The Conoid dining chair, 1978, is made of butternut, a very rare wood for Nakashima.

Arboreal Aesthetic
It is not hard to understand how Nakashima’s woodsy, spiritual philosophy, his idea that his furniture might give “second life to a tree,” as expounded upon in his book The Soul of a Tree (1981), might resonate among members of a bark-embracing, yoga-obsessed culture badly in need of spiritual solace. As Tom Voss describes it (Voss and his wife Kay Douglas, both Manhattan-based magazine designers, have been seriously collecting Nakashima furniture for the past decade), “For us it is about the spirit of the tree itself. Bringing the outside in with this furniture reveals something to you about the special nature of wood. You do not get these qualities with veneers. It especially happens when you have a roomful of it.”

But Nakashima made equally significant incursions into the more mundane and generally mechanized realms of modernism; he successfully synthesized the two in such furniture pieces as the Conoid bench and dining tables, which fused apparently free-form slabs of wood with carefully carved supports and struts in a refined modernist idiom.