Mira Nakashima has spent a lifetime honoring her father’s craft. For Harper’s BAZAAR’s Legacy Issue, the architect and master furniture maker reflects on growing up in the Nakashima workshop, where she learned the art of woodworking alongside her father, pioneering craftsman George Nakashima.
George Nakashima Woodworkers is located on a quiet road just behind the picturesque main drag of New Hope in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, approximately two hours southwest of New York City. The route I took, driving there one recent morning, was dotted with farmhouses and involved crossing a bridge over the same section of the Delaware River that George Washington forded during the Revolutionary War, a fact marked by several signs and a replica boat.
The area has become more glamorous in recent years, attracting residents like Yolanda Hadid and her two supermodel children, Gigi and Bella Hadid, as well as Bradley Cooper, earning Bucks County the distinction of being a serious “rival to the Hamptons.”For a long time before that, though, New Hope was a beacon for an artistic community, attracting artists, playwrights, and, notably, the 20th-century woodworker George Nakashima, who moved to New Hope after his release in 1943 from the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho, one of the several internment camps created by the American government during World War II.Nakashima Woodworkers—a furniture studio that operates out of a cluster of 15 buildings, including George Nakashima’s original home, marked by a modest hand-carved sign—is now run by Mira Nakashima, George’s 84-year-old daughter, who has carried out her father’s legacy of crafting soulful but humble wooden furniture since his death 36 years ago.When I enter the Nakashima offices, located in an elegant oak-framed structure from 1954, I’m greeted by Soomi Hahn Amagasu, the sales and public-relations manager , who remarks matter-of-factly that she can “smell New York City” on me. The Nakashima grounds used to be open for visits on the weekends, but in recent years, Mira changed this to be by appointment only, given the influx of visitors who arrived every Saturday and Sunday. Amagasu’s comment reflects a renewed and robust appreciation for Nakashima’s work, which today goes for significant sums on the secondary market and can be found in some of the most discerning and fashionable spaces. In Pieter Mulier’s Antwerp home, where he staged his Fall 2023 Alaïa show, you will glimpse a pair of Nakashima stools parked at his kitchen counter. When Saint Laurent opened its restaurant, Sushi Park, in Paris, it chose a Nakashima lounge chair as part of its decor. Julianne Moore, Raf Simons, and Michael Kors are all collectors. But unlike Ettore Sottsass, Gaetano Pesce, or even Pierre Paulin, whose popular designs are poppy and playful, Nakashima’s furniture is distinctly understated. It can often be the quietest thing in the room.When Mira arrives to take me on a tour of the grounds, she is cheerful, wearing a turquoise-colored toque whose buttons have been replaced with hand-carved ones by her father. From her ears dangle delicate silver earrings depicting trees. “You always wonder what the tree went through and why it did what it did when you’re looking at the lumber. Just knowing that there’s a story behind it makes it much more interesting,” she says. There is something almost spritelike about her, as if she is a protector of the forest.She leads me to the Pole Barn, a large storage shed filled with wood; almost all of it was acquired by her father decades ago, she tells me. Long planks of dried oak, chestnut, and cherry stand on their sides, leaning against every imaginable space, crowding my sight line like a forest. Dry and dusty, they have none of the luster of a finished Nakashima piece. The woodworkers prefer to work with salvaged wood, a philosophy Mira says is part of the “lifeblood of the place,” contributing to its aura of calm. “When people walk into our compound here, everybody says, ‘Oh, it’s so peaceful here,’ ” she says. This is where Mira goes to pick out something for a custom project. The barn, Mira explains, was built after her father died in 1990. He had been storing wood with a generous lumber yard, but after he died, they asked the Nakashimas to move it all somewhere else. “So we built this,” she says.On the secondary market, a Nakashima chair can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands—depending on the year it was made, the way it looks, and the quality. If you place an order with Nakashima Woodworkers, the prices are available upon request, though it’s fair to assume these are investment pieces for your home. “The pieces aren’t loud in their color or pretense or scale, but they are very powerful in their individuality,” says Michael Bargo, the New York City–based interior designer who works on all of the Row stores and who helped select a Nakashima credenza and pair of chairs from Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s personal collection for their fashion label’s Upper East Side store. “They have shapes and movement that vary from piece to piece, which is what makes them so rare and special.”Jodi Pollack, Sotheby’s chairman and co-worldwide head of 20th century design, cites Nakashima’s approachability, adding that his work is “utilitarian in the best way.” She has several Nakashimas in her own home. “You want to touch them, you want to use them. They’re conversation pieces; they scream of the handmade,” she says. Mira’s pieces command almost as much as those of her father these days on the secondary market. “It’s very easy to immediately identify a work by Mira, based on just the expressiveness of the wood, versus her father’s work, which can sometimes be a bit more restrained. I think collectors are really leaning into that, and I don’t see them necessarily being limited by the fact that it’s by Mira and not by George. That divide is narrowing.”In total, about a dozen craftspeople and designers produce around 800 pieces a year, a rate that has stayed more or less consistent in the decades since Nakashima’s death. What, then, is to be done with George Nakashima Woodworkers, which not only has managed to maintain its relevancy but has also had pieces become embraced by some of the most elite members of the fashion tribe, earning it the kind of cachet that most designers dream about?“I’ve been thinking about it for a long time,” Mira says. She has four children, none of whom live in New Hope or have expressed a strong interest in the business. Her younger brother, Kevin, died after battling congestive heart failure and pneumonia in 2020. She has seven grandchildren, but they are still young; her grandson Toshi is currently working with her, but, she adds, “he hasn’t finished college.” She knows the work needs to continue. She’s thinking she might put her shares in a trust for the employees, allowing them to continue making Nakashimas as a collective. “You can supervise a little from a distance,” she says, “but you really have to be here every day to make sure that the work is going properly. Every day, I go in and mark out something in the shop or I do a drawing or two or communicate with clients or rummage around in the wood pile to see what there is that matches what they want.”“I think Mira’s goal is not how to make a revolution but ‘How can I evolve?’ ” says Quy Nguyen, the cofounder of the Manhattan vintage design gallery Form Atelier. “An evolution pays a lot of respect to what took place before. Think about it as a tree. She’s another branch. If she’s teaching other people and there are other followers of her, those will be more branches and they will become leaves.”Nakashima’s biography reflects a distinct blend of Eastern and Western culture. Born in Spokane, Washington, in 1905, the son of two Japanese immigrants, he studied architecture at the University of Washington, continuing his education at MIT, where he received a master’s degree in architecture. Nakashima traveled in 1933 to Paris, where he encountered the work of Le Corbusier, and then later to Japan, where he worked for the architect Antonin Raymond. Through Raymond, he eventually found his way to Pondicherry, India, where he supervised the building of the Golconde dormitory, a private residence for a large, wealthy ashram. It was a formative time; Nakashima lived and immersed himself in the culture and teaching of the ashram. While in India, he also discovered woodworking and made his first pieces of furniture. He realized he wanted to work in such a way that he was able to control the design process from start to finish, something he believed architecture didn’t provide. When he returned to the United States in 1940, his ambitions had shifted. He now wanted to be a woodworker.His dreams were cut short in 1942 with the news that he—along with 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two thirds of whom were citizens—would be forcibly stripped of his possessions, removed from his home, and incarcerated in a concentration camp. Labeled a threat to the United States, he was imprisoned in rural Idaho with his wife, Marion, and newborn Mira for a year, until his former boss Raymond was able to sponsor his release, hiring Nakashima as a chicken farmer on the architect’s property in New Hope. He was able to purchase his first three acres of land in exchange for labor on the neighboring farm of a Quaker. Soon enough, Nakashima found success with his furniture, designing pieces for Knoll and steadily making a name for himself as a woodworker. By 1972, when Nelson Rockefeller commissioned more than 200 pieces from him, Nakashima had established himself as a talented craftsman.“I guess Dad could have gone back to the West Coast,” Mira says. “But he liked New Hope. He liked the artists that lived around here. He liked the countryside. We’re up here in all these trees and hills and rocks and stuff. He liked the trees.”Nakashima combined the radical simplicity of midcentury design—clean lines, no frills—with a wondrous sense of natural ornamentation. The complicated patterns of a tree’s own burl, for example, might become the decorative edge of a bench or table. And while other woodworkers might have rejected the structural flaws in a piece of wood—a split, say, or a large crevice—Nakashima often used that same flaw as the starting point for his imagination. As he wrote in his 1981 book, The Soul of a Tree, describing a large slab he rescued from an old English tree: “The usual market for fine timber would not find much use for such a slab, practically a reject of nature. I have sometimes rescued these great slabs from the dump heap and sometimes, with luck, seem to give them a second chance at life as good furniture. The natural forms with all their bumps and ‘warts’ survive. To fashion such a piece of wood into fine furniture is almost an act of resurrection.”I ask Mira if she ever spoke to her father about her family’s incarceration. “I should have asked my parents a lot of questions when they were alive,” she says. “But I think that’s the way Japanese are, particularly if there’s something unpleasant; they just don’t talk about it. That’s what happened during the war. Nobody wanted to talk about it.”The way Mira remembers it, when news spread of her father’s death after a brief illness, customers canceled their orders. Others demanded a discount, assuming they were receiving something of lesser quality. At her father’s church service, even the Catholic priest intoned, “Those hands are still now.” Mira, who was standing in the choir, held her tongue. “I remember thinking, ‘Wait a minute, we’re still here,’ ” she tells me. Initially, Mira’s mother, Marion, forbade Mira to tell anyone that she was making furniture.The business was saved, thankfully, by an unfortunate tragedy. A year before Nakashima’s death, the Princeton home of two longtime customers, Arthur and Evelyn Krosnick, was destroyed by fire. The couple had amassed 112 Nakashima pieces over the previous three decades. They had come to George Nakashima “in tears,” Mira says, to replace everything. “At that point, my mother didn’t keep any of the drawings, so we had to reconstruct everything. Sometimes we redesigned things, but Mrs. Krosnick dutifully ran everything through the insurance company so that they got paid. That kept us going for about three and a half years.”We are now sitting in the Reception House, the second home her father built in the mid-1970s, after he was flush with cash from working with the Rockefeller family. A large washi-paper lamp by Isamu Noguchi, a friend of her parents, hangs overhead. It is a beautiful house—with wide birch and walnut floorboards and a fantastic bathroom decorated with mosaic penny tiles—but Marion preferred the original and more humble home her husband had built next door in 1946, so her parents never fully moved in. These days, the Reception House mostly sits empty, though Mira occasionally uses it for entertaining.Eventually, a publicist named Bob Hunsicker convinced the family that they needed to announce that Mira was stepping into her father’s shoes. A small news item about her ran in Architectural Digest. Mira is a trained architect, having studied at both Harvard University and Waseda University in Tokyo, where she lived for three years and where she met her first husband, also an architect. “The best draftsman in the class—he was the only one in his family of 11 children to go to college—helped me get through my projects,” says Mira. But they struggled to make ends meet in Japan. They soon left and moved the family to Pittsburgh. In 1969, Mira’s father mentioned he had bought 20 acres across the road from his own property and that he was building a house for them. So they moved again. “It was a little bit of a bribe, I guess,” she says. Though the marriage didn’t last—the couple divorced in 1975—Mira has lived there ever since.Mira’s first husband expected her to be a stay-at-home wife, but living next to her parents allowed her some flexibility and freedom to start working. She would find a few hours here or there, and once all four children were in school, more and more time freed up. Working for her parents wasn’t easy. She was fired by them several times. “Oh, I didn’t do what I was told, or I would question their authority or suggest that they needed to have health insurance and things like that, but they didn’t want to hear it,” she says with a sigh.Before she became a woodworker, Mira had wanted to be a musician. Because Kevin was 12 years her junior, her childhood was more like that of an only child. One evening, one of the younger woodworkers invited her to come folk dancing with him and his wife in Princeton. She found the experience invigorating; soon after, she learned to play the recorder, eventually studying both flute and piano while in high school. When she was accepted into Harvard, she imagined she would study music and math. But her father told her that she would study architecture, as he had.“When Dad said, ‘No, you’re not going into music, you’re going into architecture,’ I thought, ‘Okay, I can do that.’ It’s not that I particularly wanted to be an architect, but I could do that,” she says.Still, she acknowledges she is happy: “I’m so lucky to live and work in such a beautiful place.” She has been married for several decades now to a fellow woodworker she met after her first marriage fell apart. They like to listen to classical music together. “There’s something really special about making things by hand,” she says. “Your brain develops differently.”On the day of my visit, under the arched roof of the Conoid Studio, which Nakashima built from 1957 to 1959, a variety of Nakashima chair prototypes have been moved there temporarily, assembled like a herd of deer. I ask her if she has a favorite piece. The Mira, she says without hesitating, referring to the petite Shaker-inspired chair her father named for her in 1950. But it is the Concordia chair that catches my eye; a three-legged, flat-seated chair with barely any back, it was designed by Mira specifically for classical musicians. It’s “probably the most iconic and successful and different from my father’s designs that I’ve done so far,” she admits. It’s easy to imagine a cellist freely moving her bow or a violinist scaling the upper register of his instrument without constraint. “I was at one of the Concordia Chamber Players concerts and looking at them sitting on these ugly chairs on stage and thought, well, maybe I should design them a chair.”“I never thought much about me,” Mira tells me. But it’s evident she is always thinking about connection her work has with the world—and, in particular, how her work makes us feel. “I just sort of did what there was to do and tried to do it as well as possible.”This story appears in the March issue of Harper’s Bazaar.
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