Going Against the Grain : Crafts: Fine woodworkers preserve painstaking traditions in an age of assembly-line furniture. Many earn less than $20,000 a year.
Nearly invisible in an age of manufactured cabinets and assembly-line chairs, the fine woodworkers of Ventura County hone the skills of another age in small shops and tiny garages, scratching out a living as word of their craftsmanship is passed from client to client.
You can’t find them in the Yellow Pages. Don’t look for them at art shows. Many don’t even know one another. Almost to a person, they’re 40-something and college-educated in disciplines they’ve abandoned to work with their hands.
They’re the best in their business locally, but they often earn no more than $20,000 a year. Some barter to live. One trades furniture to a dentist for bicuspid repair.
“You have to know them to find them. That’s how far removed they are from the marketplace,” said Fillmore resident Robert L. Smith, an art professor at Cal State Northridge who teaches furniture design. “They are an anachronism.”
They are, for example:
* Gary Bulla, 42, a multitalented Santa Paula woodworker who often works for the rich and famous who populate the fine old homes of the Ojai Valley, the spectacular new houses of the Ventura oceanfront and the motion picture enclaves of Montecito.
* James McCarthy, 41, an Ojai furniture maker who with partner Aaron Clapp builds one-of-a-kind chairs, desks and cabinets for customers who have paid as much as $100,000 for an elaborate home woodworking job and as little as $200 for a jewelry box.
* Jake Colborn, 45, of the upper Ojai Valley, a general contractor who pours patios and builds new houses but takes particular pride in restoring historical buildings such as the Gould House in Ventura and the Bard Mansion library in Port Hueneme.
* Keith Buchan, 47, who with carver Gretchen Greenberg fashions furniture from rich woods in a back-yard Meiners Oaks shop laden not only with ancient Stanley chisels and 80-year-old hand planes but tables and machines of Buchan’s invention.
* Bruce A. Smith, 37, who recently abandoned his Camarillo custom furniture business to broker commodities in Los Angeles, but returned in 2 1/2 months to the freedom of his craft.
“The nature of people who get involved in this sort of thing is that they like to paddle their own canoe,” Smith said. “My dad had his own glass business. He was a glazier. He was a guy who could look out his back door and have the wind in his face, and that’s pretty much what I grew up to be too.”
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Together they are the descendants of an Arts and Crafts movement founded in England in response to the Industrial Revolution and brought to this country near the turn of the 20th Century, professor Robert Smith said.
“The emphasis was not to reject the machine but to reject the industrial process,” he said.
Loosely knit groups of weavers, potters, silversmiths and furniture and cabinet makers formed. Among the woodworkers, Gustav Stickley stood out in New York and brothers Charles and Henry Greene were architectural icons in Pasadena.
Until World War II many American towns had their own highly trained cabinet and furniture makers.
But after three decades of increasing mass production, true craftsmen were hard to find in 1966, when Pasadena architect Randell Makinson began to restore the Greene brothers’ magnificent Gamble House in Pasadena.
Things turned around again as the anonymity of the Computer Age spawned thousands of fledgling woodworkers nationwide in the 1970s and ‘80s.
“It’s sort of a cycle,” Makinson said. “The Industrial Revolution scared people and made them want to be proud of the work they were doing. And then the Computer Age told people they didn’t want to become just a number. They wanted to feel like they contributed something that was lasting.”
However, as the building boom of the 1970s and excesses of the 1980s gave way to the recessionary 1990s, the ranks of craftsmen thinned. Around Ventura County, woodworkers have closed their shops and found “real jobs,” Bulla said.
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One recent afternoon, as the thin, tanned Bulla planed fine black walnut cabinets to conform to circular walls in a $1.5-million Ventura house, he explained that the woodworker’s craft and business acumen often do not mesh.
Bulla had taken over this cabinetry job from another top woodworker who had declared bankruptcy.
“I’ve had four shops call me in the last month and a half trying to sell me their tools,” he said. “I’d love to have them, but I can’t afford them either.”
Despite a three-year downturn, Bulla still has a core crew of six employees and is in demand.
He recently finished a white oak screening room at movie director Robert Zemeckis’ estate in Montecito. He once spent 20 months working on a house in Ojai. He has built fixtures that the Ventura-based apparel company Patagonia shipped to Germany for a new store.
He’s built church pews, museum displays and front desks at an Ojai library, a Ventura hotel and a Santa Barbara Social Security office. He’s even built kitchens at the Point Mugu Naval Air Weapons Station, a necessary “bread-and-butter job.”
But Bulla clears no more than $20,000 in a good year, he said. Hard times have prompted even big spenders to watch their budgets, and craftsmen have reduced their bids on jobs in response, woodworkers said.
“There’s a big difference between a fine woodworker and a good businessman,” said Bulla, who studied as an apprentice boat builder in Oregon and with a master furniture maker in Fort Bragg, N.C.
“The entrepreneur part you learn through the school of hard knocks,” he said. “And I’m still learning.”
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But to a person, woodworkers say they are not in their business because of the money.
Ojai architect Marc Whitman, who counts on Bulla for high-quality woodwork, said such craftsmen are a rare and eccentric breed.
“They’re like artists,” Whitman said. “They don’t advertise, because it’s not part of their constitution. Maybe they thrive on the suffering and the struggle.”
Buchan, a 1969 English graduate from UC Santa Barbara, said that he and longtime partner Greenberg do not embrace poverty, but value their freedom.
The Meiners Oaks couple broke away from conventional jobs 17 years ago and began to teach themselves furniture making and woodcarving.
“Gretchen and I decided, ‘Well, let’s do something together,’ ” Buchan said. “We’re not sure why, but we picked furniture. We both blame the other person. We just didn’t want to fit into the system.”
They subsidized their training by painting houses and restoring kitchens. But they also gathered a group of patrons, both rich and working class. Their most loyal customer, a Forest Service worker, diligently sets aside her overtime pay to buy their furniture, Greenberg said.
Today Buchan, in Levis and a ponytail, and Greenberg, in blue floral shirt and sandals, live in a small wood-frame house on a modest street just west of Ojai. She works out of their garage and he out of a shop behind the house.
He builds, among other things, $685 teakwood chairs, $1,700 pecan tables and mahogany fireplace and dressing screens. She carves decorative reliefs into the screens and fashions her own separate artwork.
To see Buchan’s shop is to glimpse the tools of 20th Century woodworkers. There are power saws, of course, but also the files, chisels and planes that are the staples of handicraft. He keeps an entire drawer of router bits. He has shelves of glues, stains, oils and finishes, and a “spokeshave” once used to smooth the wooden spokes of wagon wheels.
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Buchan owns a 1913 Stanley plane. “They did these things then with the heart,” he said.
His best chisels, pre-World War II Stanleys bought for $1 each at a garage sale, are hung in a row on the wall. “They’re the best that have ever been made,” he said.
In the couple’s house, visitors can sit on a chair shaped like a giant Egyptian cat or on a strong trestle chair with no front legs. The couple cannot afford their own furniture, but occasionally they keep pieces they’ve deemed imperfect.
They say they are content.
“Unless you’re absolutely starving you don’t have to do what you don’t want to do,” Buchan said. “Most people come to you because they’ve seen something you’ve done, and you can usually nudge them in the direction you want them to go.”
While they must eat, the couple say they sometimes do pieces that make no sense economically but allow them to grow in their craft.
Buchan remembers a $1,500 desk ordered by a Ventura telephone repairman 10 years ago. It cost $3,500 in Buchan’s time and materials. “He gave me a price and I knew what I was doing. But it was a relaxation, so he ended up with a very nice desk.”
The couple moves within a barter economy. Their home is spotted with fine pottery because of swaps within the Ojai arts community.
“That’s how I got my teeth fixed,” Buchan said. “I found a dentist who wanted to trade.”
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Jake Colborn earned his college degree in economics in 1970 and came home to Santa Paula just as his father was expanding the family tile business from bathroom countertops to cabinetry.
“I found it suited my nature,” Colborn recalled. “More than anything, it’s something that gives you immediate feedback. You’re done with a piece and you can stand back and reflect on the craftsmanship, the innate beauty.”
Not that Colborn’s small construction company does only woodworking that could pass for art. “We do anything that will pay the bills,” he said. “The spectacular ones are few and far between.”
Colborn is known, however, for his restoration of historical buildings. He restored the chapel on Santa Cruz Island and is now working on the highly figured white oak and bookcase doors at the Bard Library in Port Hueneme, a state landmark.
Colborn--along with former partner Doug Hawkins--also restored the Gould House near the county hospital in Ventura, a home designed in 1924 by architect Henry Greene and considered a jewel of Craftsman architecture.
Using the designs of Makinson, author of two definitive books on the Greene brothers’ work, Colborn and Hawkins completed construction of the house’s unfinished upstairs, built a garage and an enclosed bridge across a back garden and installed kitchen cabinets and a dining-room light fixture that is hung by leather straps.
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Colborn’s associate Chuck Teague also rebuilt a desk and constructed two chairs to match the Stickley dining-room set.
“Doug sweat blood and tears on this, trying to get the geometry straight,” said owner Virginia Gould, standing in the upstairs office where thick beams converge from an octagonal room and meet at a bay window.
Makinson recalled Colborn, Hawkins and Teague as true craftsmen, rather than the type that entered the profession when it was popular and money was easy to make.
“The true craftsman,” he said, “is the one who in his soul just loves creating beautiful things. They’re the ones that continue on.”