No slouch of a design
A Maine craftsman re-imagines his signature design
Owl Furniture was hit with a flood of orders for handcrafted ergonomic office furniture at the onset of the pandemic. As demand temporarily exceeded what the small company was able to produce, founder Geoffrey Warner received a grant to develop a process to mass produce the ergonomic seat bases from post-consumer plastics via injection molding.
By Amy Paradysz
Photos by Sarah Szwajkos / Damn Rabbit Studios
The Owl Furniture brand began with these ergonomic, handcrafted and sustainably-made seats.
Four decades into his career handcrafting wood furniture, Geoffrey Warner is taking his signature line—the Owl stool—into mass production with a seat made of postconsumer plastics.
At first glance, a plastic-derived office stool sounds like quite a divergence for a studio craftsman whose career was built on sculpting wood into one-of-a-kind furniture commissions. Warner learned this craft at Rhode Island School of Design studying with Dutch master Tage Frid, a leader in the studio furniture movement that blurred distinctions between furniture and art.
“He influenced me with a philosophy of efficiency,” says Warner, who recognizes beauty in the simplistic of form and function. “Less is more. I developed a style over the years. What has really affected me in my design is that furniture needs to cradle the human body. Furniture can be designed that way with beauty.”
At his studio in the fishing village of Stonington on Deer Isle, Warner has spent the past 20 years crafting tables, chairs and cabinets from sustainable American hardwood in pieces both Danish-influenced and nature-inspired.
When the economy—and custom orders—took a plunge in 2008, Warner considered what he could design to sell at the farmers’ market. The basic stool, he says, was begging for a design upgrade.
“The ischial tuberosities, or sit bones, bottom out on something hard,” Warner says. “But I could fix that by relieving the seat. I started carving, and before I knew it, I had two holes in the seat. I shaped it and made it look beautiful and put it on three legs. I sat on it, and it was incredibly comfortable, promoted active posture and supported spinal alignment.” His assistant observed that it looked just like an owl. That’s how the Owl Furniture wing of Geoffrey Warner Studio was born.
In response to customer requests, Warner has created several variations on the Owl seat: A four-legged version. Wooden and metal base options. A lumbar support option. A rolling office chair. Bar stools and kitchen counter stools of various heights, some with foot rings. Stools designed for meditation, for playing guitar or for dentists examining patients. Then came several variations on adjustable sitting/standing workstations with the desk portions curving ergonomically around the body.
Over the past 12 years, 5,000 Owl stools have been sold—each one handcrafted from sustainably harvested American hardwood. And Warner has only three employees. The work-at-home surge in March 2020 brought a tsunami of orders that the small company couldn’t entirely fill until January 2021.
Another thing that troubled Warner was that—at $695 a stool—the Classic Owl isn’t affordable for educational or healthcare settings. But there was no way he could sell the stools at wholesale prices with each seat being built, shaped and finished by hand.
ErgoPro Owl seats in Blue Moon, Cherry, Natural and Go Green.
But, what if he could create a variation on the Owl stool that could be mass produced and, therefore, more affordable while still holding to Owl Furniture’s values of sustainability?
With a $15,000 grant from Maine Technology Institute, Warner embarked on a year of research and development with two polymer companies, a chemist and G&G Products, a Kennebunk company that does injection molding. The resulting ErgoPro Owl has a 3/16-inch-thick injectionmolded seat composed of recycled post-consumer plastics with tiny wood particles that provide a bit of an organic aesthetic. While the ergonomic benefits are the same as with the classic Owl seat, the price is less than half.
“It’s about good design and about being healthy, being an environmentally minded ergonomic furniture company,” Warner says. “It all started with the Owl stool, which revolutionized my way of thinking.”
The ErgoPro Owl is available this spring through the Owl Furniture website. Wood Owl chairs are available at Maine retail outlets, including Center for Maine Crafts in Gardiner, Gold/Smith Gallery in Boothbay Harbor, Main Street Mercantile in Northeast Harbor, Michael Good Gallery in Rockland—and, of course, Geoffrey Warner Studio in Stonington.
This article appeared in the Spring/Summer 2021 edition of Green & Healthy Maine HOMES. Subscribe today!