Hybrid craftsman Roy McMakin’s work blends art with furniture and captures the essence of a domestic environment. He opened the Domestic Furniture Company in Los Angeles in 1987 and after a commission to remodel screen writer Barbara Benedek’s family home, he began designing TV sets, and furniture pieces for the Getty Museum and J Crew stores. Relocating to Seattle saw him shift his focus back to the home, a context where he composes characterful scenes combining found furniture with his own pieces. 

Left, the dining table and chairs, the stools and the kitchen island are all McMakin’s own design, while the sideboard, rocking chair and small table were flea market finds. Right, McMakin in his Seattle home standing next to his wall-mounted table sculpture (2008). 

Roy McMakin is not easy to categorise. He’s an artist, a craftsman, a builder, a designer, a collector, and an architect. Sometimes simultaneously. A McMakin chair might not be coveted as a trophy piece in quite the same way as a Hadid bench or a Newson chair, but that’s only because one McMakin chair is never enough.

His pieces demand to be together in a group. They are in dialogue with each other just as the people who pull one of McMakin’s chairs up to a table already have something to talk about: ‘Did you notice how each slat in the back of this chair is a different size? What’s up with these patches of wood in the table? Why are the knobs on that dresser so big? Why are they different sizes? Is that a refrigerator, a table or a bookshelf?’

McMakin challenges perceptions of what one expects from a piece of furniture. As an art student in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he used furniture and architecture as vehicles for conceptual explorations of identity, perception and domesticity.

McMakin’s furniture is produced in his woodshop in Seattle. Lined up on the shelves are the colour blocks he uses for sampling different shades; most of them represent a piece of furniture. 

This interest in furniture was not new. As a child, he ‘curated’ the furniture in his bedroom. When his parents offered him a new bedroom set, he asked for the money instead and, after much research, purchased a desk for $65. As it turns out, the young boy had a good eye: the drop-front desk he purchased was by Gustav Stickley. Stickley’s furniture, especially his ‘No 353’ chair, exerted a strong influence on McMackin’s own work.

In fact, Stickley’s influence was only superseded when McMakin moved to San Diego for university. Here he discovered the work of the architect Irving Gill. As he tells it, this marked the beginning of a love affair that bordered on obsession. Gill’s spare aesthetic, his reduction of form to its essential elements and the constant dialogue between form and function were what instantly appealed.

‘I stalked Irving Gill,’ McMakin says of his obsessive search for a Gill building for himself. He lived in Gill’s 1906 Mary Cossitt House for three years in San Diego and when he moved to Los Angeles in 1987 he purchased and restored the architect’s 1917 Morgan House.