Let them now be joined together
This is a story about two men collaborating on the creation of a patio deck and a dining table -- although you might also say it’s a glimpse at the spacious possibilities of life, if you’re willing to clear away the clutter around you and devote yourself to the details.
Alan Pomerantz commissioned the work for his penthouse apartment in Marina del Rey, pursuing the most contemporary of urges -- the yearn for “simple living.”
He hired Stefan Fabry to construct the small deck to replace a street-front concrete slab, using hand tools and woodworking techniques 2,000 years old. Fabry also built the pedestal and benches for the similarly concise glass-topped dining room table inside.
The designs were the result of months of back and forth between patron and artisan, a happy teaming that makes good on Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s enduring, if seldom achieved, aphorism, “Less is more.”
To digress, we might recall the famous riposte of Frank Lloyd Wright, who sniffed, “Less is more only where more is no good.” Perhaps so. But then again, maybe Wright overlooked the alternative: More can be made of less if you put enough thought into it.
In Fabry’s case, the “more” and the “less” occur simultaneously in the junction of wood. He is a German, born in Romania, who does things the Japanese way -- connecting pieces of wood together with intricately hand-cut, puzzle-like joints that require no glue and no nails or screws. More handwork; less machinery. “A perfect marriage,” he enthuses. “German precision and Japanese joinery.” Naturally enough, he set up his woodshop in Southern California, on an industrial street in Venice.
Japanese joinery is best known for its use in the construction of temples that are expected to stand for thousands of years, each beam and post bound to the other through intricate, sawed and chiseled notches, laps and tenons. The joints are sometimes showy and sometimes invisible, but always devised to hold tight as wood swells and contracts with the changing moisture of the air around them.
Fabry, a lean, outgoing man in a ratty leather apron, is not the only U.S. woodworker to fall in love with Japanese joinery, far from it. Nor can he claim to be the best, for the art and the ritualistic philosophy behind it can take a lifetime to master, and he’s been at it for only a few years. But Fabry represents something else: the continuing resurgence of craft -- an ever-growing number of artisans borrowing from traditions around the world and transforming them into exciting expressions of good living, American-style.
As the novelist Jim Harrison observed, in a slightly different context, “since we have no consistent tradition, we are doomed to freedom.”
So yes, Fabry employs Western joinery too -- dovetails and finger joints. He’ll even use a hidden screw to hold down the planks of a deck.
The point is to achieve something lasting and something highly personal; something satisfying to build and just as uniquely gratifying to use. Furniture, a patio deck, a gate for the driveway, a loft balustrade.
Pomerantz, a onetime advertising executive, found the obsessive woodworker through word of mouth. That’s how things usually happen in this realm. Despite the growing number of practical artisans, finding one is still not easy.
The two understood each other immediately.
Pomerantz wanted only a few things to occupy the living spaces of his residence -- an astonishing few. If the simplicity movement is something that others talk and fret about, it’s an idea that Pomerantz is willing to take about as far as it can go.
“Clutter,” he says, “interrupts the energy in my home.”
His penthouse contains a familiar enough industrial-strength kitchen, opening into a two-story living area. After that, you can count on your fingers the “things” contained by walls and keep one hand in your pocket.
Foremost is the dining table at the far end of the kitchen. Only big enough for four, the table rests on a slender, rectangular pedestal of blond ash planks, held together with finger joints. Stacked on that are the assemblage of arms to support the top -- blocks of ash and a vividly red species of wood known as chakte kok (interlocked using a quadruple gooseneck joint). Atop, is a custom slumped glass top as thick as a sandwich.
The table is accompanied by two matching benches inlaid with tatami mats, one with a back and one without.
When it comes to furnishings, Pomerantz placed all his eggs in a single, exquisitely hand-made basket. “I spend a lot of time here,” he explains.
The remainder of his furnishings are so inconsequential as to barely cast shadows across the 500 or so square feet of white-carpeted and maple-planked “living” space: A lone beanbag chair, an import-store candlestick holder and a stereo that will soon disappear under a stairway, inside a soon-to-arrive Fabry chest. Last, a pair of end chairs that are soon to be gone.
“People come in and they say, ‘You have to get some furniture. You’ve got to put something here,’ ” Pomerantz recounts. “I say, ‘No I don’t. The space speaks for itself.’ ”
His view takes in a section of beach and ocean as well as Marina del Rey’s peninsula, and two flights below, the ground-floor redwood deck that Fabry built. Trimmed with contrasting cedar, the 24- by 22-foot enclosure features ergonomic lumbar-curved benches and a temple-like protective entablature, joined Japanese-style.
“Anybody can lay down a deck,” says Pomerantz. “I wanted a flow that added to the energy. This is my oasis.
“Maybe it’s ironic. I spent years in the advertising business coaxing people to buy things. Now I see them and I see how hard it is for them to disengage, to let go of the compulsion to have more stuff. I’m truly happier with less stuff rather than more stuff, and it’s important that the things around me are permanent and of lasting beauty.”
Five minutes away in Venice, Fabry talks of a different kind of struggle. The plain economics of craftsmanship require an adjustment in consumers’ regard for the things in their lives. Hand-made furniture and decks cost more -- in Fabry’s case, $65 an hour on projects that can consume hundreds of hours.
Heirloom quality is one payback for the investment, of course. Perhaps more significant is the chance to fill the gaps around us by plumbing one’s own creativity in collaboration with a craftsman.
“Some furniture builders have to make compromises,” Fabry laments. “Me, I’m willing to struggle for a while without compromising. I’m patient.... Using machines is quick, but then I have the machine between me and the wood. I’d rather be involved directly, involved with my sweat and with my blood sometimes. Once in awhile, I’ll cut myself and there will be blood on the wood. I’ll sand it out so the customer doesn’t see it. But I know it’s there. And when it goes out the door, a piece of me goes with it.”