ARTISAN: Repro Man

 

A fine layer of sawdust, like a coating of powdered gold, covers nearly every flat surface in Boyd Hutchison’s woodshop in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Brush it away and you might uncover a finely turned wooden bowl, an oval box, or the marbled grain of a bureau or tabletop. It’s almost like an excavation—which seems particularly appropriate since Hutchison is best known regionally for his reproductions of original Shaker furniture. As a part-time collections assistant at the Shaker Museum and Library in Old Chatham, New York, Hutchison possesses not only a hands-on familiarity with the Shaker aesthetic, but also access to the original pieces themselves, a number of which he has duplicated—often adapting and updating them—for homeowners around the region.

 

Hutchison combines technical precision, a thorough understanding of Shaker methods and style, and a willingness to build out of the box, so to speak. He has no qualms about updating a Shaker design to serve as an entertainment center, or creating a Shaker-style cupboard specifically to hold ties and belts, while still maintaining the integrity of the design.

 

“It’s a matter of adapting a Shaker piece to a contemporary setting and oftentimes adapting it to do something completely different from what the Shakers used it for,” Hutchison says. “I’m not interested in design for the sake of design, but I love to think of how to make furniture do what people want it to.” Soft-spoken, with an unlined face and dark hair that belie his seventy-two years, Hutchison is seated in a Windsor chair at a long dining table—both of which he built—in the home he shares with his wife, Catherine.

 

Extending across one wall of the dining room is his reproduction of a Shaker counter made for the meetinghouse at Canterbury, New Hampshire, painted in dark blue milk paint (a lead-free alternative to the Prussian blue of the original piece). “One of the reasons Shakers used blue so frequently for anything to do with the meetinghouse and the ministry,” Hutchison continues, “was because that was the most expensive pigment available, so they showed they were willing to spend considerable sums of money for anything to do with their religion. In the dwellings, they used reds and yellows and other pigments that weren’t so expensive.”

 

Lining the kitchen around the corner is another of his projects: three walls of built-in cupboards, with frame and panel doors, wooden knobs, and tiny drawers in which Catherine keeps spices and utensils. Down the hall in the study is one of Hutchison’s favorite pieces of his own making: a Canterbury side table with tapered legs that he reproduced in curly cherry. Sanded to within an inch of its life, the grain is so smooth and glowing that it appears to have depth, like a hologram (in woodworking terms, it’s called “chatoyancy”). It’s easy to see how he produces so much sawdust, achieving glossy surfaces such as this one, which he typically finishes with traditional materials like shellac and oils.

 

“Boyd is an absolutely consummate Shaker craftsman,” says Betsey McKearnan, who, with her husband, David, commissioned five pieces from Hutchison—including the tie cupboard—when they relocated from New York City to a home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1992. “We were coming from a very Victorian brownstone in Brooklyn, with lots of detail, lots of fussiness, and we were looking for something simple, so we turned to Shaker. Boyd was very flexible—he would try anything and he was clever enough to make anything work. We told him what we wanted, and he made it possible.”

 

For the McKearnans’ dining room, Hutchison built a round table of blistered maple that expands to seat fifteen and a sideboard designed in traditional Shaker style—except for the Mexican tiles inlaid across the top so hot dishes can be set on it. For the bedroom, he built a four-poster bed with tapered eight-foot posts and built-in dressers combining cherry wood and tiger maple, with rolling drawers “you can pull out with your little finger,” Betsey says.

 

“When Boyd builds furniture, it’s practical, it’s workable, and it has an excellent sense of ergonomics,” David McKearnan adds.

 

Not infrequently, Hutchison says, making a piece work for a contemporary home means shrinking the original scale. “Because the Shakers were communal; Shaker furniture tends to be too large for the average home,” he explains. The only piece he’s ever adapted in order to make it larger rather than smaller was a reproduction of a freestanding cupboard for a home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. (The original piece, circa 1820, was purchased by Bill Cosby in 1988, for two hundred thousand dollars, from the collection of Darrow School in New Lebanon, New York, which had acquired it from the Mount Lebanon Shakers in 1930.)

 

Hutchison theorizes that it was the Shakers’ communal living arrangements that led to their ingenious designs. “I’ve always thought they were just like everybody else in the world at that time, but one of the things they had going for them was they lived in this big communal family—there were a lot more people bouncing ideas around than you’d find sitting around a table in a farmhouse,” he posits. “It was a critical intellectual mass that helped them come up with more efficient ways of doing things.”

 

The only element cabinetmaking has in common with Hutchison’s first career is the fact that both involve trees—though in decidedly different ways. He holds a master’s degree in Forest Watershed Management from Colorado State University and a master’s and doctorate in Forest Meteorology from Yale. (His thesis was called “Photographic Assessment of Deciduous Forest Radiation Regimes.”)

 

In the 1970s, he established and ran a long-term research project on forest ecosystems for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in association with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “My primary role was to work with ecologists and environmental scientists … devoting our energies to trying to understand how natural ecosystems operate,” he says. “This was before people were talking about sustainability and biodiversity.”

 

“Boyd’s training in forestry means he is really valuable in identifying what kind of wood the objects in the collection are made of,” says Jerry Grant, director of research and library services at the Shaker Museum. “He does a microscopic evaluation of the different kinds of wood, and we’ve found a couple species you wouldn’t automatically think the Shakers would use.” In addition, Grant says, “his understanding of the structure of furniture [allows him] to keep a vigilant eye on conservation issues—how the furniture changes as the temperature and humidity change.”

 

During his years as a researcher, cabinetmaking was only a sideline for Hutchison—something he loved and pursued through the occasional seminar or workshop. “I always wanted to know how to do things with my hands,” he says. “When I was six years old, I started building stick-model airplanes, and, in high school, I wanted to take wood shop and metal shop, but that was the vocational program and I was in the college prep program. I got to take Latin and algebra, but I didn’t get to take wood shop.” He made up for that later on, attending evening woodworking classes at the local high school in Oak Ridge and traveling farther afield for more advanced programs, including a workshop on Windsor chair making and a three-day seminar on Shaker design at the Shaker Museum and Library in the mid-eighties.

 

That trip set the stage for an ongoing connection to the museum and to the Berkshires—beginning with a commission to reproduce a birch trestle table in the Old Chatham collection, continuing when he exhibited work at the museum’s Shaker workmanship shows, and culminating when he moved to the area in 1989. He and Catherine soon bought a house down a winding road in Sheffield and added on the two-story, nine-hundred-square-foot workshop from which, over the years, Hutchison has produced cabinetry for entire kitchens as well as individual pieces—including a reproduction in flaming birch of a dining room table from the Old Chatham collection, which he made for Gene and Karen Faul of Alford, Massachusetts. Gene describes it as “a magnificent piece of furniture—a great example of what somebody can do to make it as close as possible to the original.”

 

“What strikes me about Boyd is the level of his attention to detail,” says Denny Phelps of Custom Furniture Care, a restorer based in Canaan, New York, who has worked extensively with Hutchison as well as numerous other woodworkers in the region. “When he’s doing a project, he goes to the nth degree in picking out woods that match perfectly, cutting the joints so everything fits like a glove, sanding, finishing, all of it. And he has a lot of humility for someone who possesses such vast knowledge and skill.”

 

Hutchison begins each project by making very detailed drawings; he has created a number of dimensional drawings of objects from the Shaker Museum and Library and hopes to eventually produce a complete catalog of the collection. He uses traditional joinery whenever possible, he says, pointing out the sliding dovetail joints on a chest of drawers currently in progress, but doesn’t always make every piece of joinery by hand. And he won’t hesitate to use wood screws and other metal fastenings when appropriate, as the Shakers did; it’s a myth that the Shakers never used nails.

 

“The biggest challenge in woodworking when you’re doing traditional joinery is figuring out how to put these things together so they don’t tear themselves apart in our centrally heated homes of today,” Hutchison says, referring to the way wood contracts and expands as temperature and humidity shift. “Every time I build a piece of furniture, I think about allowing for that kind of movement.” Also like the Shakers, he uses a table saw and a spindle sander (theirs were powered by water), as well as a band saw.

 

Hutchison makes traditional Shaker oval boxes, and at one time worked as an interpretive craftsman at Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. “Oval boxes are intriguing to me,” he says. “There are so many steps needed to make them,” from steaming or immersion in hot water, so they can be bent, to cutting and tacking the swallowtail joints. The austerity of Shaker furniture is equally illusory. “The simplicity is very deceiving—it’s not a straightforward process to take a Shaker design and make something that looks Shaker,” Hutchison says, adding in typically understated fashion, “Somehow I have a feel for it.” [JUNE 2010]

Tresca Weinstein writes about home design, visual art, dance, and yoga for national and regional publications.

 

THE GOODS

Hutchison Woodworking