Ed Rode
Designing and building beautiful wooden furniture and sculptures is one of the greatest joys in my life. Another might be to bring nature indoors. I believe bringing a sense of treeness into our homes gives us a feeling of both wildness and stability at the same time. Often we’re not even aware of the calming effects of these gifts of the forest. Perhaps this is more important today than ever with the immense array of electronics we rely upon.
Tell me about this remarkable Bubinga table that RAREculture is offering?
It’s a conference table or large dining-room table, and the uniqueness of it is that the entire of top of the table is one board of solid Bubinga, and it’s “live edged”, which means the bark is removed, but the two sides of the tree run down the two edges of the table. It’s roughly twelve feet long by four-and-a-half feet wide, so it will seat a lot of people.
What leads you to create something like that?
The goal of all my furniture is to find some kind of comfortable point of contact between the organic and the contemporary: I like both of those styles of design, but not necessarily independent of one another, so I like blending them. The Bubinga table has a very organic-looking top, and the hard maple bases are fairly contemporary. I think it suits itself well. And it’s all natural: There’s no coloring; there’s no stain.
How do you find the wood for pieces like this?
I tend to use rather large wood in my furniture and so I need to go where the large wood grows. I source wood from all over America: New England, down south, northern California, Oregon, Washington. I also get a lot of wood from western Africa, and a great deal comes from south-western Australia.
Do you tell your suppliers exactly what you’re interested in?
I specify that I am looking for something of a certain size. But something like that is so unique that you don’t go out with a shopping list like you’re going to the supermarket. I have a very friendly relationship with my suppliers on the most part and when they run into something like that they tip me off. And I might buy a board purely on speculation just because I’m enamored with the grain in it. You can look at a big tree and see the whole history of the local forest!
So, can we be sure that your wood has been sourced ethically?
Absolutely. If I’m not convinced of that, I won’t buy the wood. I don’t want to support a system that rapes forests. Outside of the U.S., you have to rely on the governments of those places to be responsible, and if I’m not convinced that the suppliers are being monitored closely, I just won’t deal with them.
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