Designer: John Houshmand
We run into so many interesting designers in this line of work that it feels necessary to shine a spotlight their way every once and a while. Hence, our blog is starting an occasional series of designer profiles.
This living room is anchored by John Houshmand’s black walnut and glass cocktail table.
I’m starting off today with John Houshmand, who left a 24-year career in high-end construction in 2003 to start designing with wood. His sculpture, furniture, and architectural installations are arresting and beautiful. (We have featured some of his work in Washington Spaces) His showroom in New York’s SoHo is definitely worth a train trip north. And even if you don’t want to travel, he says, “you can send me a drawing on a napkin,” and he can make it.
Houshmand, a Yale graduate who has dabbled in art, architecture, design, and music over the years, says his current work started – literally – with a dream. Several dreams, actually.
Shelving
“I was having all these dreams that were very geometrical,” he says. “It was an unfolding of geometric forms and shapes, and somehow they folded into the natural forms of these slabs of wood … I just put a notebook by my bed and started drawing sketches.”
A cocktail table made with black walnut, metal, and glass
Finally, Houshmand retreated to his farm in upstate New York, bought a saw mill (yes, he bought a saw mill), and started milling and building with a load of logs salvaged off his 950-acre property. After many weekends of moonlighting, he ended up with 30 pieces, and the collection took off. “It was really fun. I got lit up like a house on fire,” he says. He went back to the city, quit his construction job, turned his loft into a showroom, “and I just sort of ran with it.”
The black walnut Epic bed and side table
He recently finished a commission for the niece of the Emir of Kuwait, and he outfitted much of Robert de Niro’s Greenwich Hotel in New York. He described another job where he will install “bent trees wandering up and down the walls” of an 8,000-square-foot space in an office building. He’s built a workshop in Hobart, NY, where 17 craftsmen fabricate his designs.
A stairway in the Greenwich Hotel with antique heart pine treads and hand-carved rail
Houshmand recently completed work at an entire house in Mexico that includes sofas, tables and chairs:
Houshmand uses only American hardwood in his designs, and each tree he uses is salvaged, either from diseased trees, trees whose lifespan has ended, or trees that are not straight enough for the mass producers. “If it’s not straight enough, if it’s not true, if it’s not the right size, it’s firewood,” he says. And as his Web site states, “We allow grains to spill. We love crumbling bark. We welcome wormholes.”
John Houshmand
31 Howard Street
New York, NY 10013
212.965.1238 www.johnhoushmand.com