53. Sam Maloof

Sam Maloof, woodworker, died the other day. He was 93. He made furniture mostly by hand. He built a sweetly eccentric house in what is now Rancho Cucamonga. It, too, was largely made by hand, shaped over many years around the shell of a commonplace frame house in the remnants of a lemon grove. Maloof's home accreted, taking on rooms and passages as they suited his family's needs or his desires. Maloof, born of immigrant Lebanese parents in Chino, was a Californian, specifically a southern Californian from the hot, dry, and once rural edge of the Los Angeles basin, when Chino was only orchards, dairy farms, fields, and a cluster of store front businesses. His father ran a dry goods store. He mother sold dresses and lace. Their son had a knack for using his hands, for making things out of wood.

Maloof lived and worked hardly a dozen miles from where he was born. He was unusually settled for someone from southern California, preferring to house his imagination in a place that he - not some planner or developer - assembled. Dislocations, of course, came to him. The orchards became tracts. A freeway passed through the site of his house; the house was moved three miles away to Alta Loma. Change dogged Maloof; every piece of his furniture was slightly different, he explained, although his forms were always the same. Difference became his subtle collaborator.

Beginning in the 1950s, Maloof was justly and increasingly praised for the craftsmanship of his furniture and his generosity toward other craft workers. At the start of his career, Maloof was understood to be a West Coast modernist, someone in the company of Charles and Ray Eames, an interpreter of refined Scandinavian precedents. Later, after modernism became another historical style, after Maloof had outlived modernism, he was recast as a humble craft worker in the Shaker tradition of unschooled American design, more than a little saintly.

Perhaps. But I figure that Maloof made a place for himself where he was not distracted. And whatever came out of his shop came from the greater gift he gave himself.

The image of a Maloof chair on this page was taken by Flickr user bknabel. It was used under a Creative Commons license.