Crafted By Design
Inside New Zealand Craft Artists' Studios
By Janette Cook
It springs, it’s alive, it gives you a very therapeutic kind of rock.’
David Haig is not talking about his favourite music album. The master furniture maker is describing one of his famous Signature rocking chairs.
The word ‘rocking chair’ immediately conjures up something huge and ornate in a Victorian parlour. But David’s chair is streamlined, superbly balanced, deceptive in its simplicity and very contemporary.
‘I first designed it in 1990,’ he says, ‘but it took me years to perfect it. Today I make them mainly from New Zealand grown walnut, and they are my best-selling pieces. There is nothing else quite like it, and the design seems to stick in people’s minds.’
David had an unusual beginning for a wood craftsman. Born in 1955 in Malaysia, he went to boarding school in England at the age of ten. In 1971 his parents suddenly decided to emigrate to New Zealand, a country of clean air and no wars, and the homeland of his maternal grandmother. They bought a farm at Hira, 12 km north of Nelson.
David returned to England and completed a degree in history at Oxford, and a few years later he and his new wife Clare came out for a visit and were enthralled with the beauty of the area. In 1981, after a spending six months back in England working with an antique restorer – a fast-track learning curve – he returned to Nelson, hung up his shingle and spent the next four years restoring antique furniture.
The move from restorer to designer and creator came about after David had attended courses by three top cabinet makers who were visiting New Zealand: Russian born James Krenov, from the College of the Redwoods in Northern California; Alan Peters from the UK, one of the top furniture designers of the late twentieth century; and Art Carpenter, also from the USA.
‘They kicked me off’, says David. He and Clare bought a property right on the estuary at Cable Bay, with Pepin Island as their backdrop, and built Tui Cottage, adding a studio and workshop in the garden.
In the past twenty years, David has won a number of awards for his furniture designs, including twice winning the overall prize in the NZ Weyerhauser furniture awards, and his work is well known both nationally and internationally.
His Signature rocking chairs are still his top commercial line. With his assistant helping him, it takes him eight weeks to make four chairs. Eighty percent of the chairs, which in 2005 were selling for NZ$5500 each, are sold off-shore – going to the USA, the UK, Australia and Europe, especially Germany.
The chair’s rockers, like other curved parts of his furniture, require steam bending, a process he had to research from scratch. Steam bending a plank of wood is a dramatic and fast-paced event. Once the plank of wood has been softened in the steam box David and his assistant have just three minutes to clamp it in vices along a steel strap and pull it in to fit around the curved block. As it is curving, the end clamp has to be tightened so that it will not spring back as it cools.
The walnut David used for some of his chairs came from a stand planted up the Grey Valley on the West Coast by Richard John Seddon in 1866. The last twenty trees from this block were milled in 1997.
David is also noted for his award winning ‘three legged dining chair’ – it has a similar comfortable moulded seat to the rocking chair, but the two back legs curve elegantly in to meet each other at ground level.
He is currently working on a new design, what he calls his ‘Andromeda’ coffee table. The two sides of walnut-faced kahikatea that form the base of the table are each curved into a shallow arch, and set on their edges facing each other like two quotation marks. One end of each touches the other in the inner part of the curve, forming an elongated oval in the centre, and the whole looks like the Andromeda constellation. The top edges of the two sections are inlaid with two converging lines of pure silver. When the oval glass table top is placed on the base, the silver Andromeda design will show through it.
David does not carve decoration into his work. ‘The form itself is the decoration,’ he says. ‘Fancy ideas without the quality craftsmanship don’t do it for me.’ He tries to work with the wood, not against it, using the grain to best advantage.
‘The eccentricities in the grain are the surprises, the little accents that adorn the piece.’ He likes the solidity of wood and is always looking for timbers that are interesting, rather than necessarily aiming for consistency in his productions. It is important, he says, to get the timber to do what you want, but you must also respect what it is. ‘The wood is my partner in the process, not my slave.’
Text extracted from Crafted by Design: Inside the New Zealand Craft Artists’ Studio By Jeanette Cook (book photographs by Stephen Robinson)
Centre for Fine Woodworking
PO Box 1452
Nelson, New Zealand
e-mail: info@cfw.co.nz
phone: +64 3 545 2674
