My passion for making furniture has always centered around environmental sustainability, adaptive reuse, and most of all, upcycling. Telling the story of a material or manufacturing process through the design by creating functional objects that people connect with and want to hold onto.
For almost 20 years I ate, slept and breathed furniture, and my company Uhuru was the way my designs came to life and entered the world.
The Stoolen
The Stoolen is the first piece I designed for our first collection in 2005, it is crafted from hardwood offcuts that are carefully hand-fitted into a unique pattern. Initially we used the scrap wood from custom projects in our shop to keep from throwing out the pieces of wood that were too small for our regular production. As we made more, we created a system of leaving containers at Brooklyn wood shops to collect scraps and divert them from the waste steam and into new products. The Stoolen and it’s variant, the metal Stoolen are both in the permanent collection of the Chipstone Foundation and were displayed and the Milwaukee Art Museum as part of the Green Furniture exhibition in 2009.
The multi-functional Stoolen works well as an end table, stool, or paired as a coffee table.
Displayed at The New Museum's main lobby, NYC 2010
The Bilge Chair
The Bilge Lounge Chair is crafted from reclaimed bourbon barrel staves from Kentucky and recycled leaf springs from New York City fire trucks. The natural char of the inside of the staves is preserved and makes up the seat and back of the chair. The cantilever design of the spring steel base provides a gentle give and bounce when you sit adding an unpredicted level of comfort. 99% of the materials used to make this chair were diverted from the waste stream or scrapyard, preserving their form and inherent qualities turning them into a product that can last another hundred years. This piece was acquired as part of the permanent collection of the The Columbus Museum and displayed in 2020 as part of the exhibition Please have a seat: A Survey of American Chairs, 1820-2020
The Cyclone Lounger
Probably my favorite piece I have designed and Uhuru’s most iconic. The Cyclone was the center piece of a line we made out of reclaimed ipe that came off the famed Coney island boardwalk. As we did more and more collections telling the story of materials, we got a name for ourselves, one day we got a call that they were ripping up part of the boardwalk and just throwing it in dumpsters. I jumped in my truck and drove down to check it out. Sure enough massive amounts of this beautiful wood from the South American rain forest was being trashed. We grabbed as much as we could and headed back to the shop. All the pieces in the collection were inspired by the land marked structures of Coney Island with this one of course based on the Cyclone rollercoaster. At 95 years old, it’s the second oldest in the world. The metal base references what appears to be a chaotic lattice of metal and wood with the seat emulating the undulating path of the track. The Cyclone Lounger was acquired by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art for their permanent collection. It has been on display at the Renwick Gallery several times, most notably for the 40 under 40: Craft Futures exhibit that ran form July 19, 2012 - February 3, 2013.
The cyclone is an architectural element
When I co-founded Uhuru in 2003 just a year out of school, I didn’t have a grand vision for what it could be. I just knew that I needed a space where all the ideas swirling around could come to fruition, the freedom to design and build our world. We didn’t have a lot of extra money for materials to design a collection. We did what we knew best, scouring the streets of New York for discarded materials we could make stuff with, and taking on any commissioned work we could get until we could put together our first collection. The last 18 years have been a rollercoaster for sure, but also have been an amazing experience of growth...with plenty of mistakes, but always learning and moving forward, making amazing things, with an incredible group of people, honing in on my values and understanding what I want my contribution to the built envoirnment to be.
Below is a selection of some of my favorite pieces I designed and projects I worked on at Uhuru, to see the full range check out www.uhurudesign.com.
Truss Collection - Upholstery and steel
Truss Desk - Steel and Oxidized Maple
Tack Console - Steel
Tack Collection - Brass
Caynon table - Cast concrete and pine
Reclaimed Yellow heart pine beams from the Domino Sugar refinery
GÄRDSGÅRD Collection
Fold chairs - Aluminum
FEATURED PROJECTS
Saul Restaurant 2013 Brooklyn Museum
Shake Shake Flagship Restaurant Fulton Transportation Hub
New Museum cafe 2010
Uhuru Showroom Tribeca 2015
Uhuru Showroom
Uhuru Creative Compound, Red Hook
This video was directed, and scored by my good friend Federico Urdaneta and produced by my wife Maria Cristina Rueda. It started when we had the idea to make a massive sculpture of a charred cherry tree for our new 4000 sq ft Tribeca showroom, but the goal of the video was to capture the essence of what we do at Uhuru and the inspiration we get from our home on the Red Hook waterfront, all through the narrative of Brooklyn native, Walt Whitman.
Chair Truck Project for NYCxDESIGN 2016
When you start a company right out of school and run it for more than 15 years, it’s easy to convince yourself you are the center of it all. I’ve always believed the saying “the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts” and none of these projects would have been possible without the incredible team of people that came through the doors of the shop and studio, people who dedicated themselves mind, body and spirt to the mission and principles of Uhuru. I thank all of them for their contributions to making Uhuru what it is today.