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Product Placem ent
IV h it M cL eo d
vino vessels, steam-bending
their quarter-sawn staves to
desired shapes©, and turning
them into handsome chairs,
such as Wine Barrel Folding
Chair© and Open Arm Morris
Chair©, tables and other pieces
inspired by Stickley, Wright
and Morris (it’s fitting, he
points out, that these designs
are being rendered in woods
milled during the Arts and
Crafts era). Historical features,
such as original hand drawknife
marks, are lovingly preserved,
and the wood’s provenance is
stamped on the underside of
each piece. Though wineries
are his signature source for oak,
McLeod also scours demolition
Whit McLeod’s customers tend
to fall into a couple of catego-
ries. There’s the green audi-
ence, who like that all of his
furniture is handcrafted from
reclaimed materials. Wine afi-
cionados covet his pieces made
from old oak winery barrels.
The design crowd admires the
earthy, refined-rustic aesthetic
of McLeod’s line, its perfect
function and fresh, contempo-
rary take on classic Arts and
Crafts style.
Then, he says, “there are
the people who just like to sit
in a comfortable chair.” He’s
got them covered, too.
McLeod, who lives and
works in the Northern Califor-
nia city of Areata, a hub of envi-
ronmental awareness deep in
redwood country, has always
been a tree guy. He grew up in
Marin County, in a 1962 Doug-
las fir house designed by Joseph
Esherick, a founder of
UC
Berkeley’s College of Environ-
mental Design (and a nephew
of the great wood sculptor
and furniture maker Wharton
Esherick). Around the home
were beautiful antique wood
objects McLeod’s father, a com-
modities broker, brought back
from business trips to Japan—a
tansu chest, a hibachi—all
straightforward and unadorned,
yet soulful and functional.
He began making things in
wood as a kid, and went on to
earn a college degree in wildlife
biology. After stints working
on a chemical tanker ship and at
a fish cannery in Alaska, he re-
turned to California and spent
three years with the U.S. Forest
Sendee inventorying old-
growth Douglas fir forests along
the Pacific coast, an experience
that raised his eco-conscious-
ness long before “sustainable”
became a buzzword. By the late
1980s he had set up his wood
shop and found steady work
making custom presentation
boxes for wineries in the re-
gion. Then in 1991 the Italian
Swiss Colony Winery modern-
ized its facility and offered
McLeod three dozen gigantic,
century-old tanks made of the
highest-grade white oak. The
windfall opened up a new di-
rection for his work.
“Man, something good had
to be done with that material,”
he recalls. “That was kind of
the start of it.”
Ever since, McLeod and his
team of craftsmen have been
taking apart discarded vintage
sites for scraps of redwood,
Douglas fir and copper. Like his
furniture, McLeod’s philoso-
phy is simple and enduring: to
“add something beautiful to the
world without taking anything
away.”—
j . l .
010
american craft
june/julyio
www.WorldMags.net & www.Journal-Plaza.net
Wine Barrel Folding Chair and steam bending photos Ethan Hill.
