SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW
Furniture designer takes queues from a simpler time
Anything that represents simplicity and cosiness in the home seems only to be growing in popularity, so it makes sense that the farmhouse modern trend is still going strong.
Furniture-maker, designer and artist Jonah Meyer, whose company Sawkille Co. produces handmade furniture and artwork in New York, breaks down the origins and evolution of farmhouse modern for us.
“The Windsor chair is where it all begins,” he says. “All these very simple elements, the dovetail joinery, they’re like musical notes. The joinery becomes the piece, becomes the concept and the connections you’re making with the furniture. We make a dovetail table, the dovetail joint is the table.”
Farmhouse modern, Meyer says, reflects the furniture-making techniques of the Shakers and early American furniture-makers such as George Nakashima. He credits his upbringing in central Pennsylvania as having a big influence on his style of furnituremaking today.
“The makers movement really started in the late ’60s and early ’70s in this country and my parents were part of that,” he says. “I grew up in that tradition, but as a furniture designer, the influences more come from an adult sensibility. I went to a Shaker village (and) learned about Nakashima. People started to introduce these ideas to me and I was introduced to American furniture. Initially, I was interested in Adirondack twig furniture.”
The furniture and art works Meyer produces today reflect these traditions, he says, but with a more modern sensibility.
“The Shakers died away,” he says. “Nakashima died. These people brought this vernacular forward and then they died, and so for me this is an open-ended place to begin as a furniture-maker, and I am very interested in that. They were pushing the envelope of how delicate can you make it, how simple, but well-crafted. These are classic designs that go on — they must be built.”
The forms you’ll see in farmhouse modern are simple circles, triangles and squares, Meyer says — nothing “too far out.” To modernize and make them more fun, he says, his team adds elements like patches and handles.
“They discovered so much in the ’50s in design,” he says. “I’m just taking really simple elements and trying to create a line of furniture that makes sense.”
Meyer founded Sawkille more than 15 years ago with his wife and business partner Tara Delisio, and says that although it hasn’t been easy to run an independent custom furniture business like theirs, the satisfaction in having employees and creating well-built, original furniture that lasts is immense.
“Sawkille, as a brand, the stools and chairs drive the whole thing,” he says.
“But we also get attention for coming up with new things. We’re trying to make room for the new vocabulary.”
When they started, Meyer says, their furniture had a really Shaker modern feel to it. But as things got going and they employed other furniture-makers, he was freed up to focus on design and producing more artwork.
Meyer’s latest work reflects the conflict between North America’s Indigenous people and the American government in the late 1880s, through symbolic images of war, plows, trains and the like.
“The pieces are more modern and have more unique artistic elements,” he says.
The joinery becomes the piece, becomes the concept and the connections you’re making with the furniture.
JONAH MEYER