Here’s what you need to know about David Moore, maker of fine furniture: He’s a chameleon. Just when you think you’ve got a bead on what he does, on how he operates, he changes colors.
He builds custom furniture using classic methods with modern design sensibilities. He’s a skilled rehabber, a videographer, inventor, musician in a band, a skateboarder, friend to many, a brother, a son, and a man who has known loss at a young age. One constant, however, is his love of wood.
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“My whole life, I made and built things,” he says. “My grandfather was a carpenter. My dad worked in construction and did woodworking as a hobby. We watched the New Yankee Workshop on television together. My mom made and painted wooden Christmas ornaments by the hundreds. She taught me to cut the profiles—that became my job as a kid.”
Moore tried college, but it wasn’t a good fit. “I sucked at college,” he says. “After I spent a year working in a cabinet shop, I knew I wanted to work with wood.” He decided to build fine furniture. He chose a Yankee school in the heart of the North Shore in Beverly, Massachusetts, an area known for furniture and art since colonial times.
“A month before I moved away to start school at the Furniture Institute of Massachusetts, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. That was in 2005,” he says.
“I’d always been close to my mom, so it was a bittersweet time in my life. I didn’t waste a minute of my schooling to honor my mom. I focused intensely and built more things in two years than I’d imagined I could.”
The focus paid off. When he returned to St. Louis after he finished the two-year program at the Furniture Institute, he designed and made a custom dining room set, his first residential commission. He’s been building custom furniture ever since.
When he first returned to St. Louis, his mother’s cancer had gone into remission. He’d considered a return to the North Shore to work, but sadly, the cancer returned and claimed his mother’s life.
One way that Moore and his two brothers dealt with the life-changing transition was to canoe. In 2010, they entered the grueling MR 340, a 340-mile endurance race on the Missouri River that starts in Kansas City and ends in St. Charles. The brothers wanted time together to process the loss. They wanted a way to honor their mother’s memory and to raise money for research to combat colon cancer.
Jeff, Kevin, and David Moore are featured in a short video about their race titled Navigating the River: Challenge. The St. Louis Art Museum created five contemporary videos of how the rivers are used today to accompany the exhibit, “George Caleb Bingham: Navigating the River.” The film’s take away line: “Life’s gonna come at you, just the same as the river stuff comes at you.”
Even though stuff came at him hard, Moore continued to work and produce furniture.
In 2012, he crafted 15 elegant benches for the Siteman Center for Advanced Medicine at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. The pieces feature a swirling ribbon back. They have the graceful curves associated with bentwood furniture, but Moore used a different method to produce them. He employed his knowledge of how skateboards are made, using moisture, forms and clamp pressure to shape the back pieces. The process, called bent lamination, produced graceful forms that are extremely strong.
The same year, he bought a commercial building at 6931 South Broadway and began an extensive gut rehab to create a permanent woodshop. He rebuilt exterior brick walls and replaced rotted floors. He added structural beams. He built out a three-room workshop on the first floor.
Throughout the rehab, he built furniture: tables of all sizes, tall-backed chairs, chests and mirrors, sideboards and more. He places newly finished pieces in two front windows.
He’s moved upstairs to finish the build-out of the second floor as a simple loft space. Moore keeps a wooden model of the space on display. It’s complete enough for a comfortable retreat from the studio. The space also functions as a rehearsal space for the band Kid Scientist, for which Moore plays drums.
He shot a promo video for Kid Scientist in the space—that’s another one of his skills, videography. He also builds custom mounts for film and video cameras. He’s produced a series of articles and videos for Fine Woodworking.
Moore’s idiosyncratic amalgam of work, art, and play fuels creativity in this young woodworker and fine furniture maker. He’s a chameleon, ever-changing, but constant in his commitment to working with wood.
For more information, visit davidmoorefurniture.com, follow him on Facebook, or contact him at 314-223-4169. Hours are by appointment only.
