Stranger's touch
Commitment to the present comes through in the work of award-winning furniture-maker William Stranger
By Joanna Beresford 05/28/2009
Instead of Bowling for Dollars, I’m going to start a franchise called Bowling for Dinners, and in order to pursue this goal I will engage the efforts of William Stranger, whose Tava Lanes coffee table recently received an award from the jurors of the M+D+F (Materials and Design and Function). The table was made from a salvaged bowing alley lane. An exhibition and award ceremony took place at the Pasadena Design Within Reach last week.
Stranger is a Pasadena furniture-maker and he’s got more than balls and bowling alleys; he’s got tools, and linseed and tung oils, and raw logs, and kindling, and deep convictions. He won the M+D+F award because he’s probably the first person ever to build a table out of a defunct bowling lane. And why shouldn’t he? What on earth else are you going to do with such a remnant except eat off of it, or put things on it, or just look at it?
In his book “Furniture: A Concise History,” Edward Lucie-Smith describes four aspects of furniture. First, furniture usually serves a purpose or performs a function. Chairs are for sitting, cabinets for storing, beds for sleeping or whatever. Second, furniture throughout history has effectively represented the social status of the owner, within a framework of social hierarchy that deviates across cultures and history. Third, furniture symbolizes the craft and level of technology that’s native to the culture in which it’s created. And finally, furniture reflects the personal taste and values of its owners. Somewhere in and among those categories there’s something else about furniture that Stranger Furniture represents most profoundly — something spiritual and emotional about the act of creation, acquisition and daily use.
“I fell in love with wood very quickly,” says Stranger. He worked for an LA contractor in the 1980s, an experience through which he discovered his passion and talent for woodwork and design. He built furniture in his garage for awhile, pursued by a growing clientele, and moved into a Pasadena workshop more than 10 years ago.
While talking with him lately, I couldn’t help but think of my mother. She used to bake the best pies in Northern Ohio. She started with flour, butter, salt, fresh fruits and sugar and spices. After she rolled out her dough and laid it in a pan, she would shear off the edges with a butter knife. Some of those leavings my siblings and I would snatch from the floury counter and gobble down as we watched her. The rest she either added to the next pie pan or sprinkled with a dazzling cloud of cinnamon-sugar and pinched into little puff pastries. She always used every scrap.
That’s how Stranger works: use everything. He finds wood from local sources — fallen trees, salvaged doors and floors, bits and pieces of the city — and makes from those materials everything from tables and chairs to wall ornaments and chopsticks.
“I love trees,” he says. “I prefer trees to wood. I love hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains among these old beings. They stand silently, watching, capturing changes in the world with such eloquence, and that is embodied in the wood.”
In his design statement, Stranger writes about balance. “I try to balance the rough beauty of the raw log, or surfaced board, with a desire to shape it into a functional carefully made form,” he states.
Stranger Furniture can be found in galleries, studios, online, in private homes and public spaces. He created the reception desk, for example, for Spa Luce on Highland Avenue, near the Hollywood Bowl. That particular intersection is a proper metaphor for an urban-dwelling furniture-maker who works in relative quiet, listening to the sound of the wood as his hands and tools negotiate with it. It’s a high calling in a bustling, blurry, show-biz world.
In Lucie-Smith’s book, the author references another cultural historian, Bevis Hillier, who wrote his own book called “The Decorative Arts of the Forties and Fifties: Austerity/Binge.” Hillier describes the Modernist movement as, among other things, a “commitment to the future.”
I think Stranger’s furniture embodies a commitment to the present, which is full of old stories and life and bright hope for what lies ahead.
Contact Joanna Dehn Beresford at truwrite@yahoo.com..
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