Elegant Furniture Gets Royal Showing

He doesn’t have quite the royal renown of Prince Charles or the paparazzi appeal of Lady Di, but David Linley is Queen Elizabeth’s nephew, and this British furniture maker--the royal carpenter--will appear in Thousand Oaks this weekend.

Linley, the son of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, is in the United States promoting his second book on elegant furniture. He is sweeping through Southern California this weekend with stops at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a couple of bookstores, including Borders Books in Thousand Oaks, where he will appear at 1 p.m. Saturday.

Linley, 35, has made a name for himself in England--but not the way his famous cousins and their sometime-spouses have. By media accounts, Linley--or more properly Viscount Linley--is a shy, modest, hard-working guy who turned a love of exquisite furniture into a profitable business.

Eleven years ago, Linley, 12th in line to the throne, started David Linley Furniture Ltd. in London, where he designs and makes custom furniture for the rich and famous, among others.

He crafted an elegant sycamore cabinet to house Elton John’s 250 pairs of glasses. Mick Jagger has also been a customer. Probably his biggest effort was a 60-foot conference table for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

But he shies away from naming other big names or talking about his royal connections. “Names are not an important part of the business,” he said in a telephone interview. But he does love to talk about craftsmanship and fine wood.

His love of furniture came early. “As a child, I was always interested in woodworking and making things,” he said. At 14, after a year of labor, he finished his first piece, a desk with sycamore inlays.

“I still use it with great pleasure,” he said.

His company employs 17 workers, and another 64 independent artisans do jobs for him. One of the firm’s specialties is creating jewelry boxes in the shape of a customer’s house, equipped with secret drawers. These, he said, are items that wives are fond of giving husbands.

“It’s one thing you can give him that he doesn’t have, and it will give him infinite pleasure,” Linley said. It’s no easy task. It calls for someone not only to photograph the house from all sides, but to climb on the roof for a careful look and to collect architectural drawings.

Linley calls furniture making “enormous fun.” And family members, he said, have been highly supportive of his business.

“My mother and grandmother have been very enthusiastic,” he said. “They donated two pieces of equipment to the cause and have commissioned me to make pieces.”

Linley came out with his first book, “Classical Furniture,” in 1993. It’s a serious and somewhat technical coffee-table book that traces the evolution of classical furniture through history. His newest effort, “Extraordinary Furniture,” takes a more lighthearted approach, featuring some of the most extravagant, inventive and unusual furniture built from the medieval period to the present.

In it you’ll see the opulent, pure silver cradle made for Napoleon’s son and the gilded, canopied bed built for his wife, Empress Josephine. It has even more eccentric offerings as well: the ingenious “sleeping chair,” made for London aristocracy in 1670. The seat back could be tilted, like today’s recliners, but this early design still had a few bugs--the chair would sometimes tip over.

The books are chock full of royal excesses, but they make little of Linley’s own royalty. Only in the introductions does he offer any glimpses into his personal life. His photographer father inspired him in a rather offbeat way by not lavishing him with toys but instead encouraging him to make his own toys.

“My father and I share a passion for how things work, which in my case took the form of schoolboy fascination with machines and mechanical contraptions,” he states in the book.

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As a child, his famous parents taught him to appreciate the architecture of fine homes and their elegant furnishings. Apparently his father wasn’t bashful about knocking on the doors of strangers’ homes, during afternoon walks, to satisfy his curiosity.

“I remember that on some of these excursions my father would just walk up unannounced to the door of an interesting house and ask politely if we could possibly look round--terrifying at the time but wonderful to look back on,” he wrote.

Linley learned furniture making from the best, studying at Parnham House School for Craftsmen in Wood, under the direction of English furniture maker John Makepeace.

His love for wood seems deep and real. When an oak tree fell on the grounds of Windsor Castle, he rescued it, crafting it into a front door for his apartment. For woods, he leans toward English oak, walnut, cherry and sycamore.

Although he is pursued by the British press, he has given them little titillating fodder. In fact, he went on the attack when a newspaper falsely reported he had been booted out of a London pub for drunken behavior. He sued, and in 1990 he won $80,000 in damages.

Three years ago, he married heiress Serena Stanhope, and they have just moved into a house in London. On weekends they look for antiques, or they might visit a gallery, where Linley says he always has an eye out for inspirations.

DETAILS

* WHAT: David Linley, nephew of Queen Elizabeth II, talks about his furniture-making business and his latest book, “Extraordinary Furniture.”

* WHERE: Borders Books, 125 W. Thousand Oaks Blvd., Thousand Oaks.

* WHEN: 1 p.m. Saturday.

* CALL: 497-8159.

* FYI: “Extraordinary Furniture” and Linley’s earlier book, “Classical Furniture,” were published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. and sell at Borders for $54 each.