NEW HOPE, Pa. – In the early 1940s, Mira Nakashima helped her dad, architect and furniture designer George Nakashima, build their Solebury Township home.
“I remember Dad telling me go find a stone that will fit into that hole please,” she said looking at a living room stone wall.
George died in 1990, but his naturalistic vision of blending traditional Japanese craftsmanship with American modernist design remains.
“This natural outline, the outline of the furniture, that is a hallmark of your dad, art of the Nakashima furniture?” 69 News reporter Bo Koltnow asked Mira while standing in front of a coffee table, with uneven natural knotty edges.
“And the ‘knockoff-ashimas,'” she chuckled, of which there are a lot.
Originals by George can now reach mid-six-figures in cost. Clients included the Rockefellers, with the very apparent butterfly joint, a staple in a Naskashima table.
Today, Mira oversees 16 woodworkers on 9 acres, with 15 buildings all built by Nakashima.
“The structure is almost like a piece of furniture,” said General Manager John Lutz, at a property garage.
About 700 pieces are hand-crafted yearly; a current coffee table is set for President Obama’s Presidential Center.
“When people pound the pieces together, you can tell if it’s fitted properly or not by how it sounds,” Mira said as a woodworker pounded wood into a joint.
“How did that sound?” Bo asked.
“It sounds good,” she responded.
During World War II, George, a Washington State native with a master’s in architecture from MIT, was put in an Idaho internment camp along with his wife and 6-week-old Mira.
However, a meeting there with a Japanese carpenter shaped the rest of his life.
“He learned not only joinery, Japanese joinery. Also learned how to improvise with found objects, with found wood, whatever materials they had is what they had to use,” Mira said.
A former employer brought Nakashima to New Hope as a chicken farmer. Nakashima then started buying up nearby land. Mira says they lived in a tent while George hand built the home.
The predominantly wood home, now a national historic landmark open to the public, is in need of preserving.
“We have data recorders that actually monitor the changes and the shifts between the seasons, as far as how much humidity gets in the house…how dry it gets, and trying to stabilize that for the collection,” Lutz said.
The Nakashima Foundation is working with Pennsylvania University and launched a capital campaign to ensure George’s balance between man and nature remains stable.
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