John DeMott’s streamlined, Scandinavian-influenced furniture is made the old-fashioned way—by hand, with a chisel and hammer
By Stefene Russell
Photography by Frank Di Piazza
Once upon a time, John DeMott was a medical researcher at the department of otolaryngology at Washington University’s School of Medicine. How does one make the leap from researching acoustic neuroma to building curved-slat chairs? Slowly.
“You do it on the weekends, you do it in the evenings, and pretty soon you find yourself enjoying it more than what you’re doing for a job,” he says. So he left the university in 2001 to continue the woodworking that he’d already been doing “quasi-professionally” for 15 years.
DeMott spent summers at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Maine and studied at Aspen’s Anderson Ranch arts school. But good woodworking boils down to understanding cells, and this is where DeMott’s science background has served him well (even wood coated in plastic expands and contracts depending on the heat and moisture in the air). That said, his design approach is more poetic than scientific, though his pieces are inspired by the clean lines of Scandinavian as well as Asian and Bauhaus furniture. His collection includes Shoji screens, a buffet table based on a Gerrit Rietveld Arts and Crafts piece and a squat but sturdy tapered-leg coffee table that wouldn’t look out of place in a Copenhagen apartment.
“I like to combine different woods,” DeMott says. “That’s where the detail comes in, when you combine different colors, and I do that by not staining anything.” (In lieu of stain, DeMott spends weeks rubbing a piece with tung oil until each cell is saturated.) He’ll accent a mostly maple piece with strips of madrone and a cherry inlay, or use ebony for tiny details like drawer pulls. He’s also fond of veneers, especially highly textured ones like walnut burl or bird’s eye maple.
But rather than seem the mad scientist, DeMott laughs while explaining that 90 percent of the time, he’s “just sawing big pieces of wood into smaller pieces of wood.” Still, there’s lots of craftsmanship involved. His furniture is not cheap—his harp-slat end tables, studies in science and art, are intended to become family heirlooms that outlast you and likely your grandchildren. “These are pieces of furniture that will be used every day, then passed from generation to generation,” DeMott says. “Wood changes; you put your hands on it, and the oil in your hands affects the wood,” absorbing the owner into its history. “You get up on a daily basis, and you touch that piece of furniture. It adds a lot to your life when you have a piece of furniture that has that character to it, that changes, that feels alive.”
JD Woodworking, 314-569-3242, www.jdwoodworking.com
