Finding New Life (and Profit) in Doomed Trees ANS

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Finding New Life (and Profit) in Doomed Trees

 
Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Seth Meyer, left, and John Wells started a green business that makes custom furniture from trees that fall to development, disease or storms. More Photos »

By LAWRENCE W. CHEEK


Published: August 7, 2010

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New Life for Doomed Trees

 

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Stuart Isett for The New York Times

At work on a table at Meyer Wells. More Photos »
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Stuart Isett for The New York Times

A 30-foot chef's table was built from an elm tree that fell in a Seattle park. More Photos »

THE wooden kitchen bar in the suburban home of Richard and Donna Majer has a canyonlike crack ripping right down its middle, which is exactly what the couple cherish most about it. It's not just furniture ­ it's a story, complete with a moral.

"As I spend time with it, I see the beauty of the hard life the tree had," Mrs. Majer says. "And it helps me find the beauty in my own life's scars."

The crack occurred three years ago in a storm that mortally wounded the towering oak in the Majers's backyard. It was a family member; Mr. Majer had planted it with his father 53 years earlier. Devastated, the Majers consulted an arborist, who said yes, it had to come down, but that there were a couple of guys in Seattle they should talk to.

The guys were Seth Meyer and John Wells. The pair harvest local urban trees doomed by development, disease or storm damage, and turn them into custom furniture, each piece a distinct botanical narrative.

Their business, started four years ago, bears all the markers that would seem to point toward collapse and extinction in a recessionary economy. It's founded on idealism and emotion. It's riddled with huge and unavoidable inefficiencies. And it tenders a high-end product that asks buyers to take risks and have faith.

Yet the company, Meyer Wells, has thrived. It's been profitable from the start, Mr. Wells says, and revenue has grown annually; it reached $850,000 last year, and the business partners say they're on track to top $1 million this year. There are now nine employees, and the furniture commissions have blown well beyond suburban kitchens to high-visibility clients like Starbucks and the University of Washington.

"I think our idealism is meeting with the demand to make buildings greener," Mr. Wells says.

Michael Verchot, director of the Business and Economic Development Center at the University of Washington, says his research backs up that theory. "We've conducted two small-business surveys in Washington State in the past four months, and we're seeing that companies that have a green product are the ones that are increasing sales," he says. "I can't speak to the whole country, but our surveys here are telling us that green will be here forever. It's a permanent shift."

The Northwest has become one of the strongest markets for nurturing innovative, sustainable businesses, says Alan Durning, executive director of the Sightline Institute, a nonprofit research group here. "In the mental geography of the American mind, the Northwest stands for nature," he says. "It attracts and retains folks who have a strong affinity for our natural heritage."

A heart of green is no guarantee of success, of course, even in Seattle. Such enterprises can be as fleeting as ripples on a pond ­ and Mr. Durning says they often fail for the same reasons others do: they race too far ahead of the market or fail to control costs. It's especially challenging for green businesses to figure out what environmental values consumers want, and what they will pay extra for, he says.

Janet Pomeroy, board president of the San Francisco-based Green Chamber of Commerce, says the green businesses that do well nationally are those that have an authentic story to sell.

Meyer Wells had those elements from the start. It understood Seattle's environmental gestalt, and had a product that could spin its own story. Although custom furniture builders are as abundant as mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest, Meyer Wells staked out a distinct territory: the big slab, furniture that could bring indoors the raw power of the environment rather than a builder's vision.

Mr. Wells says the company also saw trajectories in culture and business worldwide ­ particularly the locavore and slow-food movements ­ that suggested the time was ripe for their venture. "We're starting a slow-wood movement," he says.

In line with typically idealistic sustainable businesses, they're trying the whole bouillabaisse of green values, from using nontoxic, water-based wood finishes to offering better-than-average employee benefits. "For a small company, they work hard to make us comfortable," says Keiku Toutonghi, its one-woman finishing operation. "This is the first place I've gotten health benefits and paid vacations."

Its business model does not depend on tree lovers' anguished calls, but increasingly on networks with other businesses and design professionals. Tutta Bella, a high-end pizzeria chain, asked Meyer Wells to build a 30-foot-long chef's table from a century-old city park elm that had split in a windstorm. The table helps the restaurant establish its brand, the owner, Joe Fugere, says. "It fits our culture of sustainability and authenticity," he says.

Despite the increasingly ambitious restaurant and boardroom tables ­ the latter ironically encrusted with electronic connectivity under the rustic slabs ­ Mr. Meyer and Mr. Wells seem not to have snipped the emotional roots that led them into the business: a love of raw wood. Mr. Majer recalls the day Mr. Meyer came out to assess their doomed oak. "It's hard to explain," he says, "but we knew that Seth could see the soul of that tree."

MEYER WELLS works out of an 8,000-square-foot, high-ceiling building four miles north of downtown that once housed a Navy swimming pool.

Soft northern light floods in through clerestory windows; bare cedar boughs hang from the open ceiling trusses to cleanse any lingering negative energy from the lumber that enters and the furniture that leaves ­ a Native American belief that Mr. Wells embraces. A stunning indoor alley is formed by towering slabs of hardwoods the partners have salvaged: oak, walnut, black locust, bigleaf and silver maples, cherry and madrona.

"People who buy furniture here are adventurers," says Mr. Meyer. "They see the tree and get to be part of the process. They have to have an adventurous spirit, they have to be patient, and they have to trust. There's an element of risk."

Those adventurers might be surprised to learn that Mr. Meyer, 40, is a high-school dropout. He radiates a discerning obsession with the details of design and the philosophy of craftsmanship. "Some people drop out of school because they can't cut it," says Mr. Wells. "Others drop out because school doesn't cut it for them. That's Seth."

Mr. Meyer says he grew up in a house "with a lot of aesthetic awareness."

"My stepfather was a furniture maker," he adds. "There was always a lot of discussion about beauty and craft." Everything in the built environment was up for critique. "We'd be driving along and someone would say: 'Look at the back end of that car. What a missed opportunity!' "

Mr. Wells is 45, coolly cerebral and stuffed with education. Mr. Meyer describes him as the optimistic force in the partnership, the one who argues for the new tool or venture and sustains the faith that it all will work out. He has a bachelor's degree in English from the College of Wooster in Ohio, and another in industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design. His résumé is also flocked with sawdust. In high school he made a Chippendale desk that scored second in a statewide shop-class competition in North Carolina.

Like Mr. Meyer, he once ran a one-man custom furniture shop. The two met at a mutual friend's dinner party, worked on a couple of projects together, then decided to form a new company.

Now in production is a large dining table from two storm-felled red elms. At this point, the slabs are propped against a wall, notes and lines chalked on them. A notation beside a two-foot-long crack specifies, "OPEN." The crack will be cleaned up and stabilized, but not filled or hidden. "I see a bird in it, maybe a heron," Mr. Meyer says, admiring its form. The slabs will be mated not with ruler-straight joints, but with painstakingly curved cuts in line with the grain patterns.

He suddenly becomes a tour guide to a whole geography embedded in the wood ­ "islands" and "cathedrals" in the grain. "I'm looking to see how the grain of one board flows into the next so that the composition feels harmonious," he says. "In every piece, I'm looking for some kind of rhythm and balance. It's an intuitive process, not something with a set of rules I could ever write down."

If there's one rule in the shop, it's this: Respect the tree's narrative ­ including the chapters about its hard urban life. Mr. Meyer once found a steel snippet embedded in a beautiful cherry slab, perhaps a remnant of a nail used to hammer a "lost cat" sign to the tree. He left it in place, a piece of the story.

Nearly all of their pieces feature the trendy "live edge" ­ an edge of the slab left unmilled to celebrate the topography of the tree trunk. The technique today can be accused of being a cliché, but nature still provides a universe of forms and textures to admire. Some edges seem to ripple with geologic strata; some display miniature badlands of canyons and ridges. The Meyer Wells philosophy is to impose as little human design as possible.

The timber rolls in through motley channels. Some local arborists are plugged in and know when to call. One day, Mr. Meyer was driving near a Seattle lot that was to be the site of a new apartment building. A sprawling bigleaf maple arrested him.

"I had to make several calls, but I finally got to the demolition contractor," Mr. Meyer recalls. "He said, 'Oh yeah, we're just going to take it to the dump.' " As usual, Meyer Wells took the timber for nothing, but the cost of trucking it to the company's yard is typically $500 for an urban tree salvage.

Although the designs are minimalist, the costs add up ­ for drying, milling, design, joining the component pieces and finishing. Coffee and dining tables mostly range from $3,000 to $10,000, while runwaylike conference tables can easily hit $20,000.

Mr. Wells says they essentially use a cost-plus pricing model, but because each piece ­ and each tree's constellation of problems ­ is different, "sometimes we do well at the pricing, and sometimes we don't."

"But it all seems to average out," he adds, "and we're getting better at it."

Where Mr. Meyer still loves to ponder the expressive possibilities of a crack in a slab, Mr. Wells now seems propelled more by the big-ticket issue of sustainability. "I really believe a designer can make better choices, and that can influence people and move us in a direction that's more sustainable," he says. "That's what I've chosen to do, and I think it's what's made us a successful business."

SUSTAINABLE furniture isn't recession-proof. The company's residential business shrank in the last two years, but increases in corporate commissions more than made up the difference, Mr. Wells said. Now the residential orders are wrenching back up, and Mr. Wells remains a dogged optimist.

"People buy what they believe is right for them to buy," he says. "If there are options available that fit better with their values, they will buy those options."

The business's current challenge is in remaining faithful to its roots. Ms. Pomeroy of the Green Chamber of Commerce notes that one of the universal hazards for green businesses is trying too hard to uphold all their ideals while the gritty realities of everyday economics gnaw away at them. Sometimes, she says, they fail to understand that fully incorporating their values would mean changing the world's economic systems.

In fact, Meyer Wells is trying to save increasingly large chunks of the world. Early this year, it started a subsidiary venture, Green Tree Mill, that will extend its reach into Puget Sound's surrounding forests, harvesting and milling trees that the larger sawmills don't want. Instead of being turned directly into custom furniture, this lumber will be marketed directly to builders.

"I have sleepless nights," Mr. Wells acknowledges. "The mill is pushing us to a new level of risk, with a potentially higher level of reward."

Mr. Meyer seems to crave equilibrium more than growth, and longs for more time to put his hands on a fallen tree and massage its natural beauty.

"We're faced with the not unsatisfying challenge of injecting efficiency into an essentially creative process," he says. "From the classic viewpoint of American business, it's probably a fool's errand. But hey, so far we're making it work."

A version of this article appeared in print on August 8, 2010, on page BU1 of the New York edition.