Art

Creation, Inspiration, Transformation

Nakashima

By Anne Levin

Like so many offspring of artistic parents, Mira Nakashima-Yarnall took the creative atmosphere of her childhood for granted. She grew up in a peaceful hillside compound nestled among tall trees, just south of New Hope, Pa. While her father, George Nakashima, worked with a devoted group of artisans to transform great slabs of specially selected wood into lustrous pieces of furniture — becoming a defining figure of the American craft movement in the process — she had other things on her mind.

“I didn’t pay much attention to it,” Nakashima-Yarnall recalls. “I was busy going to school and doing my music, playing the piano and the flute. I didn’t get involved in the work or the business.”

But here she is nearly two decades after her father’s death, running George Nakashima Woodworker, the Bucks County studio he opened in 1945. Nakashima-Yarnall is the creative director and head designer; her brother Kevin is vice president. The siblings have continued their father’s tradition by producing his classic designs. At the same time, Nakashima-Yarnall, who has a bachelor’s degree in Architectural Sciences from Harvard and a master’s degree from Waseda University in Japan, has created furniture lines of her own. There is no question that woodworking, design, and architecture are in her blood.

The Nakashima name is hallowed among curators, collectors, and anyone who appreciates the art of crafting fine furniture from wood.

“There are probably three factors that make it what it is: The quality of the craftsmanship, the quality of the design, and the quality of the wood,” says Robert Aibel, whose Moderne Gallery in Philadelphia is the pre-eminent showplace of Nakashima’s work. “People tend to focus on the wood itself. And it’s true, there are rare and important pieces of wood that George chose. They can recognize the quality of the craftsmanship, because the furniture is built to last forever. But they tend to miss the quality of the design because they get carried away with the wood itself.”

Nakashima’s design process always began while he was cutting the tree he had selected. “There are myriad decisions that were made about where to cut, where to put butterflies (a Nakashima hallmark for joining separate or split pieces of wood), or exactly where to place the base,” Aibel continues. “Because the work looks effortless, people don’t realize this. It fools a lot of people, especially on some of the more complicated pieces that look so simple.”

Nakashima-Yarnall is a petite grandmother who seems younger than her 67 years. Sitting on a clear, spring morning in the airy room her father built known as the Reception House, surrounded by his designs, she reflects on her decision to take over the business after his death in 1990.

“His woodpile was sitting out in a yard in Philadelphia, and I inherited it,” she says. “He had each of those logs milled with something in mind. And I realized that this was his legacy. I felt a responsibility, also for the skilled men who had worked with him for so many years. I wanted to keep it going.”

The story of the Nakashima family’s journey from a World War II internment camp in Idaho to their compound in New Hope is familiar to his followers. George Nakashima was born in Spokane, Washington. He was a boy scout who loved wood. He started college as a forestry major, but he switched to architecture, training at the University of Washington, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and L’Ecole Americaine des Beaux Arts in France. Nakashima worked for the firm of Antonin Raymond in Japan, where he met his wife Marion before returning to the U.S. in 1941.

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