George Sawyer was home-schooled in chairmaking. His father, Dave, a pivotal figure in the renaissance of green-wood and Windsor chairmaking in the United States, was building pared-down Windsors in his one-man home shop in Vermont all throughout George’s childhood. Dave, an MIT-trained mechanical engineer who taught himself to build chairs—making hundreds of ladderbacks in the 1970s before switching to Windsors in 1982—was famously generous with his knowledge and became a mentor to scores of aspiring chairmakers.

George, however, was not originally among them. He spent “tons of time” in his father’s shop as a kid working on all sorts of projects—but none were chairs. After studying product design at Rhode Island School of Design and working for an architect on the West Coast and then for the inventor of a wood-fired steam-powered generator, George circled back home and learned the craft of chairs from his father.

George’s company, Sawyer Made, has absorbed his father’s example but takes Windsors in a different direction. For George, the appeal of the Windsor is less its craft background than its design parameters and possibilities. “My pieces are transitional—clearly rooted in the traditional but bringing more modern design language into the forms,” he says. With a team of four in the shop, Sawyer Made is making many more chairs than Dave did, and production efficiency is a key factor in the design process. “We’ve gone from all hand tools to a blend of hand and power tools,” George says. “But no robots yet!” He does embrace digital technology in the design process. After sketching ideas by hand, he moves to CAD modeling software. “That really helps me get the geometry right before building,” he explains, “and it cuts out a lot of the frustration.”

Bending tradition

George Sawyer’s Windsors embody the DNA of traditional chairs like those made by his father, Dave, but with their unexpected size, shape, and color, they’re animated by a dash of modern daring and dazzle. The blue bench, built to fit an elliptical stairwell in California, was made during Covid and sized to a tracing of the space made by the customer.

Windsor gone rogue

After building some Windsor benches of extreme length and others that turned corners, George began to populate his sketchbook with unorthodox ideas, including one for Wayward Bench. “I don’t know what the Shakers would think,” he says, “but I like it.”

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