February 10, 2004
by Paul Thurrott
Doug Green is the founder of Green Design Furniture, a Portland,
Maine-based furniture company renowned for its handmade, master-crafted
artisan engineering. Green's furniture marries gorgeous design with
a unique mortise-and-tenon joinery style that eschews traditional
fastening devices for greater strength and longevity. Green's design
methodology is so groundbreaking, in fact, that he was granted a
patent for his fastener-less furniture construction in 1993. Doug
Green's amazing furniture is featured throughout architect Sarah
Susanka's Home
by Design Showhouse. Connected Home Magazine recently sat down
with Doug to discuss his company, his products, and his work with
Home by Design.
CH: Tell us a bit about Green Design
Furniture.
Doug:
Green Design Furniture is about 10 years old. It started as an outgrowth
of a patent I received for manufacturing furniture. It's really
unusual, and uses the latest technologies to make furniture simpler
and stronger. We're using a wonderful new generation of machinery
to engineer the joinery right into the wood. The pieces are shipped
unassembled via Fed Ex and require no tools, no glue, and no fasteners.
The components are wonderfully engineered and precisely fitted,
and lock into a solid structure on arrival.
Originally, I was an industrial designer with
a traditional woodworking background. I was trying to figure out
a way to bring traditional craftsmanship and tradition into the
21st century. Unfortunately, there's a huge gap between the manufacturing
world and the handcrafted world. I thought this idea would be a
no-brainer.
CH: Did you contact traditional furniture
companies about this process?
Doug: Yes, originally I set out to license
the technology to big furniture manufacturers and thought it had
a huge potential to be transformational for the industry. For the
first time, it was possible to produce high-end, highly crafted
furniture, with Fed Ex as the delivery system. It was the best of
both worlds.
CH: What happened?
Doug: None of them took me up on it. When I
was awarded the patent in 1993, I received a lot of attention. I
was even in Time Magazine's Best of 1993 issue, and I was on the
cover of Furniture Design magazine. It wasn't for lack of trying.
So I returned to Maine, which has wonderful craftsmen. I had gone
to college up here, and it's where my woodworking career began as
well.
CH: How do you categorize the furniture
you make?
Doug: I call it artisan manufacturing. It's
very hands-on. One person takes the pieces from raw lumber to the
final product. Because we don't own the technologies the process
is designed for, we had to figure out how to use the available machinery
in our class range to reach the same degree of accuracy. This requires
more processes and setups on different machines.
CH: What are you contributing to the
Home By Design Showhouse project?
Doug: We've provided 20 pieces of furniture,
some of which are for home-electronics use. There's a new series
of pieces designed for contemporary home-entertainment needs. We
started out with the Media Armoire, which was scaled around a large-format
TV, the Sony WEGA. We then set out to make a more modest-scale piece.
Lots of the pieces in the market were just barns designed to hide
TVs. So we did some research and incorporated some interesting improvements
and new functionality in our piece. The back has removable panels,
for example, so you can install components and do the wiring and
then slide the whole thing back. It does a lot to improve wire management
inside the cabinet. Also, the shelves for components are vented,
to permit air flow beneath them. Each has a sliding bar that lets
you give components of different depths solid footing on the shelves.
We do make solid shelves available as an option too.
For large-format TVs, such as widescreen plasma
displays, we offer a new Media Credenza. You can use the cabinet
as a platform, and have components inside underneath. It features
glass doors with water glass, for a unique ripple effect that pleasantly
distorts the image inside but still lets the remote controls work.
It includes the same back and shelving as the Media Armoire. Both
were featured at CES.
We also just introduced a smaller new piece
that's not yet in the catalog. It's a Media Armoire for a 27"
TV, like you might have in a bedroom. It's similar, but scaled down
appropriately for that size TV.
We also did a dining room set and a variety
of other pieces for the home office, including a small computer
desk that continues the lines of the media furniture. These pieces
are really in demand because they're highly functional. There just
isn't a lot of well-crafted furniture for the home office.
CH: How do you sell your products?
Doug: We have a showroom in Portland, Maine, that's open 7 days
a week and is open to the public. There's also our Web site. Right
now, the turnaround on orders depends on the piece. We're adding
manpower, but currently it takes 8 to 12 weeks, on average. We even
have a few pieces held to the spring. But we're whittling down that
time. Normally, it's 12 weeks on the outside. We hope to be back
to that point within a year.
CH: Looking over your pieces, the most
striking aspect is their design. These are beautiful pieces of furniture.
Doug: Thanks. The style of the pieces is definitely
part of a tradition. People look at them and they see contemporary
furniture but with different flavors of arts and crafts, and Japanese
design. We're trying to be contemporary-classic, modern while still
maintaining a good sense of the past. We're not in outer space.
We use solid wood as the material, and the warmth of that, the human
scale, pays attention to the needs of the people in the space. That's
why we're sympathetic with Susan's philosophy. There's also the
idea of using technology to make things simpler, not complicating
your life or making it more confusing, but actually having it reflect
something more personalized and humanized.
|