Restoration - Crafts People

VanAuker Built Furniture for Restored Westcott House

VanAuker has renovated the chancel of a Gothic church, he has put broken guitars "all the way back together again," and he has tackled numerous household woodworking projects. Yet the assignment to fabricate furniture for the Westcott House is Terry A. VanAuker's most challenging. And with good reason.

To secure the assignment, VanAuker, who lives and works on the outskirts of Springfield, Ohio, needed to go through a somewhat arduous process. First he approached local architect Craig E. Dillon, who sits on the Westcott House Foundation board of directors, to express his long-standing interest in the project. Then—to be pre-qualified to bid for the work—he submitted materials such as photographs of previous projects and references from clients. Finally, he placed bids for construction of several pieces of furniture for the house. He won contracts on four of the six on which he bid.

VanAuker next received a set of plans and a specification book showing how the finished pieces should look—according to Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed the Westcott House, and Chambers, Murphy & Burge, the restoration architects in charge of the project. After seemingly endless study, VanAuker set about making his own computer-generated drawings that illustrated such details as how the joints would fit. David Vottero, of the Columbus, Ohio, architectural and engineering firm Schooley Caldwell & Associates, then reviewed them. Once VanAuker received Vottero's analysis, he migrated from his desk to his well-equipped workshop, where he constructed a library bookcase, a reception table, a child's play table with two chairs, and a birdhouse.

VanAuker was eager to receive this commission because he has long been a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright. He has read widely on Wright, has visited Wright homes in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Oberlin, Ohio, and Oak Park, Illinois, and has incorporated Wright influences into his own home, notably in lamps and a rear deck that he himself designed and built. They look as though they came directly from a Wright design manual. In fact, VanAuker acknowledges that he is a Prairie Style aficionado. "Given my freedom, I always design in that direction," he says, "for both residential architecture and furniture."

VanAuker had no actual models from the Westcott House to guide him. Built-in medicine cabinets and closet armoires appear to be the only furniture remaining there. Thus, VanAuker had the job of making the replacement pieces look the way that the originals presumably appeared.

The library bookcase, built chiefly of oak, measures approximately ten-and-a-half feet wide by five feet high. It features movable shelves and six doors with art glass fronts. A company in Cleveland fabricated the glass. Since each door is heavy, VanAuker followed detailed drawings of the mortise and tenor joints to make certain that each door remains stable.

The reception table, placed at the east end of the long front room, measures three feet wide, two feet high, and eight feet long. Also of oak with a lot of veneer, it displays four closely spaced shelves that intensify the horizontal quality of this large piece. Each end features two doors hung at a forty-five-degree angle. VanAuker designed the method of connecting the tabletop to each leg.

He constructed the child's table and chairs of solid white oak. The set is a Prairie Style version of the customary play set, he says.

The birdhouse—built of cypress to withstand weather—has nothing customary about it, however. Several features distinguish it. First, it extends twelve feet tall and more than three feet wide. Enhancing its front is a harp-like structure topped by a mast. Elements measuring four-and-one-half inches square decorate the house. And each of the sixteen "apartments" for the birds is relatively spacious: five-to-six inches high and almost one foot square. Openings, too, are rather large: two-and-one-half by three-and-one-half inches. Frank Lloyd Wright himself specified the dimensions. However, there is no certainty that the birdhouse was ever built. Nonetheless, the Durable Slate Company made a tin roof for it, and the "apartment house" stands near the front of the garden wall.

VanAuker's years of study and experimentation with wood, finishes, and the techniques of the craft have brought his work to its current sophisticated level. Essentially self-taught, he acknowledges that between jobs he is often in his shop trying out new methods of making the wood do what he wants it to do. The "trial and error" portion of his work must be done before he attempts the final product, he asserts. The favorite part of a project for him is "putting the parts together." That's when he gets the charge of satisfaction. And he also enjoys designing the project on his MacIntosh computer. He has not touched a pencil since 1990.

Despite VanAuker's love of woodworking, he has not always claimed it as a career. Once upon a time he was a musician, a guitarist who, with a partner, bought and operated a small music store in Columbus, Ohio, called Columbus Folk Music. During its fifteen-year lifetime he repaired approximately three thousand stringed instruments. Some jobs were pro forma, but others—for example, rebuilding an entire guitar—were quite complicated. "That's an intense form of woodworking," he says. The store closed in the late 1980s, and VanAuker has been a full-time woodworker ever since—happily so.

When VanAuker bid on the Westcott House furniture, he did not have a very good concept of the amount of time its painstaking construction would consume. He now knows that it took more time than he expected. Visitors to the Westcott House are certain to recognize that he invested that time wisely and well.