The House That Sam Built | asianculturalfestival.org

By JEREMY HILDRETH

San Marino, Calif.

‘The people of America,” wrote the modernist architect Richard Neutra in 1948, “have found a new mode of living, and Southern California, the richest community in the world, is fostering the economical, colorful, casual California Way of Life that you may all enjoy.” One luminary of this postwar creative environment was Sam Maloof, the Chino, Calif.-born son of Lebanese immigrants who earned, within his own lifetime, a reputation as perhaps America’s greatest-ever furniture craftsman.

The House That Sam Built

The Huntington Library

Through Jan. 30

For six decades, Maloof toiled happily in his Alta Loma workshop, producing about 75 pieces of furniture a year. When he died in 2009, at age 93, he had a six-year backlog of orders. And while Maloof himself always affected an unflappable—and largely authentic—persona of the simple woodworker, his pieces became lauded as great art. One of his rocking chairs became the first piece of contemporary furniture in the White House; another sold for $75,000 in 2001, according to Ray Leier of del Mano gallery in West Los Angeles, a longtime friend and dealer of Maloof’s.

Alfreda Maloof/Maloof Foundation

Maloof’s furniture fused engineering and art through intuition and deathdefying technique.

“The House That Sam Built,” at San Marino’s venerable Huntington Library, includes 35 splendid examples of Maloof’s furniture. They’re arranged in domestic settings alongside paintings, sculptures, ceramics, enamels and other artworks by his Pomona Valley contemporaries, including his mentor, the painter Millard Sheets.

Out for the visitor to look at (but not to sit on, alas) are Maloof’s first sofa and some early chairs—flagrantly Danish in inspiration, but lithe and lovely in walnut, maple and the occasional exotic hardwood—and the prototype home-office furniture he fashioned for industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss created the Princess and Trimline telephones, among other renowned 20th-century designs; he was Maloof’s second customer. There are also coffee tables, side tables, music stands, bassinets, settees and barstools. (If Maloof ever made a bed, none is in evidence here.)

The piece that draws a crowd, though, is an armchair with a sign: “Please be seated,” an offer few visitors refused. Beholding folks settling into the spindle-backed number revealed Maloof’s genius. “Oooooh, it’s really comfortable,” said a pregnant lady, slumping into the seat with a sigh. A thin, short woman was equally appreciative: “It hits your back in just the right place. And my feet touch the ground.” A taller fellow agreed: “It’s amazing. It works no matter who you are. How did he do it?”

When an object is handmade, you can’t help but commune with its maker, a phenomenon Maloof reveled in. He wrote in “Sam Maloof: Woodworker” (1989), “Each time a person sits in one of my chairs, or at one of my tables, or opens one of my cabinets, I want him to feel that particular piece was made especially for him to use. Knowing this, there is enjoyment for both of us: maker and user.”

Moreover, he explained, “I try to make each of my pieces beautiful and pleasing; yet no matter how well designed and crafted, I want each piece to be useful. . . . I once tried a rocking chair in a New York museum and slid right out of it. I commented on this to the museum director, who chastened me, ‘Oh, Sam, you’re not supposed to sit on it. It’s just to look at.’”

Maloof’s philosophy harked back to a bygone age, according to Jonathan L. Fairbanks, a curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, when “the artist’s and the craftsman’s work formed the basic material matrix in the community. In general that does not happen today; buyers almost never meet producers.”

An exception to this, I realized, might be Apple. For when you buy an Apple product—and maybe this will change with Steve Jobs no longer the obvious animating spirit of the company—you feel like you know the guy who made it; this gives the product tangible humanity and enhances its appeal.

Like Jobs, Maloof aimed to imbue everyday objects with beauty and practicality, and recognized the role of intuition in achieving this. If an experimental product just didn’t feel right to use, or didn’t look good, Jobs would kill it off. When making a chair, said Maloof, “I do it all by eye. I do it by feel. I use the measure of my hand rather than a rule. . . . People have asked me how I go about developing a design. There are three things that I emphasize: eye, hand, and heart.”

And a fourth thing, too, I believe: guts. Watching a video of Maloof cutting compound curves freehand into blocks of wood with a band saw is like watching Jimi Hendrix play guitar or Evel Knievel jump fountains. His technique is convention-shattering, death-defying, mesmerizing. “I don’t recommend doing it this way,” he says in an old television documentary as he twists the wood into the saw, his fingers millimeters away from the relentless blade. (I wish a 60-second loop of that were on view at the Huntington.)

In this realm of craft, where engineering and art fuse together, a healthy perfectionism arises to keep the maker honest. “A chair leg may suddenly look a little heavy or a tabletop a little thick,” Maloof explained. “When they do, I change them.” Likewise, he said, “it does not matter how much work I have and how much pressure the client puts on me I maintain a steady pace. Not one piece of furniture leaves my workshop that I would be ashamed of.”

Would that we all managed to bring such care, pride and soulfulness to our work, and such excellence to our living spaces. That is the paramount lesson and inspiration of Sam Maloof’s life and woodwork, plainly visible in this Huntington exhibition.

Mr. Hildreth is an identity consultant to cities, countries and companies.

A version of this article appeared Jan. 12, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Comfort and Joy.