Inside George Nakashima’s Japanese-Style Home & Workshop | Unique Spaces | Architectural Digest

I'm Mira Nakashima, daughter of George Nakashima, and we are at the Nakashima Studios. We're gonna take you on a trip around the property in New Hope, Pennsylvania. My father, George, was the first of four children. He was born in 1905 in Spokane, Washington. He loved Boy Scouts and developed a very strong love of trees at that point. So he decided to major in forestry at University of Washington, and then realized that his employment opportunities were somewhat limited in that profession and switched to architecture. And then he got a scholarship to MIT and graduated in 1930 at the height of the Depression. So he had trouble getting a job, and at one point he decided the best thing to do would be to sell his car and buy a steamship ticket around the world with that money. So he bummed around Paris for a while. There were two buildings which really fascinated him. One was the Chartres Cathedral. Every inch of that cathedral, it was built by people of all different walks of life who just worked together to build this cathedral. Another building was a Corbusier building. The Pavillon Suisse was under construction when he was in Paris, and he was fascinated with reinforced concrete architecture. This is the Conoid Studio. Conoid basically means it's generated from a section of a cone. My dad was really into thin warped shell roofs, and this is the most experimental warped shell on the property. It's made of reinforced concrete, and it's a 40 by 40 foot span. It's round at that end, and it's basically flat at the other end, but the engineers added the signed curves so he could keep it 2 1⁄2 inches thick. When he started working on it, he was so inspired by the space, he set up his studio here. So this space spawned a line of furniture. You have the Conoid chair, which has become kind of synonymous with our brand. It is a two-legged cantilevered chair, and when it came out, we received a number of letters saying, hey, you can't sell a two-legged wooden chair. You're gonna get sued up and down the street. A two-legged chair is gonna break all the time. It doesn't break. It's one of our strongest chairs. I love it dearly. We also have the Conoid dining table. This one's made with English walnut. We have the Conoid coffee table. We have the Conoid room divider, which is right here. This one's made with Persian walnut. Really lovely. Conoid end table here. Lots of Conoid-named pieces. Nothing's cone-shaped, though. The little chair in the front right there with three legs was the first original Mira chair. It was designed for me when I was about 10. That's in the early 1950s. He said he had this feeling of death in the Paris society, and he decided it was time to get back on that boat and ended up in Japan. It was 1934, so he got a job with the office of Raymond Antonin in Tokyo. He brought modern architecture to Japan, and there were many people in his office who became wonderful modernist architects in Japan, and Dad was exposed to them. They hadn't done any reinforced concrete of any kind in the continent of India at the time, so Dad volunteered to go and be architect on site. He went there in 1936. He had to train people to do reinforced concrete, so he became very involved in the society and the philosophy, and took on the name of Sundarananda. They thought he was going to stay there for the rest of his life, but World War II was starting. Dad had second thoughts. He said, well, if my family is all back in the USA, I better go back to the USA. On the way, he met my mother. They fell in love, became engaged, and were married in Los Angeles in 1941, and then they moved up to Seattle, Washington. On the way, Dad did a survey trip of architecture in the USA, and he decided he didn't want to be an architect anymore if that's the way they were doing architecture in the USA, so he turned to furniture. A year after my parents were married, I was born, and then six weeks after that, we were all incarcerated on the Idaho desert. That was my first home, which I don't remember, luckily. Our family decided if we were going to be incarcerated, we would all be together, so my grandparents and my aunts and uncles and we were all together in the same camp. One good thing that he did learn when we were in camp, the Japanese carpenter he worked with basically instructed him in how to improvise with found objects because that's all we had. We had leftover packing materials, there were leftover building materials, there was bitter brush that grew on the desert. He also learned how to use Japanese hand tools and certain kinds of joinery that he wasn't that familiar with. He was so grateful to this man named Gentaro Hikogawa because he was a master carpenter. There was no furniture except the army cots, so Dad and Gentaro learned how to improvise and make furniture for our camp space. My mother was not so happy with the situation, but Dad, he knew how to make the best of whatever was given you. Dad's professor from MIT contacted Anton and Noemi Raymond who had left Japan and came back to Pennsylvania to the East Coast and had bought an old farm in Bucks County and Dad's professor contacted them and said, can you please sponsor the Nakashimas so they can leave camp and they did. And so they insisted they really needed a chicken farmer. So my dad came and he was a chicken farmer in Pennsylvania. After a while, he said chickens and he were not psychologically compatible. There were some letters that we discovered in the family house that my mother had written and she described the time when we were at the Raymond farm just down the hill here. There's a stream that runs by the farm and she said we were playing in the fresh water and we were free. She was just so grateful to be free and out of that camp. Even though we were chicken farmers, we were at least free. When we were released from camp early, during that period of time, because of Mr. Raymond's connections with the architecture and art world, Dad met Isamu Noguchi and Harry Bertoia. Harry was a sculptor and he also designed chairs for Noel. So when Dad built this building, Harry was very kind and gifted Dad a sculpture. So one of the sculptures is hanging on the wall over there. The other one's outside on the patio. We've also used Akari lamps, which were designed by Isamu Noguchi. He was basically doing the same kind of thing as my father and he did his part to try to preserve the old Japanese craft traditions after World War II. I think this is one of the biggest ones that Noguchi designed, but Dad always had one hanging here. And this is our design studio. This is where we work. That's my desk right there. This is my desk and my chair. It used to be Dad's. We use old-fashioned drafting tools. Yeah, of course we have modernized and used computers. We still do our drawing by hand. I really feel it's important to be able to use real paper and pencils to draw because it sort of translates into the handwork in the shop. When Dad started out, I think everybody was geared towards mass production, but he was of the mind where he thought we should preserve handwork and making things by hand and just the whole experience of people's hands on natural materials and using not just machines, which we use partly, but hand tools as well. He insisted that that was an important part of design. They're gonna make this for the Wayne Art Center. Yeah. Should be nice. It's a nice board. This is my husband, John. He's working on a chair, as usual. He was working before we met. We were both married to other people at the time. Things happened. We commiserated and became friends. Originally, this was a lunchroom, but no one was eating lunch here, so it became the chair shop. It's somewhat passive solar, so we're facing south. So the light, as the days shorten, comes farther and farther into the building and warms it up. This was the prototype for the Conoid Studio, so it must have been done first. Yeah. In 58, and the other was finished during 59 or so. You'll notice the shape of the roof is the same. It just doesn't have that sine wave curve throughout. And it's smaller, and it's made of plywood instead of concrete. The three of us that work here, so it's a little tight, but we get along. We have to move through the room to do our various tasks. There was a sculptor in Japan named Nagurai, and he said that you couldn't have evil thoughts in a Nakashima chair. It puts you in a certain state. So in a sense, for George, a chair is like a throne. You should sense something in yourself, and the chair is helping you to make that connection. This building was the only non-George building on the property. It was built in 1990 after my father passed away because he had this huge pile of lumber stored down in Philadelphia. And as soon as he died, they said, we need the space. Move it. Get it out of here. So my daughter Maria, who's also an architect, drafted what we needed as far as space. We built the first half of this pole barn in 1990, and the second half in 95, because we ran out of space. So this is where we store our lumber. The majority of the furniture that we make is made with American black walnut or cherry, but there are a great many species in here, about 50. Some of the more notable ones are things like Persian walnut and English walnut. We actually have some Persian walnut logs right here. The ones marked with red paint on the side, those come from Iran. We also have some of our East Indian rosewood blocks right there, which we use for our butterflies. So during George's time, he was able to purchase whole logs from other countries, and nowadays that's not possible because you can't import a log from another country because it has to be properly processed in its country of origins as to not bring in invasive species. So nowadays it's nearly impossible to get these species, like our Persian walnut, like our English walnut. They won't let them in. Get a good smuggler. Smuggle a log. Will this fit in my suitcase? When we moved to this property, dad didn't have enough money in the bank to buy the property itself, but he fell in love with the south-facing slope. And he found out the man who owned it was a fellow MIT graduate. And he said, "'Could I please have three acres of land to build on "'in exchange for labor on your farm?' He said, okay, back in the 1940s, you could do things like that. He let my father build the workshop first, and he literally built it with his own two hands. And then he started building our house, which he also built with his own two hands. This is the old family house. It was actually the first house that was ours. When we first moved to the property, we lived in an old army tent in the back of this building. And while dad built this, and he concentrated on finishing the shop first so he could earn a living. And then he's probably working on projects in this shop too, and finishing this house in his spare time, which he didn't have much of. This is where I grew up, where I used to roller skate in here. This used to be my room here. And I was allowed to paint murals on the walls here. They're like Fusuma doors in Japan, and it covers the closet. This was the early one with skunks and animals. And this is the later one with the Thunderbird there on the right-hand side. When was the first Thunderbird made? I have no idea. I know nothing about cars. This is the room that dad built for me when my brother was born in 1954. And I moved in and lived here until I left for college in 1963. And it's nice remembering when I was here. This is my parents' bedroom. And my parents always lived here, and the pictures on the wall are pretty much the way they were when my parents lived here. These are both Ben Shaw and Peace Doves. The tea cart there was designed by my father for my mother. She had trouble walking. It's on casters so she could carry stuff around. I think these were wedding presents from my father and mother from somebody a long time ago. And she kept pictures of friends and relations in her room. I remember the trees were much smaller, and dad used to call it mural land. And it was little. It was magical. Dad did not teach me anything directly, and I learned what I learned from the workmen directly. When I came in in 1970, dad was giving them these little half-page sketches of freehand drawings and a few rough dimensions. And that was their plan for making their furniture. This is the arts building. It was one of my father's experimentations in thin-shell construction. That's a hyperbolic paraboloid shell roof, and it was built in 1967 as a gallery for Ben Shaw. And Ben Shaw came by after it was under construction and said, oh, George, you really need a mosaic on the wall. So we have a Ben Shaw mosaic on the outside of this building. All the furniture in this space is from George's era. In particular, this piece right here is my favorite on the property. This is one of our Arlen tables. This one's made with redwood, which comes from California. All of the redwood we have came from a forest fire. So you can see this one has really lovely charring on the outside, and it's taken this really interesting shape because it's a root burl, so it comes from underneath the earth. Really beautiful piece. It's funny when people just try to put down their drink and it falls straight through. Everybody who comes here and tries to walk up those stairs is a little bit afraid of walking on them because it doesn't look like it should stand. They're all cantilevered into the wall, and there's no railing. This building was built before building code came to Bucks County, so we got away with it. My parents used to have cocktail parties here, and it was kind of amusing to watch people walk up and down the stairs with a drinking hand. It was a little risky, but nobody's fallen off yet. Not even you. Yeah, we've been good. I wasn't that clumsy. Give me some credit. This is one of my favorite tables. It is one of the largest single-board tops of its time. I think it was built in mid-1960s, and Dad had gone to England to purchase these logs, and he found this English oak burl log, and among a bunch of other logs, English walnut, and he was so proud of himself. He said, the Queen of England should have sold her jewels and kept those logs, but I got them. This is a Harry Bertoia sound sculpture, and it's about to make a lot of noise. I love that thing. This is the reception house. This building was built in 1974, so George knew that this was going to be the last building he was gonna be able to build here. With that in mind, he used some of the best materials available to him, so we have some really great pieces of furniture in here. This headboard is made with English oak burl. The coffee table is made with buckeye burl. George also built this building during the energy crisis, so he thought fossil fuels wouldn't last this forever, so this house is entirely run with electrics. George intended on this building being kind of a retirement home for him and his wife, but he never ended up retiring, so they never ended up moving in, but this space has always been used as a place to host. Part of the reason Dad built this is he was working on Governor Rockefeller's home in Pocantico Hills, which was designed by Junzo Yoshimura, his best friend from the Raymond office. They asked Junzo to do the furniture, and he says, why don't you have my friend George do that instead? So that was one of the biggest commissions we've ever had. So we had more money to spend on things like new buildings than we did before. He actually imported plaster from Japan for the entryway and also the Japanese room. It's the only Japanese room on the property that has a four and a half mat footprint and has been used for tea ceremony and also as an extra bedroom. The bathtub looks pretty extravagant. It is a sunken bath, and it's decorated with penny round Japanese tiles, and my children were quite young at the time in the 70s, and Dad invited them to write their names for eternity in this tile bathtub and create their own little designs. And my brother has his name in the tiles in the bathroom as well. And the fireplace is built like an old Pennsylvania farmhouse so that when the fire gets going, it heats the entire building and it stays hot enough so that you could cook in the stone walls. When my father passed away in 1990, we decided we should expand its mission to include the preservation of the Nakashima buildings and property in New Hope. And even though my mother is gone, now my brother also is gone, we still have our woodworkers and our officers of the woodworking operation focused entirely on making furniture. In Western education, you're taught to develop your ego and do your own thing and design something different than anybody else ever did. And Dad was not that way. He was very rooted in tradition. And I think understanding the traditions of the past and the traditions of woodworking from the past are really important not to lose. And it's also respecting the material. People nowadays cut down thousands of acres of trees and there's so much material that's wasted. And Dad did not want to waste material. I think that's a really good lesson for today's society, not to waste what nature has given us and to make the best use of it.