furniture Archives - 'ear 'ear! by Gaynor Young

No Labels!

Gaynor Young — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 04:28:19 +0000

Dis Tyd, the sign said. It’s Time.
I smiled to myself as we entered the room. A fire crackled, merrily accompanying the sound of people chatting. It was a miserable day outside. I was so glad we had followed Eduard’s advice and investigated his wife’s new coffee shop.

Every week, my best friend, ‘B’ and Eduard met for their Sunday bike rides. Hither and thither they rode hectically through the George forests and mountains. Eduard and ‘B’ shared a ‘life’ I knew nothing about. That was fine. He was her cycling buddy. He was her ‘Young Gun’!

One day, ‘B’ said to me: “Eduard tells me that his wife, Mia, has opened this wonderful coffee shop near Fancourt. He suggested we should pop in. After pilates lets try out her cappuccinos!
We stood in the coffee shop and looked for a spare table.
“Can I help you?” asked this petite woman with a wide mouth and eyes brimming with life.
“Yes, please. We would like a table for two.”
When she took our order, we introduced ourselves to Mia. “I had a suspicion you were Eduard’s ‘B’,” she laughed. “He told me you were small and had a force and energy that bowled people over!”
An apt description of ‘B’!

“Here is that gorgeous ‘chocolate bomb’ cake we ordered,” ‘B’ enthused. I looked in the direction of the approaching culinary delight and my eyes fell, not on the cake but on a table. Such an incredibly beautiful table. It’s pedestal looked as if it was made with different pieces of wood all slotted together. I walked around it and sighed. It was stunning.
“That was made by Eduard from Kiaat wood.” I hadn’t even noticed Mia standing beside me. “In fact, he made all the furniture in this shop.”
My eyes took in the furniture around me: the tables and chairs were all different, the side board, amazing wooden vases.
“But…but Eduard cycles,” I said stupidly.
“He does that too,” Mia laughed, “He is a furniture manufacturer.”

Eduard and Mia met when they were both about 15 months old. Their parents were friends and they visited each other in Tzaneen. Mia cherishes a photo that was taken of the two children sitting on their mothers laps, shyly peeping at one another.
As I devoured the ambrosial ‘chocolate bomb’, I knew that I had to meet with Eduard.

Eduard’s factory was not far from Dis Tyd. The dust swirled lazily in the shafts of sunlight shining through the open door. Eduard grinned shyly and introduced his assistant, Jacques.

The room was dominated by a huge wooden sideboard. It had obviously been sanded. It had that raw, fresh smell to it.
“This is what I’m working on at the moment,” Eduard said.
“So you restore furniture as well as make it. How beautiful this is.” I ran my hand along the top. I had grown up surrounded by beautiful furniture inherited by my mother. I recognised the handsome antique oak wood beneath my hand.
“You should have seen it when it was bought in to us. A bit of crumbly old furniture that looked ready to be thrown away. Thank goodness the owner knew what it could look like. He handed it over to me and it was love at first sight. I saw the sideboard’s potential and Jacques and I got to work.”
“The owner will do a hop, skip and a jump when he sees it,” I enthused.
“Well…um…he will be pleased,” Eduard said practically.

Thirteen years ago, Eduard had done a course in furniture technology at Saasveld College in George. He had then gone into business making kitchen cupboards. He found that gave him little joy so six years ago he opened up this workshop. Suddenly things fell into place. He was doing what he loved to do. He was creating and restoring furniture.
“When I restore furniture, I feel a bit like a plastic surgeon. I return youth and vitality to a decrepit object. And being able to create my own furniture is liberating.”
“Do you use your own designs or do you use a computerised design system?”
He laughed and tapped his head. “They all come from up here!”

For me, ‘B’s cycling buddy had been transformed. I realised that I had wrongly categorised and inadvertently compartmentalised him. I had thought of Eduard as being ‘B’s cycling buddy and nothing more. I thought of my hairdresser, manicurist, dentist, doctor. Too often we label people and by doing so, forget that there is so much more to them. Suddenly Eduard had altered. Why? Because I had been granted a window into his life. Suddenly he was no longer merely ‘B’s cycling buddy but a person. A person with a sense of humour, a passion for his work, a gentleness that touched on all around him. We are not given windows into everyone’s life. But I will no longer categorise people. My hairdresser is not someone who merely cuts my hair. She has a life that includes hair cutting. Whether I am ever given that window into her life is neither here nor there. I will just remember.
As I will remember, ‘B’s cyclist who turned into so much more.
Eduard changed me in the process.

One day when I move into a bigger house, it will have a beautiful round table in my entrance hall, made by Eduard. It’s pedestal will be made up of different facets of wood that catch the different hues and tones surrounding it. It will be made of oak.

I love oak.
And ‘chocolate bomb’ cake!

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The Wishing Chair!

Gaynor Young — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 04:00:19 +0000

I remember as a child reading The Wishing Chair by Enid Blyton. It was about a magical chair that could fly. Together with the owners of the Wishing Chair I flew on so many enthralling adventures. I now know how The Wishing Chair came into existence. It grew magically on a branch of one of Gavin Munro’s trees.
Smile. Let me tell you about Gavin Munro’s ‘enchanted’ forest!
As a child, playing hide and seek in his garden, he wished there were tall trees. He was good at climbing trees. They made great hiding places. He looked at the small Bonsai tree on the verandah table. That tree was pathetic. It didn’t even look like a tree. It actually looked like a chair. The chairs! He ran to the table that was surrounded by chairs and a table cloth. Quick as a flash, he was under the table cloth with the chairs pulled neatly after him. They would never find him here. Good thing the Bonsai tree had bought a chair to mind. The image of the ‘Bonsai-chair’ remained with Gavin.
The seed of his furniture growing project sprouted twenty years later on a beach in San Fransisco. Gavin had finished at Art College getting a degree in Furniture Design. He had worked as an apprentice to a cabinet-maker and done a long stint building with natural materials in Scotland and California. Working on the beach was a sheer delight, seeing what new materials each tide would bring. It was then a case of stitching the wood back together – each ‘stitch’ fitting into carefully cut-out mortices. It was at this moment that Gavin realised that, rather than going through all these processes, he could grow trees directly into beautiful and useful shapes.
At present, in a field on the side of a hill 22 kilometres north of Derby in England, are row after row of perfectly maintained willow, oak, ash and sycamore trees. What clearly marks this field out from a regular forest, are the blue-and-black plastic moulds that surround the trees. These ‘steer’ the trees in pre-defined routes. They are gently and expertly manipulated into the exact shape of a chair, a table, a lamp or a mirror frame.
The process starts by shaping the young trees around the moulds. The growing tips are bent and coaxed in the direction they need to go with small plastic clasps. When the different strands of the tree need to be brought together to form one solid piece of wood, parts of the bark are shaved off and they are aligned, eventually growing together again. Once the final shape has been formed, the trees are left to mature and thicken, leaving a solid piece of wood without any joins. The method is described as being more about persuasion than manipulation.
“The trees are growing and all we are doing is shaping the tips as it grows along,” said Munro. “The trick is to let the tree grow and just tweak it as it grows. That is the beauty of it. It is so simple.”
The first harvest is expected in October. The trees will have been growing for four years. They will be cut, stored and dried. In 2017 they will be exhibited and then delivered to those people that pre-ordered them. It has taken longer than Gavin expected. He remarked: “We thought we would have a harvest by now. But trees, well … they grow slowly.”
However, while growing up, Gavin went through several operations to straighten his spine.
“It’s where I learnt patience. There were long periods of staying still, plenty of time to observe what was going on and reflect. It was only after working on this furniture-growing project for a few years, that a friend pointed out that I must know exactly what it’s like to be shaped and grafted on a similar time scale.” He laughed. “I’ve had practice. It requires patience.
Think about how furniture is usually made. First, you have to grow the trees, so allow about 30 years. Then you’ve got to chop them down, leaving a cleared area that can cause problems like erosion or desertification. Next you transport the logs to a sawmill. That means you need to build roads and use polluting logging trucks. Then you need to build a large facility to store the planks. The wood is then transported somewhere else, chopped up and stuck together, creating joints that might eventually come loose and fall apart.
Growing furniture on trees is an incredible ideal. Amazing! Mind blowing! So, why do I find it so difficult to accept? I think of the beautiful, majestic Oak studded with lots of wooden chairs. And something in me cries out: No! Imagine our beautiful Weeping Willow impregnated with small wooden tables!
Chinese women had their feet bound up so that they were unable to grow. Little feet were considered beautiful. I feel that this is doing the same thing to trees. We are binding and restricting them for our benefit.
Although I realise that this is a far healthier way of producing furniture, a part of me pulls up short at the idea. I would rather leave the trees alone. I think Thoreau sums up my feelings when he says:

“I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.”
Henry David Thoreau

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You can find out more about Gavin Munro and his company ‘Full Grown’ here!

or why not watch this short video?

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