Page 128 - The Book For Men Fall/Winter 2023

RAIN POURED DOWN IN HUGE, DRAMATIC SHEETS, FILLING THE AIR. He took this iconic and easily recognizable form and stripped it back, resulting
The wind pushed through the landscape with such violence that it cracked trees in half, sending them plummeting to the ground or crash- ing through power lines. Cars were abandoned on flooded streets and homes were completely blown apart by falling debris, leaving nothing but messy piles of wood and detritus. It was September 24th, 2022, and post-tropical Hurricane Fiona had swept ashore in Nova Scotia, ripped through the Maritimes, left half a million people without power, and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
When the storm hit, Nova Scotia-raised furniture-maker Jonathan Otter was in Cork, Ireland, where he lives with his wife and nine-year- old daughter. But even with the Atlantic Ocean separating him from
Fiona’s impacts, the hurricane still hit close to his heart. The north of the province, where he grew up, was particularly affected. On his parents’ land, all the trees were completely flattened, and when he spoke to his parents on the phone, his father remarked that he could clearly see the back boundary line for the first time ever. Decades of hard work implementing a meticulous and sustainable forestry plan were undone in mere minutes. So, when Timberland approached Otter looking to collaborate on a chair, one that would be sold at auction to generate money for victims of the storm, the designer jumped at the opportunity.
Otter is primarily known as a chair-maker and is celebrated for his sim- plistic-yet-gorgeous, hand-carved designs. His Lounge Chair No. 2 — one of which is now a part of Canada’s House of Commons collection — is based on a classic Windsor chair, with its spindles, continuous armback and wooden seat.
in a beautiful blend of contrasting dark walnut and light ash, with the back and arms curving together in a fluid, natural way. Lounge Chair No. 3, with its black walnut frame and hand-stitched white leather seat, won international accolades at the prestigious Arts & Craft Design Awards. But Otter’s deliciously tactile, sensuous designs — and the hundreds of hours of painstaking labour that go into them — don’t come cheap: his chairs can sell for upwards of $30,000.
The designer has always been drawn to the chair as an object, finding something special in the intimate way it fits into a home. “It’s easy enough to make a beautiful chair,” reflects Otter, “and it’s easy enough to make a com- fortable chair. But to make a chair that’s both beautiful and comfortable is the holy grail of furniture making.” He muses that throughout history there have only been a few designers — he won’t name names — who have completely nailed it because, while chairs are required to fit the body, everyone’s body is different. A chair needs to be both practical and artistic, a treat both to look at and to sit in. And this challenging of finding balance is the reason Otter has found himself drawn to chairs again and again.
Otter has no formal training in furniture-making; instead, he learned his trade through a combination of voracious reading and growing up with a carpenter for a father. As a child on his parents’ 400-acre, forest-surrounded farm, he would frequently assist with projects and repairs, or take on his own. He made toboggans, bows and arrows, and a functional boat to use in the nearby river. One year, when he was 13, he lost his whole summer to building barns with his family. “I said at the end of that summer I would never work with wood again,” Otter jokes.
128 BFM / FW23 FEATURE / AGAINST THE GRAIN