“A wobbly line here, a slightly askew handle there, reminds the
consumer that the product is made by hand.” This is the late British
design historian Peter Dormer in
The Meanings of Modern Design,
published in 1990. Writing on the studio craft movement, Dormer
describes imperfection as the individual maker’s ramshackle bayo-
net in an era of mechanization. “The handicrafts of the 20th cen-
tury,” he wrote, “oppose rather than serve or enhance industrial
design.” Twenty years later, young makers are only too well aware
of this historical battle line, and it has certainly been drawn for the
Brooklyn-based furniture maker Matthew Fairbank.
Fairbank embodies this opposition, on the one hand, making
one-of-a-kind tables, chairs and the like through his line, Matthew
Fairbank Design, and on the other, having designed furniture for
assembly lines and scaled production for sleek commercial entities.
“There’s that inner war in me. Am I just a designer, or do I really
love doing what I do in a physical sense?” But perhaps posing the
question is enough to make a sort of peace with it. So far in Fair-
bank’s short career, the 28-year-old designer has managed to em-
brace the divide by adapting to the nuances of client demands, out-
sourcing to vendors and manufacturers when he needs a hand, and
simultaneously pinching from the industrial design world as inspi-
ration for his own idiosyncratic craft. It’s almost as if the battle line
has been breached, or at least approached in less reactionary terms.
Like other Rhode Island School of Design furniture students
taught by John Dunnigan and Rosanne Somerson, Fairbank learned
that anything that can be made with a machine can also be done by
hand. In his first semester, a “no power tools” rule forced him to see
this, and Fairbank recalls falling into a shop-clique of kids so ob-
sessed with quality that they would “try to pass a hair through the
joinery to test whether it was tight enough.” He fondly calls his
group the “wood nerds.” But after graduating from art school’s hap-
py laboratory in 2003, Fairbank struggled to find work in a world
that, he discovered, often cared less than he about beautiful hand-
made furniture. Like any adaptable maker, Fairbank instead took
an internship and then a job designing interiors with a massively
massive corporation, Starwood Hotels and Resorts. One of the
largest hotel chains on earth, Starwood owns the Sheraton, Westin
and w brands. It runs 992 properties worldwide, or 298,500 hotel
rooms. Every year this means hundreds of thousands of chairs and
tables put into production.
At this scale, Fairbank’s concept of furniture as a set of discrete
objects expanded into a world of cohesive interiors. Lighting,
mood and surface texture became more of a factor, and he was intro-
duced to a range of industrial design methods and materials. “We
designed the guest rooms and everything in them—floor coverings,
bath accessories, headboards, ballroom stacking chairs and
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