage Group Ltd. and Chester Schuler for the development of an electronic film editing system.

But by then Barker had decided he had had enough of high-tech inventions and this longtime member of community theater groups decided to move to Los Angeles to become an actor. And act he did.

There were roles in “Cheers,” “Murder She Wrote,” “Magnum P.I.” and “Missing In Action,” a movie starring Chuck Norris.

So what if he had never made tables before? Tables were not about to stand in the way of this overachiever.

Neither were drawers. Barker’s wife, Patricia Bennett, 52, who handles the business end of Woodpeckers, still recalls their first large order, a set of office furniture: a desk with a return, a credenza, a coffee table and two chairs, all in pine and with a total of 21 drawers.

Barker had never made a drawer before, but he took on the challenge. And he quoted a price of $4,500.

“The man jumped at it,” Bennett said. “We spent a month building it, and when we delivered the furniture he gave us a $300 tip.”

But she added, “It was more like a $15,000 job. We took the money and went to Palm Springs for the weekend; we were exhausted.”

The couple have since learned so much that architect Morland assumed until recently that Barker had been apprenticed in England in the art of joinery and carpentry.

During the last year, Barker and Bennett have created a mail-order line called Pacific Craftsman. Inspired both by the Arts and Crafts Movement and Southwestern design, the tables, chairs, beds and recliners feature wavy cutout work and trademark plugs of dark wenge, an African wood, hiding screws or acting as dowels.

The Pacific Craftsman line comes either finished or naked, assembled or in kit, at prices varying from $300 to $600 for a solid cherry coffee table, for example.

But Woodpeckers’ greatest strength is custom-designed furniture, and use of exotic woods such as tiger, wenge and shadua from Africa, or canary wood from Brazil.

“We are a custom shop; we build everything by hand. If a person came in and picked this table out of the portfolio, we’d go and make it. We have no design or plan; we are more like artists who build furniture than carpenters,” Barker said.

Artistry is what it took when a famous local basketball player commissioned a table a year ago. “All he said was, ‘I want a table to sit six, to match this lamp’--he wanted it to match his Tiffany lamp,” Barker recalled.

So Barker designed a table of carved bird’s-eye maple, with cherry and ebony inlay all around to imitate the foliage pattern of the Tiffany lamp.

And then there was the customer whose heart was set on the medieval look for his dining-room table. Barker responded.

“I thought, what does a medieval table look like? It’s massive and dark. So I built the table, put a blowtorch to it and burnt one-eighth of an inch off the surface, then I rubbed the charcoal off, applied oil and rubbed again with steel wool to give it color and patina,” Barker said.

And where does Barker fit Tarrington in among the tables and chairs? That’s easy. “When I have to go to the studio, I come in here at 4 in the morning to work on the furniture, and instead of listening to the radio, I learn my lines with a small tape recorder. Then I go off to act at 7 a.m.,” Barker said.