Early Black Walnut 'Mira Chair' by George Nakashima

A cursory look at the Mira chair by George Nakashima (1905–90) reveals a simple wood form that might be perfectly at home in a 17th-century-era Shaker community in the United States, mid-century Scandinavia or even ancient Japan. That’s not much of a surprise — the American designer traveled widely and drew on varying traditions in his work.

Nakashima was born to Japanese immigrants in Washington state, studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then worked in Paris, Japan and India before returning to the United States. During World War II in 1942, his family was sent to an internment camp in Idaho, where Nakashima trained under a Japanese master wood-carver. Upon his release, the designer moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania, where he established his own practice with a focus on woodworking.

For Nakashima, it was crucial that each piece of furniture be utilized in everyday life — he designed this chair around 1950 for its namesake, his young daughter, Mira. Inspired by Shaker-style craftsmanship, the all-wood piece has a spindle back, a heart-shaped seat and just three tapered legs. Nakashima created three versions of the chair to accommodate Mira's growth over the years, with the two larger ones featuring modest-sized footrests. Today Mira runs her father’s studio, which continues to produce the Mira chair exactly the way he did.

A master woodworker and M.I.T.-trained architect, George Nakashima was the leading light of the American Studio furniture movement. Along with Wharton Esherick, Sam Maloof and Wendell Castle, Nakashima was an artisan who disdained industrial methods and materials in favor of a personal, craft-based approach to the design. What sets Nakashima apart is the poetic style of his work, his reverence for wood and the belief that his furniture could evince — as he put it in the title of his 1981 memoir — The Soul of a Tree.

Born in Spokane, Washington, to Japanese immigrants, Nakashima traveled widely after college, working and studying in Paris, Japan and India, and at every stop he absorbed both modernist and traditional design influences. The turning point in Nakashima’s career development came in the United States in 1942, when he was placed in an internment camp for Asian-Americans in Idaho. There, Nakashima met a master woodcarver who tutored him in Japanese crafting techniques. A former employer won Nakashima’s release and brought him to bucolic New Hope, Pennsylvania, where Nakashima set up a studio and worked for the rest of his life.

Nakashima’s singular aesthetic is best captured in his custom-made tables and benches — pieces that show off the grain, burls and whorls in a plank of wood. He left the “free edge,” or natural contour, of the slab un-planed, and reinforced fissures in the wood with “butterfly” joints. Almost all Nakashima seating pieces have smooth, milled edges. Nakashima also contracted with large-scale manufacturers to produce carefully supervised editions of his designs. Knoll has offered his Straight chair — a modern take on the spindle-backed Windsor chair — since 1946; the now-defunct firm Widdicomb-Mueller issued the Shaker-inspired Origins collection in the 1950s.

Nelson Rockefeller in 1973 gave Nakashima his single largest commission: a 200-piece suite for his suburban New York estate. Today, Nakashima furniture is collected by both the staid and the fashionable: his work sits in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as in the homes of Steven Spielberg, Brad Pitt, Diane von Furstenberg and the late Steve Jobs.