Robert Beauchamp: Knot in the Family Tree

By David Colman
Woodwork, April 1995, No. 32, pages 30 through 38.

If there were a t-shirt that read "Real Woodworkers Log Their Own," Robert Beauchamp would be the first to wear one.

This furniture maker from Davis, California, does everything but plan his own seedlings. To find the kind of wood he needs, Beauchamp relies on a friend of his, Terry Wenner, who trims trees for a living. Wenner is always on the lookout for unusual specimens to add to Beauchamp's selection.

In addition, Beauchamp himself spots and tags felled trees that look promising, affixing notes that read: "Please call me if you would like to sell this wood." He occasionally responds to newspaper ads offering free wood in exchange for tree removal services.

It was Robert Erickson, Beauchamp's long-time mentor, who introduced him to the advantage of harvesting in the first place. Erickson, a noted chairmaker in his own right ("a Sierra chairmaker," in Woodwork, Issue 21), co-owns a portable chain sawmill with Beauchamp. Together, they use the mill to renew their supply of raw materials year-round.

By taking control of this first stage of the furniture-making process, Beauchamp ensures himself the best possible supply of lumber. Such a selection is especially important for projects like the expansive dining room tables he loves to fashion. The walnut he harvests is superior to commercially available wood in both grain, pattern and size. His inventory includes a variety of boards that are nearly three feet wide and nine feet long.

The ability to select from such abundance gives him the latitude few artisans enjoy with store-bought material. Over the years, he has learned how to capitalize upon this advantage by selecting wood for a given project with ever greater care: "I've developed an eye for what looks right by being able to lay things out, and make a more conscious decision about how things go together. You just don't go to the wood pile and pull two pieces out and decide those are going to be enough for your piece." Today, Beauchamp invests nearly as much time in selecting his wood as he does in finishing good: "You take the pieces out, plane them, clean them up so you can see the grain -- until you find something that looks like it goes together."

The benefits of his copious wood supply extend to chairs as well as table top applications. As he says, "These boards are great for dining table tops. But I even cut them up for chairs sometimes, though it seems a waste. I use them for chair seats, which are 20 inches wide. It's great to have 32 inch wide lumber to use." It also allows him to coordinate the grain of the wood with the design of the posts and spindles - "In chairs, it's really important that the grain of the back posts follows the curve of the posts. You don't want the grain going across the narrowest part of the chair." Finally, having control over his lumber source allows him to board-match all the chairs in a given dining room set. Thus, he used only two boards for all six formal chairs in the van Muyden set he created to Erickson's design. Likewise, the eight chairs in Michael Zolezzi's dining ensemble were also hewn from but two slabs of walnut.

Harvesting is so important to Beauchamp that he has hardly needed to buy any wood in the recent past, despite the fact that he fashioned no less than 36 pieces of furniture last year. He relies instead upon his own initiative and network to locate and utilize a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fine native California wood. Some of the wildest grains and biggest boards come from the trees Wenner has trimmed in the field. One such find quickly became Beauchamp's most prized piece of wood - a paradox walnut tree (the type tree is locally known as bastone, the tree produced when the nut of a California black walnut tree is pollinated by an English walnut).

At the behest of a Sacramento homeowner, Wenner uprooted the 110 year-old tree because its roots were threatening to destroy the foundation of a neighbor's garage. Beauchamp first used "the absolutely incredible figure in this wood" to produce two outstanding Pembroke tables. But after lavishing the paradox walnut on a number of uncommissioned pieces, Beauchamp began to husband the remaining stash more carefully, deciding, "its crazy to make all the speculative furniture out of this wood!" Now he reserves it for special products and customers, like the Tambour couch he recently constructed for his artistic "patron saint," Michael Zolezzi.

Beauchamp's current inventory of wood consists of nearly 5,000 board feet of black walnut, chestnut and elm. Smaller supplies of oak, camphor and locust round out the supply. Since he uses only 800 board feet each year, and continues to harvest local timber to augment his cache, his wood supply is set for the foreseeable future. Like many concerned woodworkers, he has virtually eliminated popular exotic woods from his repertoire. While he admits to having to some koa in his armada, he uses what's left sparingly with genuine reservation - "I used to buy a little bit of koa before I changed my ways. Its an abused species, because we just devastated the koa forests in Hawaii. I have a few sticks left, but I'll never buy it again." No such reservations, however, extend to the maple or cherry that he continues to buy in small amounts. Beauchamp incorporates both of these light-hued woods to good effect in his visually arresting walnut laminations.

Given his growing reputation and considerable portfolio, it may surprise you to learn that Robert Beauchamp hardly sprang from the womb destined to be a furniture maker. In fact, it is something of a miracle that he resisted the impulse to become a physician - like his grandfather, father and three uncles (all of whom graduated from Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia). But to their everlasting credit, neither his mother nor his pediatrician father ever applied pressure on Robert to follow in the family medical tradition. In fact, his parents became the most enthusiastic supporters of his woodworking career. Both parents seemed happy to accept the fact that their son had become a knot in the family tree.

But their role in Robert's art has always been more than just passive. To this day, they supply him with his most important source of criticism and acclaim. Its an evaluation process that Robert both encourages and seeks. Whenever his father visits the woodworking shop, Beauchamp solicits his opinion about mixing and matching woodgrains - "What do you think of this piece next to this piece? How about these together?" Beauchamp also makes a point of bringing every new work to his parent's home for analysis and suggestion. Ironically, while his parents never objected to their son knotting the family tree, they strenuously object to the knots he insists on featuring in his pieces. Its an aesthetic disagreement that will remain a bone of contention between the two generations, because Beauchamp, contrary to most of his peers in the field, is committed to stressing the imperfections of wood: "My mom and dad do not like knots. I love them. There's one just glaring out at you in the table I did for Michael Zolezzi. It's a ten inch long crack, right in the middle of a two foot by six foot board, where a limb came through. I just love it, but they both prefer that I be more selective with my use of knots."

Beauchamp, whose now 36, has been a professional woodworker for nearly 15 years. But his career in the field was far from pre-ordained. In fact, he showed little interest in the profession until his junior year at Humboldt State University, when he settled upon an industrial arts major, with a concentration in woodwork. Beauchamp sites his college wood shop instructor, Richard Erickson (no relation to Robert), as a special kind of teacher who not only made learning fun, but also stressed the practical and safe aspects of the craft. Beauchamp came away from that experience with an insatiable desire to learn more about woodworking, and a healthy respect for the perils of power tools. Looking back on that period, he recalls, "I learned a lot just by observation. I can't say that what I learned gave me the knowledge or the experience to make what I make now, but I think it helped lead to that."

Practical experience helped fill important parts of the puzzle. During his senior year, he spent a worthwhile internship at Jim Drennen's "Woodworks" shop in Sacramento, making mirror frames and coat racks. Looking back on that experience, Beauchamp now realizes, "From lots of repetitive work there, I learned how to do things quickly, efficiently and safely. Those things are key for me now." Less inspiring was four month stay at a production cabinet shop in Woodland, where he laid the same patterns on to plywood over and over until he reached his wit's end. "I knew very little then, but everyone there knew even less than I did," says Beauchamp of the kind of robotic woodwork he swore never to do again.

After he left the cabinet shop in 1980, Beauchamp's mother, Marie, alerted him to an intriguing article in the local paper about Robert Erickson, entitled, "In Search of the Perfect Rocking Chair." It would prove to be the start of a momentous affiliation between the two craftsmen that continue to the present day. After numerous supplications, Beauchamp persuaded Erickson to accept him as an apprentice in his Nevada City, California shop. The first thing Beauchamp managed to do there was cut some expensive walnut boards too short. The apprentice now terms his debut "an inauspicious beginning." Because, "Erickson didn't have a lot of money at the time."

Things could only get better, and when they did in August 1982, when Beauchamp , subbing for his absent boss at the Pacific States Crafts Fair in San Francisco, added a rocking chair he had built himself to Erickson's display inventory at the show. When the piece sold, a gratified Beauchamp treated it as his "graduation present" from apprenticeship. A friend of both woodworkers, who witnessed the sale at the 1982 fair, called the piece the "best chair Bob Erickson never built."

Beyond the important of harvesting wood, Beauchamp also learned form Erickson the principles of design. Having taken no courses at college in this discipline, Beauchamp was primed to assimilate the lessons of his mentor about symmetry and organization. Erickson placed a premium on uniformity of design, and the drift of the message was not lost ion his student, who to this day strives for classical balance in all of his projects: "Bob taught me to keep things uniform. For example, the chair's support posts I laminate, will all be made from the same wood on the front and the same wood on the backside. It gives some symmetry to the piece. I really like things being symmetrical in their appearance, even if a piece itself I asymmetrical."

Words like "book-matched woods" and "mirror images" pepper Beauchamp's conversation about wood work. He invests each of his projects with a clarity of vision, and a lack of clutter, that makes them stand out from the crowd. Take, for example, the armoire Beauchamp recently completed for client David Stephens. Stephens came to the artist with more than just a concept for the piece. He brought along complete plans, which Beauchamp simplified but followed rigorously. The simplification consisted of dividing the seven-foot-tall object into four separate parts for ease of transport and installation.

The armoire is by far the most ambitious piece Beauchamp has ever undertaken. He and his assistants have invested 800 hours in the course of four months in crafting the finished project. Originally, the projected cost for the piece was $9,000. When Stephens learned that Beauchamp had seriously understained the time required for completion, he magnanimously offered to up the total to $14,000 to cover material costs and everyone's hourly rate.

What Stephens received, however, exceeded his every expectation for appearance, craftsmanship, and utility. As the owner puts it, "its worth every penny." A carefully orchestrated façade of chechem, cherry and walnut decorates the exterior panel. Beauchamp purchased a small amount of chechem for the project because it is a sustainable yield hardwood from an area in Belize where, "they're not wiping out whole forests just to get one tree." Like a puzzle box, the piece invites you to open its curved doors and investigate the labyrinthian compartments that await inside. Behind the obvious array of drawers and bins within lurk three of Beauchamp's trademark hidden compartments buried deep inside dead spaces, and accessible only by releasing the right sequence of pins and dowels.

The inside of the armoire offers a magical array of light and dark woods, big and little drawers that are festooned with intricately carved pulls. On the left side is a set of curved-front drawers which are eighteen inches deep on their shallow ends and 27 inches deep on their other end. The drawer fronts are made from laminated curly maple which Beauchamp clamped to a master form while the glue dried. The dovetail joinery which fastens the curved front sections of each drawer to the side members posed significant problems which Beauchamp describes thusly: "cutting the dovetails was very involved, because I didn't have a square face to lay them off. So I had to make a little flat space for the sides of the drawer to meet the rounded front." The front and rear corners all feature hand-cut dovetails.

The handles presented even more difficulty than the joinery, because each pull was not only recessed, but undercut for better hand purchase. Beauchamp reveals just how heavily good furniture design depends on ergonomics, when he explains, "its very awkward to pull the drawers out because they are so deep. We wanted to design them so your hand would naturally exert the right force to pull evenly." In order to angle the handles, he fabricated a special jig which fit onto the drawer's curved front. The jig enabled him to rout each pull at the same angle. He then cut a 3/16" thick handles to fit into the routed troughs, and fashioned them to protrude only 1/8". Finally, he sculpted a space beneath each handle to allow more room for a hand to operate comfortably within the tight confines.

With the exception of his dining room table tops and coffee table tops, which are finished with a catalyzed lacquer for durability, Beauchamp finishes all his pieces with tung oil. His shop is a stain-free zone, and has been since he ruined a perfect set of teak tables back when he was apprenticing with Erickson. "They were the sweetest little tables I ever made," he explains, "perfect to the drawings." The client who had commissioned them explicitly requested that they be finished to match her other teak furniture, which had aged to an orange hue. Beauchamp continues, "I put this orange stain on them and I got physically nauseated. I said to myself, 'why am I doing this? I just ruined this great piece of work that I did, and I will never do this again.'" And to this day, he hasn't. As he puts it, "if somebody said, 'I want you to make a walnut chest and put oak stain on it,' I'd say, 'you've got the wrong guy.'"

Honesty in wood vernacular is one of Beauchamp's guiding commandments. If its oak you want, he'll give you oak - not walnut that's stained to look like oak. If you want cherry, you'll have to take it in its natural, light-colored state, or not select it at all. He patiently explains to clients that unstained cherry only turns dark with age and time. Indeed, if there's any one thing this craftsman has learned from his years of experience in the shop, its an appreciation for the natural way different kinds of woods work well together - "Just flipping boards the opposite way makes an incredible difference. You look at the lines and grain of the wood, and you say, 'this looks great, and that looks terrible.' You really have to take those things into consideration. When you work with the different kinds of maple - curly, tiger, bird's-eye plain - you really can't intermix them." Hue and grain determine compatibility.

Ever the classicist, Beauchamp concerns himself not only with integrity of design and honesty of material, but also, the eternal durability of the objects he creates. Its perhaps the most important lesson he learned from working alongside Bob Erickson: "When I make a piece of furniture, I think, 'OK, what's this piece going to be like in 100 years? How am I going to make it, so that somebody doesn't have to do anything to it and it'll be just fine in100 years?'" Thus, when clients occasionally request him to construct tables with solid tops, Beauchamp explains that he is unwilling to immobilize wood without wood for movement - "I'll say, 'well, you can't do that, because without a gap, the panel's going to expand and contract, and break the frame apart.'" If more of industry thought along such revolutionary lands, our landfills might shrink and our inventory of perpetual artifacts might increase and prosper. Don't bet on it, though.