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For the Press Downloadable Images and Press Releases
Green
Design Furniture was featured on HGTV! You can check out a QuickTime
clip of the show by clicking on of these links:
Connected Home Magazine, April 2004
axm, April 2002 Tucked away in Portland, Maine, USA must be one of the best kept secrets state side of the Atlantic. Green Design Furniture, a small artisan furniture making company is producing some of the finest furniture that I have seen for some time. Crafted in Cherry Wood, the 'Series 2 Designs collection' takes its cue from Far Eastern architecture and decorative arts. The whole concept uses the Arts and Crafts style of the late nineteen—early 20th century and the furniture literally speaks for itself. Doug Green, designer and founder of the company says the secret of its success lies in his acknowledgment of 'what relevant design tradition is in the 21st century.' He said: 'When you look at the history of the American decorative arts, especially furniture design, there is an especially strong link between technological innovation and the emergence of new styles and movements...In our times it is also quite true that mass production manufacturers have turned their back on the tradition of craftsmanship and lost any connection to values of authenticity in materials and design.' What he refers to is furniture built in the 'American traditional style.' The invention that is the structure for every piece of furniture produced by Green Design Furniture, a patented method of construction that dispenses with the need for any metal or plastic fasteners. All of the components slide and lock together using a series of engineered and crafted sliding dovetails that are integrated into the designs. So another influence is the construction method itself, which creates a kind of visual design vocabulary. The 'Series 2 Designs collection' reflects an exploration of form and content. Together combining function with gently curved lines to create a lighter more contemporary look. 'You could say I'm a big fan of Japanese design, but my American roots are usually showing,' says a very talented Doug Green. Download the PDF (2.8MB). Need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader? Get it here. In 1993,
we introduced the first furniture designs featuring the new assembly
system at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in NYC.
Then, the goal was to find companies who would license the idea
for their manufacturing. We received a good deal of attention in
the trade press, but the most exciting of all was to be included
in Time Magazine’s list for the best designs of the year.
US Airways Attaché, March 2000 Green's designs spring not from his commitment to beautiful woodwork, but from his search for a more efficient, cost effective method of furniture manufacture an a mass- production scale. He discovered computer-driven routers, that is machining centers capable of performing incredibly intricate tasks over and over again. So what intricate task did Green decide to have the computer perform? He chose the workworker's challenge and mark of fine craftsmanship: the sliding dovetail joint. In the structural system Green developed, the furniture pieces fit together, he says, like a Chinese puzzle box. No screws or hardware are required for assembly; each piece interlocks with the next. Unable to convince major furniture manufacturers to shift their paradigm, Green decided to go into the furniture-making business himself in a more traditional crafts production shop He had to engineer backwards, and adapt his designs to smaller machines and the human hand. Still the basic premise of Green Design Furniture--the Chinese puzzle-box assembly--remains unchanged, and final assembly is left to the purchaser. The finished chairs, tables, desks, bureaus, and credenzas are shipped flat vialFedEx. We're the first and only manufacturer of high-end furniture what can get a product into people's homes in two days, boasts Green. Green calls his approach craftsman programming--an oxymoron, perhaps, to those who view hand vs. machine as an ideological battle. But Green, who is as comfortable working in front of a computer as he is sanding a tabletop by hand, refuses to be drawn into that conflict: In today's world, with hand labor being as expensive as it is, if a machine can do something beautifully, why not let it? And while Green is quick to tout his method's revolutionary potential, he also sees his work a part of a long tradition of American craftsmanship, a tradition defined by invention. For a profile of Doug’s career, this article by Peter J. Stephano is probably the best yet. Better Home and Gardens Wood Magazine,
March 2000, Peter J. Stephano From woodworker to industrial design; a path of creativity "I realized only fairly recently that before I was a veer a woodworker, I was an inventor,” says Doug Green, the founder and head of Green Design Furniture. As a kid in Scarsdale, NY, he regularly took things apart and reassembled them in different form. He was a born tinkerer. "I went to college right here in Maine,” Doug continues, "then I taught preschool. But I got caught up in the handcrafts movement of the late 1970's. And as a hobby, I began woodworking..." After two years of teaching, Doug got completely hooked on woodworking, bought a full line of tools, quit teaching and opened a little shop in Topsham, Maine. "I was doing custom furniture and repairs, ad did it two or three years before getting a job as a cabinetmaker with Thos. Moser," recalls Doug. "At that time he had six cabinetmakers, up in the old Grange Hall in New Gloucester. Each cabinetmaker was completely responsible for a piece of furniture--a great learning experience for me." Doug worked for Moser for a year, and during that time followed his natural inclination to find better ways to do something by designing jigs that sped up a process or refined it. "It was fun, finding more efficient ways of doing things," he says. This phase of Doug’s career would soon end, though, (as he) enrolled in the graduate program for industrial design at The Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. A look at the world through designing eyes Pratt Institute’s industrial design program was nuts and bolts, according to Doug. It blended current manufacturing technology with creativity to arrive at a product. It was about materials and processes and how things were made in the world-- and conceptual problem solving. “As an industrial designer, you have to have the freedom to question things,” Doug explains. “Sometimes, when you become too expert in a field of knowledge, your expertise limits your ability to ask questions and to innovate. At Pratt, I was taught to become a generalist.” Easy-to-assemble furniture goes to the patent office In the late 1980’s Doug began sketching an idea for a take-apart sofa made of the fewest possible components. It also had to be lightweight and easily assembled and disassembled. In 1989, he started prototyping his idea, but in chair form. Doug experimented with many types of joinery, and finally decided on the sliding dovetail as the key. “I took me a long time to figure out how to do the long, tapered dovetails that enable the pars of a piece of furniture to interlock,” he says. “When I finally got the chair done, it was a creaky and unattractive piece of furniture with Baltic-birch plywood sides, seat and back. Everybody who saw it thought that it was a very strange looking piece of furniture, and it was. Yet, the joinery technique worked.” Driven with the idea, Doug went to work making furniture with the dovetail joinery. He made everything-tables, case pieces and desks. By the time Doug was finished, he had 15 pieces of furniture. “I’d also started working with a brilliant patent lawyer, Abbot Spear, a then 87-year-old Maine attorney. He came out of retirement to work on the project,” Doug comments. “He filed a patent for me in 1992 that 30 claims for creating different structures using the sliding dovetail as interlocking joinery, and it was awarded in 1995. The reason that it is a patentable idea was that during the patent search, we found out that the field of self-assembling, or fastener-free, furniture was all tab-and-slot, puzzle-type furniture. Mine was the first where joinery was part of the furniture, and it wants visible when the piece was assembled. The patent involved the order in which the pieces went together, too. So it’s not the sliding dovetail that’s patented, it’s how you create the structures. “My idea was to get a patent on the process, then license it to a big furniture manufacturer and get a realty from every piece of furniture of my design that they sold.” Doug continues. “My patent-applied for furniture and I got a lot of attention in 1993. Then, I painfully realized that the furniture industry as a whole isn’t real progressive in terms of design. As a result, I had this great idea, and not one seemed to want it because it would involver restructuring how they make furniture. One CEO told me that they couldn’t keep their machinery accurate enough to produce the precision needed in my furniture, and they doubted that they could train their workers either.” The birth of a business: Green Design Furniture Doug did have offers from large furniture companies to buy his design outright, but after working on it for three years, he wasn’t about to give it away. So Green Design Furniture was born. “Looking back on what’s happened, it’s like this idea had a will-a mind of its own,” says Doug. “This space [a former pottery factory] became the company’s first store. The furniture I built with the help of one other guy in a little shop in Brunswick, Maine. That was in 1994. Now I have nine [eleven as of 2002] people in the production shop. Today, about 80% of Green Design Furniture’s business comes via its catalog, which customers order from advertisements in the New Yorker magazine and the Wall Street Journal newspaper. At this writing, the company’s mailing list contained 30,000 names. “Last year, 35% of the people who ordered from us the first time, placed a second order,” Doug says. “ A typical first-time order is one piece, but we have people who order $10,000 to $12,000 worth of furniture at a time. A lot of that happens on the second or third order”. There’s a definite customer service aspect to
this type of business, too, according to Doug. “Because our
furniture is shipped unassembled, it can go by Federal Express fast
and at a reasonable cost to the customer. For example, we got a
call this morning from a woman in Chicago who ordered and eight-drawer
dresser. We can put that on the Fed Ex truck today, and it will
get to her in two days from now. And with conventional furniture
and freight, there’s a 24% chance that it will be damaged before
it gets to the customer. And because the customers handle each component in assembly, there’s nowhere to hide anything less than the best, even to the inside of a drawer. That’s why the craftsmen at Green Design Furniture must keep the quality level high, from the wood to the joinery, to the finish. Doug explains: “We’re such a micro dot on the radar screen nationally, our reputation for quality and customer satisfaction is of major importance.” Inside the shop, furniture components travel on wheels Although Doug’s furniture prototypes were done in ash, maple, cherry, and white oak, Green Design Furniture now produces-except by special order-only in cherry. Unlike any shop that builds furniture in batches, at Green Design you’ll never see it (except for straight-backed chairs) being assembled until just prior to shipping. Because Doug has designed the furniture to assemble without fasteners, the components, such as table-leg assemblies and tops, can be shaped, joined, sanded, and finished individually. And the parts travel from work station to work station on carts. At shipping time, workers test-fit a furniture piece’s components, make any necessary corrections, then disassemble them and wrap for shipment. When we set up a production run, we do the setup for each pattern. When we get the fit, we then can run all the pieces,” says Doug. “Making furniture this way combines traditional woodworking with this machining process. Part of each production run is building components: ripping, planning, jointing, edge-joining-getting them to uniform dimensions. When the components are done, we start the machining of mortises and tenons, and routing the dovetails.” It’s the dovetails that prove critical. “The engineering for the sliding dovetail is difficult because it’s tapered,” Doug says. “That means that it’s wider at the back and narrower at the front, so that it locks when fully joined. We cut the female dovetail, which opens five thousandths of an inch-little more than a hair- at an inverted pin router to match the male tapered dovetail. I have designed three differed router tables to make the male dovetails with accuracy. What we are using is the third generation. “Basically, it’s a pattern router with a linear motion bearing,” he adds. “It’s a precursor to a CNC [computer numerical control] machine that we’ll design someday to do the male dovetail with perfect accuracy. Until then we’ve been able to closely simulate CNC technology manually.” There’s little doubt that Doug Green will in the future have a CNC machine of his design. With childhood heroes like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, it’s a little wonder that his greatest pride comes from his furniture’s patent credit. That reads, “ Douglas Green, Inventor.”
PC World, December 2000, by Michael Lasky and Dennis O’Reilly A Few of Our Favorite Things Elegance and Function for the Office Constructed of high-quality solid mid-Atlantic cherry wood, Green Designs’ pricey computer desk dares to combine elegance and ergonomic functionality. The Green Designs desk arrives unassembled, but putting it together is simple and fun. Most desks consist of particleboard and screws, but this artisan-crafted furniture uses interlocking joinery in the hardwood, so its five components fit together in minutes, much like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s the first all-wood desk to have a full-length 45-inch sliding tray for a keyboard, mouse, and papers. You can easily tuck computer cables into an opening in the to of the desk, where they’re held in place with walnut covers. Beneath the desk, brass clips help organize the cables. Sure it’s pricey, but show us any last-a-lifetime art that isn’t. What’s hot: Beautifully crafted ergonomic
computer desk is functional art
Special to The Christian Science Monitor,
July 19, 2000, by Suzi Parker Heirloom-quality pieces are shipped for you to
assemble On a typical Sunday afternoon, Doug Green can be found sanding furniture in his workshop, a few blocks from his spacious showroom near Portland's waterfront. A few years ago, Mr. Green packed up his bags, locked up his New York City apartment, and opened Green Design here. He had an idea: Make high-end wooden furniture that snapped together like jigsaw puzzles and could be shipped via Federal Express to the young modern on the go. His idea worked. Today, Green ships out Arts and Crafts mission-style tables, computer desks, beds, bookcases, and sofas that can be assembled and dissembled in a matter of minutes. "I want people to see furniture as an investment," says Green, who slightly resembles a younger Richard Gere. "I also want them to be able to keep a piece forever - an heirloom. Furniture isn't made like that much anymore." Indeed, most modern furniture has screws, nuts, bolts, and glue that can weaken as years pass. It's hard for one person to pack it up and move it from coast to coast. But not Green's designs. He patented a method of manufacturing that utilizes the strength of the wood to hold the piece together. This system of interlocking joinery allows parts to slide and lock into each other. They can be packed flat and shipped almost as easily as an airline ticket. Ten years ago, he was living in New York, using his bed as a couch. An industrial designer with a penchant for woodworking, he wondered if there was a way to make a couch that saved space and was easy to transport. That's when he began experimenting with prototypes that had sliding dovetail joints. One day, after many tries, he succeeded. "My designs worked, but I knew that to start a business I didn't need to be in New York," says Green. He headed to Maine, where he had worked as a cabinetmaker years earlier. He chose Portland because of its history and attitude. "This harsh climate has attracted gritty nonconformists for years," says Green. "I knew I could get a good pool of people to work here. There's a creative freedom here for people who want to do their own things." He opened his business on the waterfront, which was shabby and run-down just six years ago. Today, the area surrounding Green's showroom hosts funky antique shops, eclectic bistros, and designer boutiques. In his showroom office, Green designs all of the furniture. Each piece is then handmade from Pennsylvania cherry wood. A perfectionist, he hires people with little woodworking experience because he wants to train them in his own methods. He employs about 15 people; the average employee is 24 and has a college degree. In the workshop, associates - as Green likes to call his employees - listen to punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees, jazz great Charlie Parker, and Irish band U2 while turning cherry wood into quality works of art for customers across the country. Fifty percent of Green's business comes from the West Coast. More than 47 percent of his customers are repeat buyers. And at least 85 percent of purchasers buy the furniture from the catalog or Web site (www.greendesigns.com). This fall, Green will unveil two new dining-room tables. He expects them to be popular, but no piece, he says, can compare to the best-selling computer desk. "If you are going to sit at a desk all day, and sometimes all night, you better like that piece of furniture," says Green. His computer desk is clean in design and functional. It features a 45-inch sliding tray for keyboard, mouse, and papers. Computer cables run through precision-cut openings in the top. It, too, boxes up and can be shipped overnight. This Japanese-influenced furniture isn't cheap. The desk costs about $2,500 before shipping. A king-size bed runs $2,775, plus $300 for Fed Ex delivery. A solid cherry bench is $875. When Green started producing his "jigsaw-puzzle furniture," he also began to design and fine-tune the manufacturing process. For the past six years, he and his crew have invented, fabricated, and perfected their own machines and production patterns. The technique works. Last year, Green Designs was a million-dollar business. "Our business has caught on," he says. "We now have a rhythm going, and it doesn't hurt that we have a great track record with customers." Green signs the first 100 pieces of a line. His keen attention to detail and precision has earned him several prestigious design awards. In 1993, he was selected one of the top designers of the year by Time Magazine. In 1997, his designs received an award for "value and versatility" at the Philadelphia Fine Furniture Show. And Green's work isn't just in homes. A Green hall table greets visitors in the Portland Museum of Art, which was designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei. A senior partner at a Washington law firm noticed a small sketch of a table in the catalog. He called Green and asked if he could adapt the design into a 23 foot-long conference table. Green said yes and designed and delivered the table. Buyers quickly recognize the quality of their purchases. "The customer puts it together, so he will see every aspect of the furniture from the inside and outside," says Green, who has been known to toss aside a piece that isn't working. "There's no fudging here. Every piece has
to be perfect." |
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