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Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
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Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Narrative Furniture co-founder Andy Kim at the studio in Fox Park
A chisel hits the floor, and three voices ring out: “Umer!” Nowhere near the chisel, the young Eritrean just grins. It’s a relief being the kid brother at work. Since his parents’ death, Abdurahman Umer has been responsible for four younger siblings.
He hoists the garage door for a new shipment of cherry wood as Qaiss Sayed Hakimshah, a refugee from Afghanistan, saws strips of walnut and maple. Smoke hangs in the air, kicked up by the blade’s hot bite. Auday (who’s from Iraq and asks that his surname not be used) just found out that a barn’s going down in Millstadt, Illinois. He wants those hand-hewn 8-by-8-foot beams.
Three guys in Fox Park who’d never used a shop tool are now handcrafting some of the area’s most artful, highest-quality wood furniture…and it’s designed with an industrial chic that comes naturally to St. Louis, by a Korean-American who moved here from L.A.
Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Three years ago, Andy Kim flew to St. Louis to help a friend, Paul Larson. Larson had built a successful financial services company and wanted to start a foundation, using startup businesses to help challenged communities grow. Kim had zero business training (“I studied theology, philosophy, and psychology—the most useful non-useful background you can have!”), but he’d watched nonprofits exhaust themselves trying to raise money. Larson’s idea made sense.
Kim and John Peters are now managing directors of the Larson Financial Foundation. They oversee an egg-laying facility in North Africa and the first hygienic poultry processing plant in Paramankeni, India. (“The traditional system was a lady with a machete and a tree stump,” Kim says wryly.) Here in St. Louis, they built a cleaning company around a French-speaking refugee from the Congo. Next, they bought the old Riefling-Vigar Automotive building, at the corner of South Jefferson and Victor, to start Narrative Furniture.
They looked for people who were hungry to work and easy to like, then found a master woodworker to teach them. “People act like refugees are these charity cases,” says Kim. “Qaiss speaks seven languages. Auday was a civil engineer in Iraq. Umer is fearless, always the first to jump in.”
Now, the workshop’s crowded with 38 side tables (Kim’s angular rocket-cool reimagining of Midcentury tapered legs) and 500 cherry, walnut, and maple–striped cheese boards. “I envisioned maple strips on both sides to make it symmetrical,” he says. “Qaiss goes, ‘I like it thick on one side and let it flow into the walnut, light to dark.’ And it’s beautiful. I tell the guys, ‘I will never say anything if you have a thoughtful reason for what you do. Express yourself artistically, or we can outsource this to China and let robots do it.’”
Hakimshah bevels the bottom of a wooden bow tie and whacks it into the half-inch-deep recess he’s hollowed with a router. Every piece of Narrative Furniture is inlaid with this bow tie, a nod to the old days when cracked or seamed wood was held together in that way. Kim respects history. He loves that Corvettes were made in St. Louis; that Chicago was built of St. Louis brick. “I care about heritage, about objects that connect us to history,” he says, then shrugs. “Maybe because there was such a void of it in L.A.”
Or maybe it’s because his parents had to start from scratch. “My dad was an English professor, and when he came to this country, nobody cared, so he worked on roofs,” says Kim. “He knew he couldn’t do that forever, so he started his own company. My family had a saying: ‘If one of us makes it, we all make it.’ My dad was the one who made it.”
Kim smiles. “He had this old hardwood desk in his office, and I remember him sitting there late at night thinking about how he was going to pay for my braces or my cousins’ college,” he recalls. “So many stories went into that desk. Furniture has this incredible ability to take on living qualities.”
He nods at a Narrative dining table resting on a heavy steel X base: “I want the wood to see tearstains. I’m not interested in the throwaway culture.”
Now covered in plaster dust, the main floor will soon open as a retail showroom for local artisans in addition to Narrative furniture. On the third floor’s brick walls, the pink, turquoise, and blue that once glossed Fords and Nash Ramblers has faded to winter-sunset pastels. Offices are glass-walled and skylit. The Fox Park Neighborhood Association uses the massive steel-inlay conference table. A conversation about racial reconciliation took place here; Umer’s Eritrean association has a standing invite.
“When [my wife] Elyssa and I moved here, we lived in a city called Fenton,” Kim says, “and we met with community leaders; they asked where we lived, and I’d say Fenton, and I saw it in their eyes: ‘You still go home.’”
Now the Kims live nearby and don’t avert their eyes. When Elyssa went running and met a single mother, she invited her home for dinner, and Kim made calls to find her a job. “Sometimes I wonder why people get to decide when they help people, whether it’s at a soup kitchen on Sundays from 2 till 4,” he says. “God forbid one of those people you serve soup to shows up at your door in the night.” Absently, he smooths a wooden board sanded to satin. “There’s nothing convenient about love,” he says. “Love is the most inconvenient thing ever. It costs you something.”
