Miles Karpilow: A Craftsman’s Journey
by David Meiland
From Woodwork magazine #60, December 1999

I’d heard about Miles Karpilow many years before I met him. A colleague and I were installing a kitchen full of prefab cabinets, grumbling as we went about their poor quality and the difficulty it was causing us. As we worked, he told me about a custom kitchen he had done, with beautiful handmade cabinets by a local maker. That job, he said, had come out perfectly, and he wished this client had bothered to buy cabinets from the same shop. Later, I came across a piece of Miles Karpilow furniture in a gallery, and then another in a well-known magazine showcasing custom woodworking. Everyone, it seemed, knew Miles. The woodworkers around town, the contractors, the lumber clerks—they had all made his acquaintance, and many had worked with him.

I finally met him after calling to introduce myself and asking whether I might come by to visit his shop and see some of his work. He graciously agreed, and in a series of meetings, he took me from the beginning, his early days as a carver of wooden picture frames, to the present, as a studio furnituremaker and designer working on commissions and on speculation. His career began in 1953, almost half a century ago, when he was fresh out of college, and has continued uninterrupted to the present. I was immediately struck by this fact—it’s a rare woodworker, or worker in any artistic medium, who can stay commercially viable for so long a time. Karpilow, like virtually no one else in the business, has worked continuously in wood throughout his long career, almost all of that time self-employed. A rare feat indeed.

Karpilow studied painting, drawing, woodcut, and lithography in school, and earned a degree in art history. Following school, he became employed as a carver by Kulicke Frames in New York City, carving by hand ornate frames for fine paintings. As a child, he had been fond of whittling and carving with his penknife, and drew the ire of his grandmother by carving on her porch posts, so the move to carving for a living was natural. He held this position from 1953 to 1957 before moving west to San Francisco, where, in 1957, he took another job as a frame carver. With his new employer, Ruckert’s Picture Framing, he did some of the design and gilding of frames, as well as the carving. He held this job four years, and it was to be his last stint of formal employment.

By 1961, Karpilow had established his first self-employed venture, a partnership known as “3-By,” with architect Dan Osborne and fellow craftsman John Barrow. They set up shop in a San Francisco storefront, and purchased a Delta table saw, a belt sander, a jigsaw, and a few other tools. A 30" wooden plane, which Karpilow still has, was propped upside-down and used as a jointer. The trio took on a range of work, including carpentry, furniture, and carving projects. In their modest shop, they produced a chair designed by Osborne. The piece was shown at the Los Angeles County Fair in 1963, and received favorable reviews in the magazines published with the Sunday papers in Los Angeles. Karpilow has in his vast portfolio a clipping from the Los Angeles Times, showing the chair and mentioning its makers. Unaccountably, the partners received no inquiries from dealers or individuals. The partnership dissolved amicably. John Barrow went to work for Art Carpenter, and by 1964, Karpilow was working solo in the storefront shop.

During his first year working alone, Karpilow received a major commission, a music stand designed and built for a string quartet. As he grew his business, he worked most of the time on a series of smaller projects, only occasionally building a larger piece. He characterizes his work of that era as influenced by Danish modern, Shaker, and 17th-century American furniture. He and John Barrow had attended a major show of Danish work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Karpilow brought its influences into some of his early designs. He also started building kitchen cabinets and other casework during this time, a type of work that has continued until recently as a leg of his business.

By 1965, Karpilow and his wife Shelley had young children, and they moved across the Bay to Berkeley, looking for more suitable space for their family. Karpilow continued working out of the San Francisco shop for a year, and then relocated to neighboring Oakland, working briefly out of two different shop spaces before settling into a rented building that he eventually occupied for 16 years. He shared this shop for a brief time, but found that he had to funnel work to his shopmate in order that the rent be paid. Business picked up steadily through the end of the 60’s and into the 70’s. Karpilow made many connections with the parents of students at the school his children attended, and developed other relationships with architects and contractors. Kitchen cabinets remained a staple of his work, and he punctuated things by building an increasing number of major furniture pieces of his own design, and in collaboration with others. A dealer of high-end audio equipment regularly commissioned cabinetry and furniture to house custom stereo systems, requiring Karpilow to design around the components called for in an installation. Architects and homeowners approached him, either with designs in hand, or simply with ideas. Karpilow satisfied all comers, drawing from his broad knowledge of furniture and art, incorporating elements of many existing styles into his own work, always conscious of the influences on his design sense.

In 1981, on the occasion of Karpilow’s 50th birthday, his wife created a book, titled Miles Karpilow: Woodwork, that chronicled his work to that point. Sixteen photos grace the book’s pages, summarizing furniture and doors from the 60’s and 70’s, the first twenty years of Karpilow’s work. His fondness for walnut is clear, as are his free-ranging design sense and his ability to carve in dramatically different styles. A traditional trestle table with gently carved feet stands next to a pair of heavily sculpted pedestal coffee tables. A circular library ladder, its planks shaped and thinned to delicate proportions, shares a spread with the “3-By Chair,” an imposing, angular piece. The final page displays a doll bed made for his daughter. This piece is 16" x 21" and every bit of the surface is ornate carving, in a style reminiscent of eastern European work.

Another book, constructed of bound black-and-white images made by photographer Nicholas King, wordlessly follows Karpilow through the 1985 design and construction of a gorgeous semi-circular headboard for a bed. Taken at many stages during the project, the shots illustrate in a powerful way the techniques Karpilow used to lay out, cut, join, and assemble the piece. The story is extremely well captured, and conveys a strong feeling of the planning, problem-solving, and discovery process that Karpilow went through, pursuing his vision during the ambitious project.

Karpilow began a stylistic exploration of the Arts and Crafts movement and related traditions, notably the work of Greene and Greene, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, during the 1980’s. On commission, he built a faithful reproduction of Greene and Greene’s “Blacker House Desk,” after a well-known piece now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At that time, the original desk was owned by a private individual in Pasadena and Karpilow was able to inspect the piece, make measurements, prepare drawings, and take photographs of it. He subsequently built other pieces with the same influence, but never latched onto the style entirely, preferring to move back and forth between different types of work. He was among the first to explore this vein, which has since come into vogue with furnituremakers.

Entry doors have been another major theme in Karpilow’s work, and account for dozens of the pieces in his portfolio. He built his first in the early 60’s, and has continued to build them steadily throughout his career. Many of them display heavy carving. Of particular note are the doors for Narsai’s Market. Karpilow met Narsai David, a well-known Bay Area restaurateur, in 1972. Their collaboration lasted many years, and yielded the entry doors, a maitre d’ stand, carved bars, and other woodwork throughout the store and restaurant, as well as furniture for David’s home. Of the many other doors he has built, a significant project was for the Haas family, prominent San Franciscans, who commissioned elaborately carved Louis XV-style doors for their residence. On this project, as on many others, Karpilow called on his knowledge of art history, and his eight years as a carver of frames, in the design and execution of the doors.

Karpilow and I sit in the small office adjacent to his shop, and later in the living room of his Berkeley home, in both places surrounded by examples of his work. He shares with me hundreds of portfolio pictures from the past four decades. Many are black-and-white photos he shot and printed himself in his own darkroom. Others are studio or location shots by professionals. Still others appeared in newspapers and magazines. There is a vast array of work represented, and it’s disorienting at first to try to reconcile the range of styles. It becomes easier, though, when one considers that the photos represent more than 40 years of stylistic development, experimentation, and refinement, all during the career of a single woodworker. Karpilow can recall the month and year each piece was made, who it was built for, and often has a story to go with it. He is a man with an unusually keen memory for details. He pulls out a copy of his resume for me. The earliest entries date to 1949, when he attended the Tyler School of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and then to 1952-3, when he was represented in New York gallery shows by his drawings, woodcuts, and paintings. Selected commissions include work for noted individuals and institutions around the Bay Area and beyond. More recent entries include a variety of publications and stints as a teacher of woodworking technique.

Of all the elements of woodworking, Karpilow most enjoys carving. The importance of carving to him is evident in his portfolio and in his shop-samples, experiments, and test pieces are everywhere. Also an avid painter, Karpilow likens carving to painting, in terms of the sense of discovery that goes along with it. As he told me, “I physically enjoy carving. Right now I’m working on a project involving a number of boxes that, at this stage, isn’t much fun, it’s just sanding, and lots of it. I’m also working on a carving. I have to struggle to stay with the sanding, because the carving is sitting right there on the bench. It’s hard for me to leave the carving alone. Sometimes I’ll be on my way out the door and I think I’ll just make a few more cuts in it, and of course I can’t stop there, I keep poring over it, and it turns into an hour. It’s a lot like painting: you have a vision, and then the realization. It can happen in seconds. You see something and you keep working toward it, until it looks like what you saw.”
In the context of Karpilow’s work process, in which pieces are carefully planned and designed in advance, carving provides an organic element, a sense of freedom in both the mental and physical aspects of the creative process.

Karpilow now works in a comfortable but modest shop space. He bought the building, a former grocery store, in 1986, and did extensive structural work to restore it to good condition. His bench stands against the wall in one corner, with shelves full of tools above. Around the room, samples of carvings and details from his designs inhabit shelves. Working drawings are pinned up on the walls, reminders of projects past. Work in various stages of completion is staged on assembly benches and shelves—a set of cabinets with drawers, a bust carving for the peghead of a stringed instrument, a nearly completed walnut and maple sideboard. The collection of machinery is nicely rounded. In addition to Karpilow’s Powermatic tablesaw (bought new in 1964), there is a planer, a shaper, a radial arm saw, a pair of bandsaws, a band resaw, a vertical mortiser, a jigsaw, and a stroke sander. A massive jointer sits in the adjoining stock room, complemented by a 6" model in the shop. A cache of recycled vertical-grain Douglas fir sits under an overhang outside the door, waiting for its day.

For a recent commission, Karpilow designed a large cabinet with two carved walnut panels. He first sketched the design for each panel full size on paper. These drawings were transferred to wood with a pounce wheel and then filled in with pencil. At the drill press, Karpilow drilled a hole through each area of waste, and then went to the jigsaw and carefully cut out each section. He then began carving. Unfurling one of three rolls of carving tools, he selected a couple of gouges and began roughing out the leaves and stems of the design. He worked rapidly and with confidence, taking deep cuts, sometimes using a mallet, and other times pushing the tools gently through the work. Rough forms took shape quickly, and he pulled out a handful of smaller tools as the finish work began. Pausing occasionally to refresh or embellish his layout lines, he cut delicate veins into the leaves, and defined foreground and background. A set of rifflers was used in some areas. All told, 20 hours of work went into the two panels before they were ready to be installed into their frames.

Through the years, Karpilow has produced an enormous body of work, covering countless bases and developing a broad stylistic vocabulary. Of the furniture and cabinetmakers I have met, he has by far the strongest knowledge of the world’s furniture styles, and easily relates his work and the work of other makers to those styles. He is a man with a lifelong interest in art of all sorts, and he does his work with a strong awareness of the traditions that have shaped it. As friend and client Russell Ellis wrote in the 1981 introduction to Miles Karpilow: Woodwork, “He is radically eclectic, eager to copy, seldom does the same thing twice. He’s even fickle in his desire to adopt and invent inside other’s styles. Although my ego is served by the work he does for me, I’m secretly pleased that his real audience is other woodworkers and the ghosts of earlier ones.”

Karpilow attributes his commercial longevity partly to his avoidance of any particular style. To my eye, his portfolio shows a consistent, tasteful blending of elements familiar to the connoisseur of furniture and woodworking. He has not experimented with trendy, jarring looks, bright colors, or odd materials. He is sensitive and responsive to the natural beauty of his chosen material. Technically proficient, he is able to respond to clients’ requests for all types of work, building at times from architects’ drawings, and at other times from his own designs, always pulling in elements from the established lexicon of furniture and art. He is also a man who knows what he wants. He is decisive, willing to commit himself, and always looking to stretch the boundaries of his stylistic explorations. Most of all, I think, he is a man on a lifelong journey though art and through craft, discovering, refining, and expressing his own creative sense.

David Meiland is a contributing editor to Woodwork magazine. He can be reached at david@meiland.com.
 
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