It’s a pleasure to walk into the Needham Furniture Makers building on Hillside Avenue. The air smells faintly of fresh wood and sawdust. The gallery where you enter has handmade items of all shapes and sizes, from small bowls to an elegant modern dining table. A handmade guitar hangs on the wall and a folk-art wooden yogi does a headstand in the corner. Through an open door one of the artisans is in a shop room fitting hardware to an inlaid interior barn door he was commissioned to make for a Texas home.
The business, conceived by owner Peter Stein and a former partner, is a mecca for makers — and for those who appreciate artisan furniture and woodworking. Beginners can take furniture making classes there through Needham Community Education. Hobbyists can buy limited memberships which gives them access to tools, power equipment and a community of knowledge that surpasses whatever they may have in their basements. And half a dozen or so professional artisans rent individual workspaces and share the large equipment, creating a hive of individual output in a shared space. Co-working and sharing equipment reduces their overhead, making their work more profitable — though some of that profit may be under pressure after this year’s local property reassessment.
It’s an unusual business for Needham and its founder has taken an unusual route to get there. Stein studied engineering at Princeton, got an MBA from the Sloan School at MIT, and worked in relatively traditional jobs — tech marketing, then business relocation (a family business) — for a couple of decades. He and his family, including a daughter who is now out of college and two sons going into their senior years, lived in Needham.
When the relocation business was bought by a larger company, however, Stein decided to follow his heart rather than his B-school-launched trajectory. “We went from like a 75-person company to like a 75,000-person company,” he said. “After about six months, I was out.”
“I contemplated what should I do at that point. So … I opened a restaurant and bar in Cambridge.” After a couple of years, when his restaurant manager began to suggest Stein did not need to be there all the time, he started taking furniture-making classes at the North Bennet Street School in the North End.
“It was a hobby born in Needham. I was always interested in making stuff. I was a mechanical engineer. When my kids were born, I bought my first table saw and made my kids their furniture, little desks, bookcases, things of that nature. I would go to Pottery Barn and measure the train table that they had there and run home and make it. I built my shop up in my basement quite slowly. When I had a need for a tool, I would buy the tool and hopefully I would use it more than once.”
The restaurant withered during COVID. Furniture-making alone is a hard way to make a living, Stein knew, but maybe there was another way to build on his North Bennet Street education. He found the building at 590 Hillside Ave. and began fitting it out as a shared space. One of the people he asked for advice was Joe van Benten, the Newton-based furnituremaker (now retired) who lived in Needham for decades. “He was in business for 41 years and he convinced me that, ‘Hey, you could do this.’ He sent three or four kids through college doing it.”
One of the artisans taking advantage of the space at Needham Furniture Makers is Hugo Nakashima-Brown, who was outfitting the barn door. Nakashima-Brown is as much an artist whose medium is wood as he is a furnituremaker. “I have a very well known furnituremaker [George Nakashima, ‘who kind of pioneered the idea of free-edge furniture in the U.S.’] on one side of my family and I prefer to distinguish myself as an individual working in the field. And so I do things that are as polarly different from their work as possible.” The barn door commission is an elegant work of art in wood veneer with an unusual theme: One panel is a homeless encampment with an overturned crate in the foreground.
Nakashima-Brown, who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, is preparing for an exhibition of another project: a set of veneer art pieces based on the paintings of Howard Finster, a friend of his grandfather. “My grandfather once said Finster’s work was like Rembrandt. I thought, what if I took a Howard Finster piece and ‘Rembrandt-ed’ it by doing it in the fine Italian technique of veneer and tarsia.”
As he showed off the space, Stein admitted that his haven of wood and craft is under financial strain. His lease requires him to pay property taxes, which doubled with this year’s reassessment.
“My landlord is great and we’re trying to see if we can get an abatement,” said Stein. “I can’t afford to do this if it’s losing money. I’m not retiring off of it. But that was a big hit that took me from the black [profit] to the red [loss].”
“I’m not going to say it’s an existential issue,” Stein said. Then he paused. “But it is a fundamental issue with our existence.”
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