He started making furniture in 1988, building pieces for himself that were mostly made of two-by-fours and plywood. The first few years, he built basic works for friends, and friends of friends.
Yet among those early modest endeavors were a couple of complicated and finely finished commissions that gave S. Lloyd Natof a sense of what could be possible with woodworking.
Natof has come a long way since then. Today, in his shop at 6108 Roosevelt Road in Oak Park, the great-grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright has made a name for himself as a master furniture craftsman and rightly so. His hand-crafted, unique pieces are surely a beautiful sight to see.
Natof works with a combination of veneer and solid stock in ways that play to the strengths of each material. He likes creating beautiful boxes — cabinets, buffets, bookcases — volumetric solids on sexy, curved legs.
He also likes to do the tango! Natof discovered Tango 21 Dance Theater in Chicago and has been with them in more than a dozen performances, which have even included one up at Wright’s Wisconsin home, Taliesin.
Check out Natof’s shop if you haven’t already, although his hours are by appointment only. His great-grandfather would be proud as his pieces are gorgeous. And maybe while you’re there, he’ll even show you a tango move or two.
1. What are you up to? What sort of furniture are you designing and making?
I usually do a couple significant high-design pieces each year, with the remaining time spent on basic millwork and cabinetry. Right now, I’m project managing and doing the millwork for a bathroom I designed — vanity, tall cabinet, interior trim and door. I am also sought out by other designers and millworkers to fabricate lightweight structural panels. I also teach at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture at Taliesin. They have a master’s degree program, and I teach an analysis, design and furniture building series that utilize the design principles observed in Wright’s work.
2. People can come into your shop with their own designs, and you can make it? And you also will design a piece for someone?
A certain percentage of my work is fabrication work for designers, architects, as well as the general public. Sometimes they have a full drawing; other times it’s a simple sketch, and I work with them to help bring their vision to life.
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3. What type of woods do you work with and why?
I really like ash, especially when it has swirly, non-regular grain. Burled grain veneer is also important to my work. I’m interested in designs that embrace non-uniformity, and it helps if the material has a non-linear grain. Lately I’ve also been working with white oak for exterior doors and millwork; it can have a beautiful, quiet color and grain.
4. What kind of info can a designer take from Wright’s design principles?
Wright is an exemplar of compositionally based design. His work contains a broad lexicon of visual effects created by the arrangement of individual parts; the overall shape can be understood to be a consequence of the configuration of these parts. By way of contrast, most contemporary design is shaped-base; the shape predetermines the placement of the parts. Both approaches can make compelling forms and shapes, but a designer with compositional fluency will use the relationships between the parts to create more internal visual activity. The legacy of mid-century modernism is a preference for compelling shapes that usually have a static arrangement of parts — we now have weak compositional skills.
5. What are some of the qualities tango shares with your and Wright’s work?
Contained within the dialectic between these two design approaches is a metaphor about the relationship between the individual and the community. At its worst, shaped-based design is a rigid, uniform and hyper organized society; the individual parts are completely subordinated to the overall shape, with little independence or individuality. At the other end of the spectrum, if the individual has complete freedom, it can be difficult to achieve an integrated sense of a larger community. I see this as a dynamic relationship between expressivity and organization. Wright’s lesson to the 21st century is that we can have both — the energy of his designs require both individual expression of the parts and a strong sense of complex organization. He didn’t see individual expression as oppositional to organized society. There is something very appealing about the possibility of expressivity within an organized form. This is what drew me to music school in the late ’80s, furniture making and now tango. All require rigorous study and demanding technique just to get started. I like learning a skill or craft and then figuring out how to make it sing in an unconventional way using conventional methods and materials in an unusual way.
Felicia Dechter is a freelance columnist for Pioneer Press.