May 24, 2004
Carving a niche | Peter Korn's Center for Furniture Craftsmanship nears completion of a significant expansion
By Brendan Hughes
Inside the red clapboard workshops of the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, men and women who range in age from 17 to 70 stand at waist-high workbenches, crafting pieces of furniture with hand tools and cherry wood. Vice grips suspend chairs and tables at odd angles in the air as students smooth the seams between joined pieces of wood. The furniture is simple but the details are painstakingly attended to, so that the finished product is not so much assembled as it is born whole.
Outside, on the porch of the center's new gallery, founder Peter Korn watches workers hammer at exposed beams on another building, which will house a new studio fellowship program. It is the third new structure in two years to be built on the center's campus, eleven acres of meadow and swamp that hug the Oyster River on one side and Route 90 on the other, and when it is finished this fall, it will have the same sloped roof and red clapboard siding as the others. "I love watching the building assume its full shape," says Korn, who stands about six feet tall with salt and pepper hair and rimless glasses.
Similarly, for the last 12 years Korn has watched the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship assume its shape, morphing from a small, for-profit enterprise with a full-time staff of one working in a barn to a growing nonprofit with a full-time staff of three and a year-round calendar of classes in custom furniture making. In the last two-and-a-half years, he's overseen a successful $2.4 million capital campaign that retired the school's debt and funded the construction of the three new buildings; in addition, Korn has gathered the funds to finance a $900,000 endowment in order to create the only artist-in-residence program in the country for emerging furniture makers.
"It's luck," says Korn of his enterprise's success. "I started this school with a point of view about what mattered about furniture making. People seem to have responded to that point of view."
They have responded by flocking to the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, so many that Korn has to turn away hundreds of applicants every year. Today, the center hosts about 270 students per year in workshops that range in length from a week to nine months and teach custom furniture making to every level of experience, rank beginner to professional. Each year, Korn invites 25 to 30 furniture makers from all over the world to teach their craft to students ˆ lawyers, businessmen, college students, housewives; there is no stereotype of the center's students ˆ who pay anywhere from $515 (for a one-week workshop) to $14,000 (for the nine-month comprehensive course) to attend what is widely regarded as one of the best custom furniture making schools in the country.
At those prices, the center is also a big business: In 2002, the last year for which figures are available, the center took in more than $1.4 million in revenues. And that means Korn, 52, is looking to the future. "We've got lots of room for growth," he says. "Not programmatic growth or physical growth, but growth within what we've already established."
From for-profit to nonprofit
Korn, a native of Philadelphia, has a degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania, but he is a self-taught furniture maker. After graduating from college, Korn, who says he always had a passion for working with his hands, became a carpenter, then moved into custom furniture making.
Korn made furniture independently for twelve years before he signed on as director of the woodworking program at the nonprofit Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colo. During Korn's six-year tenure there, annual enrollment at the workshop grew from 50 to 250; the experience gave him the management skills he would need to start his own school. "I managed the facility, hired the instructors and managed the program from the academic side," he says. "I was involved with publications, tangentially involved in fundraising, but pretty much got an idea of how all the pieces fit together."
When his first book, Woodworking Basics: Mastering the Essentials of Craftsmanship, came out in 1992, Korn decided the time was right to set out on his own. "I bought a house here [in Rockport]," Korn recalls, "set up a shop in a barn in the back and started advertising courses." Korn chose Maine, he says, because of its appeal as a vacation destination for potential students, and because of his own love for sailing along the state's rocky coastline.
That first year, Korn offered seven six-student workshops, each two weeks in length, but so many responded that he added two more sessions. He marketed the center in woodworking magazines nationwide to people who wanted to come for a vacation and receive instruction on using basic hand tools or operating a lathe. It's a strategy that has paid off. Today the students at the center come from 38 states and seven countries ˆ only 19% of students are from Maine ˆ and the waiting lists have grown each year.
By 1996, though, the school's rapid growth had become more than Korn could handle on his own. "I was the only administrative staff person," he says. "I was the person you talked to on the telephone, I was the person who did the books, I was the person who processed the registrations, who wrote the publicationsˆ and I taught about 30-40 weeks a year." The school, he says, needed an organizational framework that would provide permanence.
The problem was that in 1992, Korn had incorporated the organization as a for-profit enterprise. "I had been hoping to open it as a nonprofit, because that's what I knew workedˆ [but] the nonprofit plans weren't ready, so I just jumped in and tried it to see what would happen" with a for-profit business model.
But that structure, while useful in the short term, didn't fit in with Korn's vision for the center. "A school should not be driven by the bottom line," he says. In 1999, Korn incorporated the center as a 503c3 nonprofit corporation, a process that involved creating a board of directors, who raised $250,000 to acquire the school and hire Korn as the executive director.
It was the center's conversion to nonprofit status that has allowed it to grow so quickly in recent years, Korn says. The board of directors, which includes such people as Richard C. Kellogg Jr., an alumnus of the center and a businessman from Houston, Texas, and Thomas Moser, the acclaimed furniture maker from Auburn, formed a long-range planning committee. With Korn's help, the committee articulated a clear mission and set long-term goals for the school, including establishing the nine-month comprehensive workshop, expanding the studio fellowship program and building two new workshops and a gallery for the display of new furniture. "Everyone on the board and on the staff and our donors is on the same page as to where the school is," Korn says. "That clear unity around a sense of purpose ˆ that's an exceptional moment in the life of a nonprofit, and it's hard to keep it, but fortunately we have it at this moment."
Crafting furniture, building a business
That unity of purpose is part of the draw for many students. Heidi Mahoney attended the twelve-week intensive course in 1998; afterwards, she and her husband opened Figcake Inc., a residential and commercial furniture business in Vergennes, Vt. She was 26 when she came to the center.
"Peter is very focused. He was an inspiration for me," Mahoney says, although she admits to disagreeing with her teacher about materials on more than one occasion. "I would say 'Wouldn't that look great with metal here,' and Peter would say 'No, Heidi, stick with the wood,' but I enjoyed it. It's very important to have that kind of focus, to learn to work with the material."
The center's location and its accessibility to novice woodworkers appealed to Mahoney. "I looked at the RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] program, but that was four years and you needed previous experience," she says. "The [center's] three-month intensive program was nice. It was a commitment, but not a huge commitment." Mahoney had no experience in furniture craftsmanship, but says that it became a new passion after three months at the center.
"I went home and set up my own shop that looked just like the school's, but on a smaller scale," says Mahoney. She also joined the Vermont Furniture Guild and began recommending the center to people who wanted to learn the skills. Last summer, she returned to the center to assist in teaching one of the week-long summer workshops.
Mahoney was able to transfer the skills she learned at the center into starting a successful furniture business of her own ˆ she recently completed 15 oak and metal tables for St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vt. ˆ but it wasn't easy. "Peter made it a point to stress how hard it was" going into business as an independent furniture maker, she says. "He said, 'Marry someone rich if you want to be a furniture maker.'"
Each semester, Korn takes students to visit local furniture makers and teaches prospective entrepreneurs basic business skills like bookkeeping and marketing, but, he says, preparation isn't always enough. "I'd say that in our 12-week courses, of our 12 students, nine or 10 are there to make furniture for money, whether that's as a full-time job or a part-time job. I would say that out of each course, maybe one or two go right into professional furniture making," says Korn.
One obstacle they face is the increasing professionalization of the field. "Sixty years ago," he says, "people did not do what [students at the center] are doing. People did not make furniture as a self-expressive formˆ People made furniture because it was a trade and it's how you make a living." These days, many custom furniture makers have master's of fine arts degrees from places like RISD or the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y.
'We're not about exclusion'
The center's fellowship program is part of that trend toward professionalization. The center has offered the fellowship for the last seven years, but thanks to the recent capital campaign, a special workshop at the Rockport campus with space for six fellows is nearly complete. In exchange for the free shop space, studio fellows are expected to assist in teaching the workshops and push the creative envelope in wooden furniture craftsmanship. The length of the fellowships varies between one month and a year, and someday, Korn hopes to grow the program's endowment to include a living stipend and materials. "I think that you'll find some resentment toward the professionalization of the field right now," Korn says. "[But] I don't think that has much to do with this school because we're not about degrees and we're not about exclusion."
Those sentiments are echoed by Doug Green, founder of Green Design Furniture in Portland. Like Korn, Green started out as a self-taught woodworker; Green later attended the Pratt Institute, where he earned his master's in industrial design. He opened Green Design Furniture in 1994, and has since patented a number of innovative production and joinery processes and established a strong niche in the fine furniture world.
Although his firm's strength is in design and production rather than crafting individually unique pieces, Green believes the skills taught at the center are vital ones to any prospective furniture designer. "Craftsmanship is a very important value in addition to design, but the first level is to know your materials, and students [at the center] learn that," he says. The three- and nine-month workshops also give students the opportunity to focus on furniture design, a skill often overlooked, says Green. "It shows [students at the center] how to improve the state of the artˆ People who just know craftsmanship tend to look backwards. Peter is not afraid of the future."
Green, whose business has been growing at a rate of eight percent to 10% a year, down from 20% to 25% before the recession, believes that the growth of his firm and the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship are related. "People are starving for some kind of personality and humanity in the products they put in their homes," he says, noting that the enrollment demand at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship is an extension of that desire for personality. "There is something very powerful about being able to take raw materials and make something that is functional and beautiful."
The center, Korn believes, will continue to grow as professionals like Heidi Mahoney come to Rockport to learn how to make useful, beautiful furniture. "It's an act of self definition," says Korn. "It's a way a person explores who they are, who they want to become, how one should live."
Outside, on the porch of the center's new gallery, founder Peter Korn watches workers hammer at exposed beams on another building, which will house a new studio fellowship program. It is the third new structure in two years to be built on the center's campus, eleven acres of meadow and swamp that hug the Oyster River on one side and Route 90 on the other, and when it is finished this fall, it will have the same sloped roof and red clapboard siding as the others. "I love watching the building assume its full shape," says Korn, who stands about six feet tall with salt and pepper hair and rimless glasses.
Similarly, for the last 12 years Korn has watched the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship assume its shape, morphing from a small, for-profit enterprise with a full-time staff of one working in a barn to a growing nonprofit with a full-time staff of three and a year-round calendar of classes in custom furniture making. In the last two-and-a-half years, he's overseen a successful $2.4 million capital campaign that retired the school's debt and funded the construction of the three new buildings; in addition, Korn has gathered the funds to finance a $900,000 endowment in order to create the only artist-in-residence program in the country for emerging furniture makers.
"It's luck," says Korn of his enterprise's success. "I started this school with a point of view about what mattered about furniture making. People seem to have responded to that point of view."
They have responded by flocking to the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, so many that Korn has to turn away hundreds of applicants every year. Today, the center hosts about 270 students per year in workshops that range in length from a week to nine months and teach custom furniture making to every level of experience, rank beginner to professional. Each year, Korn invites 25 to 30 furniture makers from all over the world to teach their craft to students ˆ lawyers, businessmen, college students, housewives; there is no stereotype of the center's students ˆ who pay anywhere from $515 (for a one-week workshop) to $14,000 (for the nine-month comprehensive course) to attend what is widely regarded as one of the best custom furniture making schools in the country.
At those prices, the center is also a big business: In 2002, the last year for which figures are available, the center took in more than $1.4 million in revenues. And that means Korn, 52, is looking to the future. "We've got lots of room for growth," he says. "Not programmatic growth or physical growth, but growth within what we've already established."
From for-profit to nonprofit
Korn, a native of Philadelphia, has a degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania, but he is a self-taught furniture maker. After graduating from college, Korn, who says he always had a passion for working with his hands, became a carpenter, then moved into custom furniture making.
Korn made furniture independently for twelve years before he signed on as director of the woodworking program at the nonprofit Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colo. During Korn's six-year tenure there, annual enrollment at the workshop grew from 50 to 250; the experience gave him the management skills he would need to start his own school. "I managed the facility, hired the instructors and managed the program from the academic side," he says. "I was involved with publications, tangentially involved in fundraising, but pretty much got an idea of how all the pieces fit together."
When his first book, Woodworking Basics: Mastering the Essentials of Craftsmanship, came out in 1992, Korn decided the time was right to set out on his own. "I bought a house here [in Rockport]," Korn recalls, "set up a shop in a barn in the back and started advertising courses." Korn chose Maine, he says, because of its appeal as a vacation destination for potential students, and because of his own love for sailing along the state's rocky coastline.
That first year, Korn offered seven six-student workshops, each two weeks in length, but so many responded that he added two more sessions. He marketed the center in woodworking magazines nationwide to people who wanted to come for a vacation and receive instruction on using basic hand tools or operating a lathe. It's a strategy that has paid off. Today the students at the center come from 38 states and seven countries ˆ only 19% of students are from Maine ˆ and the waiting lists have grown each year.
By 1996, though, the school's rapid growth had become more than Korn could handle on his own. "I was the only administrative staff person," he says. "I was the person you talked to on the telephone, I was the person who did the books, I was the person who processed the registrations, who wrote the publicationsˆ and I taught about 30-40 weeks a year." The school, he says, needed an organizational framework that would provide permanence.
The problem was that in 1992, Korn had incorporated the organization as a for-profit enterprise. "I had been hoping to open it as a nonprofit, because that's what I knew workedˆ [but] the nonprofit plans weren't ready, so I just jumped in and tried it to see what would happen" with a for-profit business model.
But that structure, while useful in the short term, didn't fit in with Korn's vision for the center. "A school should not be driven by the bottom line," he says. In 1999, Korn incorporated the center as a 503c3 nonprofit corporation, a process that involved creating a board of directors, who raised $250,000 to acquire the school and hire Korn as the executive director.
It was the center's conversion to nonprofit status that has allowed it to grow so quickly in recent years, Korn says. The board of directors, which includes such people as Richard C. Kellogg Jr., an alumnus of the center and a businessman from Houston, Texas, and Thomas Moser, the acclaimed furniture maker from Auburn, formed a long-range planning committee. With Korn's help, the committee articulated a clear mission and set long-term goals for the school, including establishing the nine-month comprehensive workshop, expanding the studio fellowship program and building two new workshops and a gallery for the display of new furniture. "Everyone on the board and on the staff and our donors is on the same page as to where the school is," Korn says. "That clear unity around a sense of purpose ˆ that's an exceptional moment in the life of a nonprofit, and it's hard to keep it, but fortunately we have it at this moment."
Crafting furniture, building a business
That unity of purpose is part of the draw for many students. Heidi Mahoney attended the twelve-week intensive course in 1998; afterwards, she and her husband opened Figcake Inc., a residential and commercial furniture business in Vergennes, Vt. She was 26 when she came to the center.
"Peter is very focused. He was an inspiration for me," Mahoney says, although she admits to disagreeing with her teacher about materials on more than one occasion. "I would say 'Wouldn't that look great with metal here,' and Peter would say 'No, Heidi, stick with the wood,' but I enjoyed it. It's very important to have that kind of focus, to learn to work with the material."
The center's location and its accessibility to novice woodworkers appealed to Mahoney. "I looked at the RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] program, but that was four years and you needed previous experience," she says. "The [center's] three-month intensive program was nice. It was a commitment, but not a huge commitment." Mahoney had no experience in furniture craftsmanship, but says that it became a new passion after three months at the center.
"I went home and set up my own shop that looked just like the school's, but on a smaller scale," says Mahoney. She also joined the Vermont Furniture Guild and began recommending the center to people who wanted to learn the skills. Last summer, she returned to the center to assist in teaching one of the week-long summer workshops.
Mahoney was able to transfer the skills she learned at the center into starting a successful furniture business of her own ˆ she recently completed 15 oak and metal tables for St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vt. ˆ but it wasn't easy. "Peter made it a point to stress how hard it was" going into business as an independent furniture maker, she says. "He said, 'Marry someone rich if you want to be a furniture maker.'"
Each semester, Korn takes students to visit local furniture makers and teaches prospective entrepreneurs basic business skills like bookkeeping and marketing, but, he says, preparation isn't always enough. "I'd say that in our 12-week courses, of our 12 students, nine or 10 are there to make furniture for money, whether that's as a full-time job or a part-time job. I would say that out of each course, maybe one or two go right into professional furniture making," says Korn.
One obstacle they face is the increasing professionalization of the field. "Sixty years ago," he says, "people did not do what [students at the center] are doing. People did not make furniture as a self-expressive formˆ People made furniture because it was a trade and it's how you make a living." These days, many custom furniture makers have master's of fine arts degrees from places like RISD or the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y.
'We're not about exclusion'
The center's fellowship program is part of that trend toward professionalization. The center has offered the fellowship for the last seven years, but thanks to the recent capital campaign, a special workshop at the Rockport campus with space for six fellows is nearly complete. In exchange for the free shop space, studio fellows are expected to assist in teaching the workshops and push the creative envelope in wooden furniture craftsmanship. The length of the fellowships varies between one month and a year, and someday, Korn hopes to grow the program's endowment to include a living stipend and materials. "I think that you'll find some resentment toward the professionalization of the field right now," Korn says. "[But] I don't think that has much to do with this school because we're not about degrees and we're not about exclusion."
Those sentiments are echoed by Doug Green, founder of Green Design Furniture in Portland. Like Korn, Green started out as a self-taught woodworker; Green later attended the Pratt Institute, where he earned his master's in industrial design. He opened Green Design Furniture in 1994, and has since patented a number of innovative production and joinery processes and established a strong niche in the fine furniture world.
Although his firm's strength is in design and production rather than crafting individually unique pieces, Green believes the skills taught at the center are vital ones to any prospective furniture designer. "Craftsmanship is a very important value in addition to design, but the first level is to know your materials, and students [at the center] learn that," he says. The three- and nine-month workshops also give students the opportunity to focus on furniture design, a skill often overlooked, says Green. "It shows [students at the center] how to improve the state of the artˆ People who just know craftsmanship tend to look backwards. Peter is not afraid of the future."
Green, whose business has been growing at a rate of eight percent to 10% a year, down from 20% to 25% before the recession, believes that the growth of his firm and the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship are related. "People are starving for some kind of personality and humanity in the products they put in their homes," he says, noting that the enrollment demand at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship is an extension of that desire for personality. "There is something very powerful about being able to take raw materials and make something that is functional and beautiful."
The center, Korn believes, will continue to grow as professionals like Heidi Mahoney come to Rockport to learn how to make useful, beautiful furniture. "It's an act of self definition," says Korn. "It's a way a person explores who they are, who they want to become, how one should live."
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments