Robin Wade does not do anything halfway. When he got into boating, he earned a master prince’s license. When he fixed the home he grew up in, he gutted it. When he needs wood for his furniture design business, Robin Wade Furniture, he finds colossal trees that have fallen within a 60-mile radius of his studio and hauls them again.
Wade didn’t even innovate until he revived the A-frame on a creek where he climbed. He learned as he went along. He also credits his thirst for knowledge as a side effect of growing up with severe dyslexia, which went undiagnosed for years. When it was diagnosed, his curiosity about learning went into overdrive and has not stopped since.
He began the furniture company after retirement yet swears, “I am just a babe in this.” The outcomes beg to differ. See the way he chooses a tree from floor to table.
Robin Wade Furniture
Wade grew up in Florence, Alabama, with a professor mom and a father in structure. His home was a 1,600-square-foot A-frame that his father designed on a creek in the woods. “My mom was a real neat freak. Everything was minimal, uncluttered, and the home was filled with midcentury modern furniture,” he says.
Robin Wade Furniture
The house is a stone’s throw away from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Rosenbaum House. This had a tremendous effect on Wade’s design style and the way he looks at the meeting of architecture and nature.
Robin Wade Furniture
His furniture has an organic sense, as Wade often preserves the natural edges on at least 2 sides of each piece. The combination of straight lines and live edges causes a appearance he predicts rustic modern.
“I haven’t found a better artist than nature,” Wade says. He preserves the pure color of the wood — “the way God made it” — also does not use stains.
Robin Wade Furniture
The furniture starts with sustainably harvested trees. One came in the early 1840s plantation Barton Hall, in which it fell during a storm. By chance, civil rights photographer Charles Moore stopped by and ended up documenting the tree harvesting. This photograph shows Moore and Wade with the shrub.
Robin Wade Furniture
That is a closeup of the exact same tree. Once a tree has been hauled back into the studio, then it is cut into natural-edged slabs with a in-house sawmill. (When Wade discovered that many sawmills cannot take care of the 60-inch-diameter logs he favors, he simply found specific equipment. “Ignorance has been my greatest benefit,” he says.)
Then, the organic edges are debarked by hand with a knife, and the slabs are put on a rack. They dry for a year per inch of depth and are then placed to the kiln for a last cure.
Wade’s studio is a “slow” studio. “What’s the rush anyway?” asks Wade. “It just makes sense that if furniture takes months or years to make, the customer would subsequently appreciate it keep it longer, and there are a slowdown from the disorderly mass consumption of our natural resources.”
For the last measures, Wade and his team use hand and power tools to bring the furniture into life, then finish each piece with a hand-rubbed oil mix.
Robin Wade Furniture
This thick slab waits to dry before staring its new life as a piece of furniture.
Robin Wade Furniture
Wade’s intent is to catch and conserve “the tremendous beauty and flowing form of their trunks and branches from which they are crafted,” he says. He also sees beauty in the way the pieces are engineered. Hence he left the screw heads in this bit revealing on purpose. “To me it makes it more real,” he explains.
Robin Wade Furniture
Wade’s creations captured the eye of architect Phil Kean, who designed the 2012 New American Home Builder’s Showhouse. Kean sought out Wade to supply the home with several pieces.
Robin Wade Furniture
“When Phil Kean first directed me to cut on the organic edges off this table, I was sick,” admits Wade. “But once I saw the way it fit to the blank lines of the home, I knew. It also helps highlight the great thing about the defects in the wood, the grain along with the dimensional joints.”
Robin Wade Furniture
This desk is in precisely the exact same showhouse. It juxtaposes the straight lines of the side bit with all the organic edges on the primary desktop slab.
Robin Wade Furniture
Wade is a huge admirer of George Nakashima. “Nakashima highlighted the attractiveness of joinery methods by bringing them into the surface rather than trying to conceal them,” he says. Wade extended this rectangular joint past the border to draw more attention to it and to highlight the natural beauty of this live border in contrast.
Robin Wade Furniture
This yin-yang java table is just another piece from the showhouse; it’s a great contrast to the white walls and clean lines of the home.
Robin Wade Furniture
Along with using only trees that he can sustainably harvest, Wade will travel a maximum of only 60 miles to get them. Keeping his job’s impact upon the ground minimal is quite significant to him as is the work of The Sustainable Furnishings Council.
Wade, left, was working to assist the city of Phil Campbell, Alabama, which was flattened by tornados at 2011. He is making a bit of furniture from a tree that came down through the storm to raise cash and awareness for the cause.
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