As an artist, I am always looking for ways to improve my city-model–building craft, so I enrolled in a beginner woodworking class at Pleasant Hill Adult School.
After ten weeks, I finished my beautiful step stool. It was made of dark sapele wood with white ash accents and one of the most creative pieces in the class. I’ve always been drawn to the richness and depth of dark woods like mahogany, or walnut. As a teenager, I restored elaborately veneered streamline modern pieces, along with mahogany Chippendale and walnut Renaissance reproductions. Later, in Italy, I was in heaven, surrounding myself with heavy, dark furniture that anchored my apartment. So it felt only natural that I chose sapele for my stool.
But when I brought it home, the small 14-by-8-inch piece felt anything but small. In our 350-square-foot apartment, it carried a visual weight far beyond its size.
Our place sits on the second floor, hovering over Hudson Street with a long view of the Oakland Hills. It’s small, but wrapped in windows on three sides. The interior walls are light pale colors, white trim, with air and openness everywhere. We don’t live in a cozy cave; we live in a cloud.
And the stool crash-landed in it.
We couldn’t find a place for it. In our Bauhaus-functional apartment, it clashed wherever we put it. I didn’t want it to become our white elephant, something that, once the excitement of making it faded, we would have to store, shift, and work around.
The stool might have felt at home in a heavy, wood-paneled Greene and Greene bungalow, where handcrafted furniture and rich woods soften the light and offer refuge from the California sun.
After much deliberation, I decided to donate it back to the school, though it might just as well have ended up at Oakland’s White Elephant Sale.
In letting it go, I realized I no longer live the way I once furnished my life. Our Rockridge apartment is not an accumulation of objects and past histories, but a living studio, constantly edited, never finished.
