Furniture maker learns the business of being creative
Kendrick Anderson opens an artist space in Castleberry Hill
It’s early evening as I walk up to Kendrick Anderson’s new studio in Castleberry Hill and the sweet smell of baked bread sits in the air — which is odd because I’m standing by an artist studio, not a bakery. Anderson opens the door to let me in. The massive front room is well lit. A table saw is on my left and directly behind it is a massive slab of spalted elm, one of the most beautiful pieces of wood I’ve ever seen. It looks like an old tree has been sliced in the thickest part of its trunk.
It’s this warehouse-turned-studio that has catapulted Anderson from part-time maker to full-time businessman. He’s learning how to juggle his art of hand-crafted custom furniture with running his own business, on top of being the landlord for a handful of other artists.
The main room of Anderson’s studio is for woodworking, but the rest of the warehouse has been sectioned off by Anderson into different studios. While “maker spaces” are trendy right now — and you can definitely call this studio a maker space — Anderson insists he wanted to make this one different. Instead of having one large room with machines accessible to many people for a fee, he says he wanted to create a building where each artist has his own space. He’s also purposefully sought out a diverse group of tenants “because it’s just more exciting that way,” he says.
Most of the available desks were hand-built by Anderson and Jordan Waller, an industrial designer who used to work in the studio. He’s done work to preserve as much of the original features of the building as he can, including the massive steel window panes which had been boarded up for 20 years. As far as tenants go, they range from someone who works in ceramics to a drafter/painter to a photographer and a fine artist. “It has been exactly what I’ve been missing in a creative space since I left college,” says Charlotte Smith, a ceramics fine artist who has been working in the studio full time for the past six months. The atmosphere, she says, is heavy with creative energy.
There’s a loading dock in the back and old train tracks run down the outer northwest wall. The streets are narrow. In every direction there is humorless red brick covered in parts by ivy. It seems as though Anderson has opened an idyllic paradise in Castleberry Hill for those wishing to escape modern society and “normal” 9-5 jobs. But an empty room designated as a future client meeting space for tenants is a reminder that artists have to make a living, too.
Anderson bought the warehouse last June with his father, who builds custom homes, though Anderson insists his dad never pushed him into woodworking. Instead, Anderson studied English literature at Georgia State. While completing his degree, he says he became overwhelmed with the idea of building a table. After some Google research and a stint working for free in a woodshop in Marietta, Anderson found his mentor, Benjie Osborne, who “literally took me under his wing and introduced me to this whole other world of furniture making,” he says. He then went on to study studio art furniture in Maine, emphasizing he was “pursuing furniture as a craft and an art versus a business.” There he learned the techniques of hand carving tools and traditional wood joinery — techniques that have mostly been replaced with precise, fast-working machines.
As we discuss life in the studio and his goals now that he’s full-time, Anderson waxes on about the sacrifices of owning your own business. “I’m not trying to paint this overly romantic world where it’s easy. I mean this is not easy at all. As it has progressed into more of a business it’s extremely stressful. ... It was a lot more simple when it was just me building one piece over two months, but then I wasn’t doing it full time. So it’s kind of that trade off.”
Now, Anderson works on four or five pieces at a time, and he has a waiting list until April. Most of his commissions are residential, but he also has high-profile clients such as Staplehouse, the highly acclaimed restaurant that benefits the Giving Kitchen, for which Anderson made the wall sconces, dining tables, and chef’s table. Anderson believes it’s his dedication to furniture making as a craft that attracts his clientele.
“I don’t necessarily want my stuff to be perfect in the sense of shape and form. And I think that’s why I’m drawn so much to hand tools, because you can create texture and you can create subtle details that you simply can’t with machines,” he says. “I think that touches on the personal aspect of it and why somebody seeks out a custom piece of furniture. ... They’re looking for that kind of personal touch or personal connection.”
As far as the future goes for Anderson and his studio, he hopes to pick out a name for it, though “nothing too crazy,” he warns. He’d like to eventually be able to offer a small line of furniture that consists of a credenza, a desk, a table, a chair. These would be made 50 or so at a time, and would be his signature designs, and on a more affordable scale than the custom work he does now. When I ask him if he’ll eventually have a showroom, he laughs. “Yeah,” he says, “that’d be a good thing.” It seems likely that if Anderson puts his mind to these things, they will happen, but for now he’s likely to be found on a bench in his studio, carving a block of wood as though that’s all there is.