Architectural Digest | A Look at the Life of America’s Most Important Contemporary Woodworker

The designer George Nakashima was fond of saying that he kept some pieces of wood in his studio for long periods of time, and “it would only be after 10 years that it would occur to him what to do with them,” recalls his nephew, John Nakashima.

George’s bewitchingly elegant wooden furniture, which emphasizes the unique shape, spirit, and peculiarities of it material, is now a cornerstone of 20th-century design, but as John details in his new documentary, George Nakashima: Woodworker, his uncle came to his profession, and his artistic sensibility, only after similarly prolonged deliberation in his 30s. “He just didn’t happen into his career,” John says. He decided that “he was going to find a reason to create.”

An archival image of George Nakashima with his daughter, Mira.

Photo: Courtesy of the George Nakashima Foundation for Peace

The illuminating film, tenderly narrated by John, a producer for West Virginia Public Broadcasting, will have its premiere run from Friday evening through Sunday on Design Miami’s website. It follows the future icon from his birth to first-generation Japanese immigrants in Spokane, Washington, in 1905, through his architecture studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on to his travel, beginning in 1931, via an around-the-world steamship ticket.

An iconic Nakashima table and chairs.

Photo: Courtesy of George Nakashima Woodworkers