Opposite: Erland
Breakfast Table, 2010,
Michelangelo marble
slab, ebonized oak
frame, satin brass ac-
cents, 30x38x28 in.
Below: Red Fife Tripod
Lamp, 2009, spun alumi-
num shade, lathe-turned
candy apple oak legs,
aluminum, 60 x 18 in.
Right: Fairbank’s studio
with Onavaillu Dining
Chair on worktable.
nightstands were all part of our repertoire.” Everything was man-
ufactured overseas and Fairbank found himself alienated from
the production process. “There was a massive disconnect,” he says.
After a few years, Fairbank joined DucDuc, the children’s furni-
ture company. Working as a junior designer, he and a few others
prototyped DucDuc’s first four lines. It was a crash course in small-
line production: “From rocking chairs to bunk beds, I was design-
ing and building simultaneously. These two processes definitely
informed one another. I traveled many times to my boss’s wood
shop upstate to build the prototypes I was drawing on AutoCAD.”
Suffice it to say, Fairbank has had ample experience with logis-
tics and project management. But the way he tells it, being a maker
was destined. A chance encounter with a furniture maker, whose
car broke down in front of his parents’ house one summer, and
a hand-me-down fetish (his mother is an antiques dealer) seemed
to have sealed his fate. So after years working with interiors and
industrial design, in 2005 he made a return to the studio, taking
a part-time job to make ends meet. “My sanity depended upon hav-
ing more hands-on experiences,” he said in an interview with the
Design Glut blog last year. Fairbank has kept his current shop
on the crumbly end of Metropolitan Avenue in the Williamsburg
neighborhood for a year now, sharing the second floor of an indus-
trial-use building with two other woodworkers. In one corner, >
aug/sep 10 american craft 045
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