Taimi Barty, furnituremaker

Swedish-born Taimi Barty‘s style is spare, a sort of modernist and Asian- and Nordic-inflused Shaker. A recent desk and chair set (here’s another similar desk by Barty, with interesting inlay) of hers has elements of classic Swedish design in the organic and slightly bowed legs and arms of the chair, and the flare in the legs of the desk – as well as an asymmetrical shape to the desk that is both Victorian and modern at the same time. Her Pillar of Drawers is as much sculpture as it is a well-designed use of vertical space, and items such as her deceptively simple wine rack show that her mind is as much on practicality as it is on aesthetic. She is part of the Mendocino Coast Furnituremakers guild/organization, and with woodworker Robert Sanderson, owner of Fort Bragg’s Sanderson Hardware, produces furniture as Wood Joint Studio.

Taimi studied engineering at Harcard and Radcliffe, and after a few years "cleaning up petroleum hydrocarbons" in San Francisco, she began a course of study in the Fine Woodworking Program at the College of the Redwoods. She and Sanderson both studied there under the great James Krenov.