The Stick Chairs of Drew Langsner

Until I visited Drew Langsner in June, I didn’t know how many dang stick chairs the man had made during his career. After I read “The Chairmaker’s Workshop” in the early 2000s, I thought of Drew as an all-rounder with chairs. He built Windsors, ladderbacks and a folk chair he called his Hearth Chair. It was like a Gibson chair in many ways, but also it wasn’t in other ways.

So my brain started rewiring itself when Drew began talking about his chairmaking journey, which began with Windsor chairs. Drew said he wanted to leave his imprint on the Windsor tradition, and so he used to spend late nights drawing out new turning shapes to come up with something that was his.

Then he picked up John Brown’s book “Welsh Stick Chairs,” and Drew said he began “flipping out.”

After reading the book, Drew realized he didn’t have to hew to traditional forms to make something wonderful. Drew made the intellectual leap that many of us early Stick Chair Babies also made: There were few rules in the world of…