When we think of “grass furniture,” we think thatching, like cottage roofs in Merry Olde England. It wouldn’t occur to us that the term “grass furniture” could apply to the beautiful, angular table in front of us. Sleek and sculptural, warmed by its honey-toned tabletop, the table is made of grass, giant grass, actually: bamboo.
Ken Tomita of Tomita design.build builds furniture using traditional Japanese joinery and contemporary forms (notes of minimalism and Noguchi) exclusively with bamboo plywood. Bamboo plywood isn’t like any plywood you’ve ever seen before. Rather than the sandwich cookie edge of regular plywood, bamboo ply’s edges are solid. Tomita does a line of clean, modern furniture as well as loads of custom work for selective clients like the Oregon Buddhist Temple and the new NE restaurant, Terroir, many of whom have been looking for years for the perfect table or bench or…until they meet Tomita.
“¾ bamboo ply drives the design,” Tomita says. “It’s a sheet good that’s also solid, unlike other plywoods. I like doing things that are real. It lets me show the material for what it is. Bamboo ply is four times as expensive as regular plywood. You know what the ends of regular plywood look like. They’re ugly, and they reveal that it’s a fake material. You couldn’t do what I’m doing, these angular beveled edges, with regular plywood.” Nor could the sophisticated joinery (with exposed tenons) he does be executed with any other plywood.
“The material itself helps me achieve my goals. I want to meld the traditional, the warm feeling of wood with sharp modern lines,” Tomita says. “I’d like each piece to move toward being a piece of contemporary sculpture. In some ways, using this material is cheating. Because it makes what I want to do so possible.”
Are there any drawbacks to working with the bamboo ply? “It’s heavy. It’s hard on blades. It splinters,” he says. “There can be issues with warping. It’s a glued up table top, after all. I’m interested in pushing it to the limits of what it can do, to make volume with it, to transcend its sheet nature.”
Tomita’s designs may begin with a sketch, but they take shape in his hands. He works iteratively with small cardboard maquettes or models on his dining room table. And Tomita makes adjustments or gets inspiration as he builds, one table top shape was suggested by the fact that it was the cutout leftover from the table’s legs.
We visit Tomita in his West Hills home which serves as a showroom for his work. (His workshop is a shared studio/workspace on the Inner Eastside.) When we visit, in early spring, he’s recovering from his third concussion resulting from a programme of surfing, snowboarding, and skating. Funny, Tomita doesn’t come across as a daredevil, more a soft-spoken, engaged thinker who’s passionate about his work.
He engages both his Japanese-American heritage and his love of modern design in each piece, sometimes overtly as with his Yama table inspired by Torii gates, and sometimes obliquely, his Chabu bench, he suggests could serve as a table if one were sitting on the floor Japanese-style.
Near the floor-to-ceiling window is a glass-topped table on slowly twisting square legs of deep brown wood that Tomita carved from larger blocks when he was 17. Is the reference to Noguchi intentional? “Yes,” Tomita says, “his work has always been an influence. And at the time I made this I was obsessed with the Noguchi table.” But it wasn’t clear to Tomita at 17 that he wanted to focus on designing and building furniture.
His meandering collegiate studies, heavy on art classes, resulted in a degree in East Asian Studies/Art History. On visits to Japan he took classes in architecture, art, silversmithing. (Tomita still visits Japan annually, studying traditional Japanese joinery.) Finally, he decided to go to graduate school in architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. “It’s very conceptual. My strength is in engineering. So I applied there on purpose to challenge myself. I learned what questions to ask as well as how to figure out answers for myself. After a year, I got an internship with Gerard Minakawa. I went to Santa Barbara to take the position at Ukao, and I never left.” He still refers to Minakawa as his mentor, and his name comes up often in our conversation about his work. It’s possible Tomita would still be working with him in Santa Barbara if Minakawa hadn’t spontaneously decided to close-up shop and move to Bolivia. They still work together on giant bamboo structures bi-annually at Burning Man.
Near the two exquisitely simple small square tables (blonde inverted u-shapes) there is a bowl. From a few steps away, the lengths of black branches in the bowl appear charred but very smooth. Looking closer at their ends, they are shiny like metal or glass, and when Tomita strikes one against the other, there is a metallic clang. “Last time I was in Japan,” he says, “I found this charcoal in Ginza. I’d like to incorporate it into a piece.”
We ask about the legs of the two Tomita tables in his living room. They are a deep, black hole kind of black. “When I was at RISD and making a lamp, I was looking for a way to make wood black. So I blackened it with a torch, I stained it. I tried shoe polish which was a good black, but too glossy. Finally, I tried sumi and achieved this great deep black. I think of it as painting a void,” he says. “It’s tricky. It has to go on right. But when it’s good….”
In the corner, there is what can only be described as a book tree. Constructed of four lengths of bamboo ply and a number of aluminum rods that both hold the lengths together and serve to hold Tomita’s design books, his Kibako book display takes the coffee table books off the coffee table and makes them elements of a changing sculpture. “Ideally, I would be a sculptor,” Tomita says.
Tomita’s work is available through his website www.tomita-db.com.
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