Publications
As
the burl turns
Griffin
Okie's life has focused on a love for fine wood
By
Rebecca Larsen
Independent
Journal Reporter
|
|
|
POLISHING
OFF HIS HANDIWORK: Griffin Okie of Mill Valley fell in love with
woodworking 25 years ago. He makes furniture
and doors in a workshop in San Rafael. He was recently featured
on the cover of Woodwork magazine. |
BEHIND Griffin Okie's workshop in San Rafael are several portable sheds and containers crammed with wood: exotic oaks, acacia, walnut, carob, pecan, applewood, olive.
There are slabs and chunks and bits of trees that he turns into boards and workable pieces and then uses to create doors, sideboards, cradles, desks and coffee tables.
He doesn't run around cutting down trees; he picks up bits and pieces here and there from trees that have fallen down or that are being removed by developers. Some pieces he bought many years ago.
"I've always been fascinated by wood; I'm a sucker for wood; I have too much wood," he says. "I get most of it from a sawyer who calls me whenever something blows down that's unusual."
Okie arrived in California about 25 years ago after getting a degree from Yale and serving three cruises in the Navy off Vietnam. "That was another life," he says, "another time."
He then worked for six months for Crocker Bank. "But I just didn't want to go on with the job. I'd seen my father bumped around by the corporate world. I wanted to be my own boss from the get-go."
He and a friend opened a store on Union Street in San Francisco in 1972. Called Dovetail, it featured lots of handmade woodwork, weavings and similar crafts of the '70s.
It was there that he started to fall in love with wooden furniture.
"Even though I'd only had an eighth grade shop class, I wanted to make my own. I knew the basics, but I made a lot of mistakes for the first 10 years. I didn't even know how to sharpen a chisel until I'd had my own shop for five years."
After selling Dovetail, he started out making tables with $400 worth of tools that he had in his garage. "Eventually I could succeed in making anything you want me to."
He moved to Marin in 1975 and now lives in Mill Valley.
According to Brooks Townes, writing about Okie in a recent article in the locally published Woodwork magazine, "Okie simply barged into woodworking, nearly unaware of the Old School, which may be why he, along with his pals, has come up with so many fresh ideas--nobody told them woodworking was hard or that old methods were the only way."
From "hippie-style" furniture that Okie made in the 1970s, his work has evolved into a mix of Arts and Crafts and Asian cabinetry. Kathy Crowley, who carries his work at her store, K. Crowley Pacific Designs in San Anselmo, recently sold one of his designs--a California walnut dining room table--for $4,200.
|
|
|
HARDWOOD
DOORS: Griffin Okie puts together a set of doors for a San Francisco
house using a system of mortise-and-tenon joints
he designed |
"He's a wonderful woodworker," she says. "He's so good at following the natural grain of the wood and he's great to work with."
Okie particularly likes to do "book matchings" with grains. That means the grains of two boards unfold on a surface like pages from a book.
The dining room table she sold, Crowley says, could be used with modern chairs or with more traditional chairs. "It's a classic, it would fit in anywhere."
Over the years, Okie has had a number of interesting customers, he says, including famous singers and Silicon Valley millionaires.
Right now he's working on a particularly ticklish job, building more than a dozen doors for an Arts-and-Crafts style mansion with a Moorish flavor, being constructed in the Twin Peaks area of San Francisco.
Some of the doors use lacewood from Brazil; the front door has panels of tortoise shell mahogany; even doors in the basement will be solid cherry.
To make the special joints required for the doors, he had to buy and modify special machinery. "We had to reinvent a machine," he says.
But the mortise and tenon joints he's creating for these doors are what he calls "three-story joints."
By that I mean you can throw them out of a three story window and they'll survive.
Griffin W. Okie can be reached at (415) 456-7456. For more about Okie and how he works with wood, see the December 1997 issue of Woodwork, published by Ross Periodicals, 42 Digital Drive, Novato, CA, (415) 382-0580. Okie is the subject of a cover story in the issue.