Woodworker Cliff Friedlander on ‘art furniture,’ jazz, and prioritizing space in design
From the Arts & Crafts-inspired front door to the satiny kitchen cabinets and vintage hardwood floors, many if not all of the spaces in the Friedlander home are hand-crafted. The customized rooms Cliff Friedlander has shared with his artist wife Sara for the past 35 years are inflected by his global aesthetic, woodworking expertise and sensitivity to both form and function. “Cherry wood with ebony pegs,” Friedlander smiles, pointing to kitchen cabinets he recently created, “inspired by a visit to the Gamble House.” [The Pasadena landmark, hand-constructed by Greene & Greene in 1908, is considered the apex of Arts & Crafts architecture in the United States.] Over the years, Friedlander has re-imagined his own home—ripped out walls, refreshed sight lines, and reconfigured windows and doors.
“The original house was a box,” he says with a shrug. Everything has been changed. Refined. Passageways have turned into dining nooks, fluted glass mellows the light swelling through the small, incredibly efficient kitchen. As in so many homes, the kitchen—with its floating cabinets and intelligent counter space—is the heart of the house. “I like to cook, so I was interested in the spaces of the kitchen. Kitchens are the majority of my work,” he admits. Friedlander once taught a kitchen design class along with a chef, and admits, “I learned a lot from that interaction. I saw how a kitchen functions for the cook. And that’s what I can bring to a client.”
In the bedroom, a custom platform bed floats on drawers that glide like buttered silk. Vertical grain fir was installed in the main hallway floors. “It looks good, but it also wears nicely,” he says. Friedlander’s eyes sweep across the floor with approval. A Shaker-style trestle table, made years ago when the couple first moved in, still hosts family meals. “Most commercial furniture is designed for the ‘average’ client,” he notes. “I made this table a few inches lower.” It exactly fits their bodies—and that’s the joy of what he does. “You can customize the details.”
As a student in New York, Friedlander developed a lifelong interest in the Arts & Crafts movement. “We called it ‘art furniture,’” he says. He always wanted to do something with wood, he says, as I admire the undulant grain on a desk of curly koa wood he made 30 years ago. “What I realized in the early ’70s was that it was fun to be doing it—and yet it was very high end stuff for rich people.” Friedlander wanted to translate the artistic style into something more people could afford. He and Sara came out from the East Coast to Santa Cruz, where Friedlander began working with George Smiley, a cabinet maker in Soquel. “I was able to develop a sense of a business that would work, that I could do myself, without needing employees,” he says. And that lifestyle would allow him to help take part in raising his daughter Sasha while continuing to pursue his other lifelong interest—music. Between his New York art furniture mentor Mike Coffey and “nuts and bolts guy” George Smiley, Friedlander discovered his own style—“somewhere in the middle.”
A product of his generation, Friedlander wanted to avoid the professional route expected of him. “I’ve always done music, first piano and then guitar,” he says. He studied gamelan, here and in Indonesia, and continues to play jazz with a tight-knit group in his living room every Friday. But when he saw the documentary film Alive Inside, he hit upon the latest of his musical projects. “It was incredible seeing the reaction of Alzheimer’s patients to hearing the music from their youth,” he says. Wanting to be “useful” with his music, Friedlander recently began compiling song lists and taking them, and his guitar, to places like Dominican Oaks where he can lead singalongs with many of the receptive and appreciative tenants.
“Music is a powerful thing. It’s a huge satisfaction, playing and singing with people, especially where people are eager for contact and participation,” he says.
Friedlander says he long ago made the decision to do work he loved. “So we wouldn’t have the newest car, or the largest house,” he says. But they traveled widely, Cliff made music, built instruments, and learned to craft unique and beautiful living spaces. “I don’t have huge expenses,” he says, leading me out the back door, across the deck he designed and constructed, past the studio he built for his wife, and out to his wood shop filled with power tools, cabinets-in-progress, and Balinese instruments. From a bank of skylights the room is flooded with natural light. The earthy perfume of freshly cut wood reminds me of my Uncle Harold’s shop. “The table saw is the most important piece,” he notes of a state-of-the-art piece of computerized equipment. He runs his hand over a large piece of smooth maple. “You can actually get pre-finished plywood now. It’s a great innovation,” he says, opening the bathroom cabinet door. “I don’t have to finish the inside of this—it’s already been finished.”
Back in the kitchen, Friedlander offers a few pro tips. Modular frameless cabinets are much more flexible, “easier to build, less expensive” than cabinets with framed doors. “There are some obvious solutions when doing kitchens. The placement of the refrigerator is huge, and no matter what you try, like lazy susans, corners are notoriously difficult,” he says. Prioritizing space is key. “The stove is prime real estate. So is the refrigerator and the sink,” he says. Design magic happens around those large appliances. “I’ve learned from my own mistakes,” Friedlander confesses. “And as I get older, I get pickier.”
PHOTO: CHIP SCHEUER
