3 Legged Counter Stools

The cofounder of New York Heartwoods, a sustainable furniture and woodworking business, Megan Offner helps clients part with their broken, diseased or fallen trees by turning them into sleek tables, case pieces and other furniture that is inspired by Shaker tradition as well as mid-century modernism.

Offner spends her days in Kingston, New York, talking to emotional homeowners considering removing their trees, fearing damage from severe weather, and with commercial clients yearning to create jaw-dropping statement interiors.

If unusual, her occupation is hardly surprising, given Offner’s outdoorsy upbringing in Missoula, Montana. She spent a lot of time camping in national parks like Glacier and while visiting family in Oregon. Those trips revealed to her the prevalence of clear-cutting in forests and the harm it does, which left a lasting impression.

“People in the city experience wood as something that comes from Home Depot,” she says with a laugh. “For me, I experience a tree as a conscious being.”

A self-described creative, Offner fell into set design after moving to New York City a few years after college. “I was building things that just ended up in the dumpster after a week,” she says of her creations for magazine shoots and ad campaigns.

The attacks of 9/11 provoked existential doubts about her career. Looking for an alternative, she enrolled in a sustainable design program at Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Vermont.

After finishing her certificate, she began volunteering on a property in Upstate New York, where she met Dave Washburn, who taught a workshop on harvesting dying and diseased trees to improve the health of a forest. Washburn eked out a living transforming these trees into boards for flooring.

“It was a model of how one could have a beautiful and creative life that produced no waste,” Offner says. “I had this a-ha moment of ‘That’s what I’m going to do.’”

Washburn introduced her to another mentor who would influence her career trajectory. Jed Bark, a fine art framer, had purchased a sawmill in Warwick, New York, to make lumber for his frames and agreed to train Offner there.

In 2011, Offner cofounded New York Heartwoods on Bark’s land with Washburn (who continued to work for the company for about two years). Initially, they sold lumber and slabs made from fallen trees to New York designers. Soon, however, the firm was fielding requests from tree services and landowners to turn their downed trees — which otherwise would have wound up in chippers or landfills — into one-of-a-kind tables.

A particularly meaningful project for Offner’s firm was the construction of a massive wraparound bench made of ash for upscale kaiseki restaurant Uchu, on the Lower East Side.

The species is disappearing across North America, so “it was one of the last big ash trees we might work with,” says Offner, who considered the opportunity to do so an honor, and especially apt that it was for a Japanese client whose traditional culture is known for revering nature.

The different species also speak to her differently. Walnut, for instance, which Offner has used for a stunning mid-century-style credenza, appears emerald and amethyst before it’s cut, but once it meets air, she says, “there’s this magical moment” when the colors start to change. It’s a kind of alchemy. As, indeed, is Offner’s work.

Find New York Heartwoods furniture on 1stDibs.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.

Stools are versatile and a necessary addition to any living room, kitchen area or elsewhere in your home. A sofa or reliable lounge chair might nab all the credit, comfort-wise, but don’t discount the roles that good antique, new and vintage stools can play.

“Stools are jewels and statements in a space, and they can also be investment pieces,” says New York City designer Amy Lau, who adds that these seats provide an excellent choice for setting an interior’s general tone. 

Stools, which are among the oldest forms of wooden furnishings, may also serve as decorative pieces, even if we’re talking about a stool that is far less sculptural than the gracefully curving molded plywood shells that make up Sōri Yanagi’s provocative Butterfly stool. 

Fawn Galli, a New York interior designer, uses her stools in the same way you would use a throw pillow. “I normally buy several styles and move them around the home where needed,” she says.

Stools are smaller pieces of seating as compared to armchairs or dining chairs and can add depth as well as functionality to a space that you’ve set aside for entertaining. For a splash of color, consider the Stool 60, a pioneering work of bentwood by Finnish architect and furniture maker Alvar Aalto. It’s manufactured by Artek and comes in a variety of colored seats and finishes.

Barstools that date back to the 1970s are now more ubiquitous in kitchens. Vintage barstools have seen renewed interest, be they a meld of chrome and leather or transparent plastic, such as the Lucite and stainless-steel counter stool variety from Indiana-born furniture designer Charles Hollis Jones, who is renowned for his acrylic works. A cluster of barstools — perhaps a set of four brushed-aluminum counter stools by Emeco or Tubby Tube stools by Faye Toogood — can encourage merriment in the kitchen. If you’ve got the room for family and friends to congregate and enjoy cocktails where the cooking is done, consider matching your stools with a tall table.

Whether you need counter stools, drafting stools or another kind, explore an extensive range of antique, new and vintage stools on 1stDibs.