Earlywood: When Your Eyes Fail You

Publisher’s note: Good morning and welcome to Earlywood, a free weekly excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. Sometimes, it’s from a magazine article. Or a book. Or (in this case) a blog post published in 2011. Each entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. Enjoy!

Perhaps the best way to design nice furniture is to first look at thousands of examples of it.

That’s the path I take, and I always recommend woodworkers visit museums and galleries, or pore over books crammed with photos of pleasing forms. But it never occurred to me that looking at furniture could have the opposite effect – it can ruin you.

During my last week in Germany in 2011, I spent a lot of time with Ute Kaiser, who is in charge of public relations and the class program for Dictum GmbH, the company that runs the classes where I teach.

Ute is a former newspaper reporter like myself, so we get along just great. And usually before or after I teach at Dictum, she and her boyfriend take me sightseeing somewhere in Bavaria. This time we went to Regensburg and ended up ducking some spotty weather in a cafe that looked like something transplanted from Paris.

As the three of us chatted about what we had seen that day, the conversation turned to furniture, both old and new. That’s when Ute told me a story about a Bavarian furniture factory and the time she had interviewed the owner while she was a reporter.

The man had made a lot of money selling factory-made furniture all over Germany, though the furniture wasn’t particularly well-made or beautiful. During the interview, he explained his business model.

As a long-time maker, he knew that his furniture wasn’t the best. But he also knew something about human nature.

So he bought regular advertising in the local paper that showed photos of his furniture. The more the readers saw the ugly forms, the more they became used to them – the stuff became comfortable and familiar. And after becoming used to it, they bought it.

As much as I hate to admit, this makes sense. We accept the familiar and reject the different, especially when it comes to filling our homes.

It’s just that the world is upside down now. The ugly is familiar and the beautiful is rare.

Heading Back to Germany in 2025

Ute doesn’t work for Dictum anymore, but I still teach there in the summer months. As you are reading this, I should be landing in Bavaria, bleary-eyed and ready for some coffee.

First stop: HTM Rosenheim, which is hosting a special exhibition about wooden joinery in Europe and Japan. Watch a short video here. Then, after my first week of teaching, Rudy Everts and I are headed to the Vitra Design Museum to see its new exhibit on Shaker furniture.

I get to see a lot of Shaker furniture here in Kentucky and Ohio, but it’s mostly from the Western colonies. This exhibit at Vitra covers a wide swath of the furniture, and it has pieces I’ve never seen before.

So even 14 years later, I’m still trying to keep the ugly at bay.