Crafted in wood

Local couple uses hand tools, techniques to make chairs

Lee Ferris Maureen Rugar uses a spokeshave while working on the seat of a chair, which is from pine.

Lee Ferris Maureen Rugar of F&M Windsor Chairmakers in LaGrange uses a spokeshave while working on the seat of a Windsor chair. Rugar and her husband, Ferris Rugar, use traditional methods to create fine handcrafted pieces of furniture.

Lee Ferris A finished sack back Windsor chair created at F&M Windsor Chairmakers. The chairs typically take from four to 15 days to make, depending on the complexity of the design.

Lee Ferris Traditional hand tools are used at F&M Windsor Chairmakers to create 18th and 19th century reproduction chairs. Tools include, from front, an inshave, a spokeshave and a block plane.

Lee Ferris The color samples for the Rugars' Windsor chairs feature the use of milk paint, which is then given coats of oil to seal the paint. They offer 14 colors.

Lee Ferris Ferris Rugar uses a draw knife to shape a chair spindle which is being created from red oak.

Lee Ferris An inshave is used after cutting large pieces out of the chair's seat with a carving adz.

Lee Ferris Wood shavings cling to the blade of a spokeshave that sits on a work bench at the Rugars' shop.

A duchess of The Windsor Institute, Rugar and her husband, Ferris, are chair makers and owners of F&M Windsor Chairmakers, run out of their home in the Town of LaGrange.

The couple, who also work as estate caretakers, became interested in chair making in the late 1990s when Maureen read a story in Country Living magazine about a man from The Windsor Institute in Hampton, N.H., who made chairs. Intrigued, she called the institute and enrolled herself and her husband in one of the institute's chair-making classes.

While the couple had some woodworking experience, Maureen, who is not fond of power equipment -- "they scare the bologna out of me" -- was delighted to discover the chair-making class involved the use of hand tools only.

"We felt like we belonged there," Maureen said when the couple first walked into the classroom. "This was our calling. We just fell in love with it."

Occupation proves fulfilling

The couple each built their own Windsor chair by hand during the week-long class -- the first two chairs, as it turned out, of many others.

"I was just as proud of that (first) chair as the day I had brought my son home from the hospital," Maureen said.

They loved the process, the results of their efforts and the great feeling they got from their work. They continued making chairs and showed a couple of them to a friend, who put them in the window of her shop, Beacon Hill Antiques in Beacon. A passerby saw the chairs and gave the Rugars their first order. It was for eight side chairs and two armchairs.

"It was amazing," Ferris said. "Absolutely amazing."

They turned the basement of their home in Beacon into a workshop, established their business, F&M Windsor Chairmakers, and got to work. Within a year, they ran out of room.

"You find out real quick, when you love making chairs that you run out of room in your house. You run out of room in your friends' and parents' house," Ferris said. "It became an obsession."

They planned to put up a work shed on their property, but town regulations restricted them from doing so. So they moved to LaGrange into a house formerly used by Ferris' grandmother that was situated next door to Ferris' parents' place. The house had a two-car garage that the couple converted into their workshop.

"We ended up taking every single class they offer," Maureen said of the institute's 11 or so courses. In fact, out of 11 people who've earned the institute's highest level of mastery, Maureen is the only female to do so. Per the institute's honor society, her ranking is a duchess; Ferris, at one step below her, is an earl.

The couple put up a Web site, began exhibiting at the Crafts at Rhinebeck show and became members of the Century Museum Village and Collectors Association, through which they demonstrate woodworking at the Dutchess County Fair. They also put chairs for sale at the RiverWinds Gallery in Beacon and the Noble Tree Gallery in Kingston.

Demonstrating today

The Rugars will be at the Crafts at Rhinebeck fair at the Dutchess County Fairgrounds today doing a woodworking demonstration.

Except for two designs, the Rugars' chairs are constructed without nails or screws. The chair legs are tapered, twisted and glued into holes in the chair seat for an extremely tight fit. The top of each leg is then wedged into the seat, making it impossible to untwist.

Their desk and table chairs, benches and rockers are constructed from some 18 to 40 pieces of shaped and steam-bent wood each. All are made from logs and planks of the same woods used 200 years ago, primarily red oak, which is flexible and can be steam-bent; maple, because it's hard and holds details well; and pine, which is soft and easy to sculpt to make the seats.

The furniture is constructed with hand woodworking and chair-making tools, some of which are antique or reproduction utensils. Some tools are equipped with extremely sharp blades. Using them skillfully is a matter of practice and technique, Ferris said.

"You've got to have the nerve to get out there and try it," he said.

The Rugars can do a broad variety of painted finishes on their chairs, including antique, faux and decorative looks. Early on, Windsor chairs typically were painted green, but, Ferris said, because the chairs were built to last, they'd get painted over and over again as styles changed.

"If you find an original chair now, it's probably got five or six coats of paint on it and it gives you the look very similar to what we have on our chairs," Ferris said.

Creating 'works of art'

Their decorative finishes include bronze powder stenciling and faux grain painting that are done with the same finishes as were originally used. The process is long and drawn out, Ferris said, and the intention was to turn the chairs into works of art.

"We hit the Industrial Revolution and people had disposable income," he said, for while the chairs then were machine-made, their fancy finishes were done by hand. "They were decorating their houses with (the chairs)."

Woodworking on the chairs takes from four to 15 days to complete, depending on the complexity of the design. Finishing can take from a couple of days to months for highly decorative styles.

Ferris and Maureen each construct their own chairs, start to finish, with costs for the furniture running from about $425 to $2,500, the latter being an ornately decorated family bench.

Mike Dunbar co-owns The Windsor Institute with his wife, Susanna. The art of making Windsor chairs by hand died out during the Industrial Revolution in the 1830s, Dunbar said, but he wanted to make the chairs, so he taught himself how. He later began teaching others, too, and in 1994 established the institute.

Today, 30 five-day classes in Windsor chair making are taught per year at the institute, with 18 students per class. To date, 6,500 students from around the world have completed classes at the institute. Dunbar said, reportedly, it's the only school of its kind in the world.

Windsors are wood chairs designed with a seat that separates the bottom carriage from the chair back. Most have a spindle back. Although there are many different styles of Windsor chairs, Dunbar teaches North American Windsor chair making, in which the chairs are replicated in design and construction after those built in North American in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

"If you buy new chairs this week, you expect that 10 years from now they're going to be at the end of the driveway waiting for the rubbish pickup," Dunbar said. "But the way Ferris and Maureen are making chairs, they're going to last 200 years. And it's been proven because chairs made this way have lasted."

Although some, like the Rugars, make chairs and sell them, many do it strictly for their personal satisfaction, Dunbar said.

Deep connection with product

"It's something you can do in a reasonably short amount of time," he said. "It's very satisfying. You produce something that you interact in, in a different way than you do with most furniture. You sit in a chair. It's personal."

Virginia Donovan and Linda Hubbard are two of five co-owners of the RiverWinds Gallery in Beacon, where several of the Rugars' chairs are for sale. "They're wonderful, absolutely wonderful," Donovan said of the chairs.

"All of us are intrigued by the Rugars as craftspeople, because they take such pride in their work," she said, noting the chairs' exceptional character, stability and comfort.

Hubbard's husband, Stuart, so liked the Rugar writing chair when he saw it in the shop, his wife bought it for him for Christmas.

"It doesn't look like a reproduction. It looks like a chair that's been around for a while," he said, and it goes well in their 1743 house in Stormville.

Hubbard, a carpenter and furniture-maker, said the chair is also comfortable and sturdy. "It looks like what it's supposed to be," he said.

Recently the Rugars got an order for 60 Windsor chairs for a campsite in Willsboro, Essex County. Although the chairs aren't the old-world spindle-backed designs the Rugars typically make, the size of the order is impressive. They've also received requests to make tables and even a bed. But their spindle-back Windsors are by far their favorite furniture to make.

"We come out here and we work until 11 at night and we go in and we go to bed and we get up and we come right back in here," Ferris said. "It's a labor of love."

Profile

F&M Windsor Chairmakers

Where: 8 Beaver Road, Town of LaGrange.

Established: 1999.

Owners: Ferris and Maureen Rugar.

Family: Son, Ferris, 30.

On the Web: http://www.fmwindsors.com/