Although trained as an architect, George Nakashima purposefully chose the path of a woodworker, a vocation that would ultimately encompass his commanding role in the development of American studio furniture after the Second World War. Born in Spokane, Washington, to parents who emigrated from Japan, in the sweeping forests of the Pacific Northwest, Nakashima forged a lifelong reverence for what he would come to call the “soul of the tree.”¹ As a result, every element in his handmade furniture, including Lounge Chair Rocker with Free-Form Arm, Right, drives toward a singular goal: to reveal the “wonderful phenomenon of a living spirit in a tree . . . so that the tree lives again.”²

Architecture was a crucial building block for Nakashima’s global worldview. For much of the 1930s, he journeyed abroad—in Paris, Japan, and Pondicherry, India, where Nakashima oversaw building an ashram dormitory for Sri Aurobindo, adding the Hindu leader’s teachings into his spiritual realm. The darkening of World War II pulled the woodworker back to Seattle in 1939. Soon, he and his young family were among the 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated by the War Relocation Authority, finding themselves in a Minidoka, Idaho, concentration camp in 1942. There, Nakashima’s vision to imbue his work with Japanese approaches crystalized as he worked alongside carpenter Gentaro Hikogawa, who had trained in Japan. This act of personal conviction, writes his daughter Mira, “in effect promulgated and vindicated the norms of Japanese beauty through his work in the United States.”³   

Nakashima became one of America’s first studio furniture makers in the postwar era, building a catalogue of designs that remain in studio production today.  Among them is Lounge Chair, introduced in 1962. The design evolved from its 1955 webbed-seat prototype and into examples such as Lounge Chair Rocker with Free-Form Arm, Right, made in 1973. Like most of Nakashima’s furniture, it was a commission built in his renowned compound in New Hope, Pennsylvania. There, he would develop specifications like rockers and select woods, like this striking arm of American black walnut, sliced with a precision he likened to diamond cutting.⁴ Nakashima often spoke of his vast influences, and this wide, single arm and long spindles bears relation to types of early nineteenth-century American Windsor writing chairs.⁵ Yet, unlike historical examples, the outer edge of the rocker’s arm has its grain and growth center stage. Its noble fault line is elegantly stabilized with a rosewood butterfly joint, a long-held joinery technique that Nakashima made all his own. —Elizabeth Essner