The Best Seats in the House Can Really Rock

Two rocking chairs make it clear that Sam Maloof’s world is shaped by his heart and his hands. The celebrated contemporary furniture designer made each--by hand--to honor two women who mean so much to him: Freda’s Chair for his wife of 50 years until her death; Beverly’s Chair for the woman who fell in love first with a walnut table then, a half-century later, married the man who made it.

Maloof, whose sculptural wood furniture is so prized by collectors, museum directors and even U.S. presidents that they wait years for delivery, is the subject of a display at the Beverly Hills Municipal Art Gallery. He brought the two rocking chairs from his home to the gallery because they represent “the heart and soul of what I do.”

Freda’s Chair was made to “embrace” the woman Maloof married in 1948 when he was an overworked artist’s assistant. Since the couple didn’t have money to buy furniture for their Ontario home, Maloof made tables, chairs and a hi-fi cabinet with salvaged materials and borrowed tools.

Their living-dining room furniture was practical, attractive and tactile, hallmarks of future pieces that would propel Maloof to the top rung of American studio furniture makers and would make him the only woodworker to date to be named a MacArthur Fellow. (Maloof was intimidated by the academics, poets and scientists at the award ceremony in 1985 until Freda reminded him that none of them could make a chair.)

Freda’s rocking chair, which he made three decades ago, has a solid walnut seat, curved back legs, sculptured arms and extended rockers with hooks “so it won’t tip over,” says the designer. In the early years, he sold some like it for $250; auction houses now sell them for 100 times that amount. “I wouldn’t part with this one for all the money in the world,” says Maloof, caressing the rocker’s backrest with his hands that are proportionately too large and too thick for his medium frame.

As with all of the 5,000 pieces Maloof has made by hand, function and comfort are key. In his rocking chairs, which are his best-known designs, armrests accept tired limbs in their natural relaxed position, and form-fitting seats slope toward the back spindles to provide comfortable support.

In the early 1960s, Maloof was making a rocking chair for John F. Kennedy to ease the president’s back pain, but it didn’t arrive at the White House before Kennedy’s assassination. Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, however, have eased their burdens while striking presidential poses in Maloof’s rocking chairs.

“Taut and muscular and yet most elegant” is how Jonathan Leo Fairbanks, emeritus curator of American decorative arts and sculpture, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, describes Maloof’s work.

Beverly’s Chair is carved from zircote wood and is four times heavier than Freda’s, but its thin-and-thick, turned wood and smaller frame give this rocking chair a delicate appearance. “It’s a sensuous chair,” says Maloof, 86, who is standing in front of the rocker and moving his hand to imitate its gentle curves, from its graceful back, down its flared arms to its extended legs. “It invites you to touch.”

Maloof and Beverly Wingate, who was a close friend to both the designer and his first wife, were married in July last year. Maloof presented the rocker to Beverly on Valentine’s Day this year.

When Beverly, 71, sits in her chair, she says, it becomes a part of her. “And when I’m not in it, I look at it and it’s beautiful,” she says.

Beverly was one of a million people who saw Maloof’s furniture in a showcase house at the Los Angeles County Fair in 1954. She and her first husband “didn’t have a house or any money,” but she had fallen in love with “the most beautiful dining room table,” and she wrote the Maloofs a letter, promising to send $25 as often as possible. The checks trickled in for years. “I think she still owes me money,” jokes Maloof.

Her table, which seats eight people, now shares space with the designer’s other pieces in their redwood home in Alta Loma.

The house where he had lived with Freda from 1953 until her death in 1998, and where they raised their two children, is nearby. Over the years, Maloof added dozens of rooms to the original “dingbat” structure. He also hand-carved a two-story spiral staircase and installed triangular clerestory windows. Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the 22-room house, which serves as a museum for the family’s collection of Native American art and contemporary crafts, will be open for public tours in October.

In addition to the two dozen pieces of the designer’s furniture on display at the Beverly Hills gallery through Sept. 30 are paintings, pottery, Native American blankets and other decorative pieces from the Maloof household.

It was curator Gere Kavanaugh’s intention to have “a show about Sam.”

“I wanted to show the scope of Sam’s aesthetic and not to do it as a purist show as it was done at the Renwick Gallery” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., last fall, says Kavanaugh, who also designed and installed the exhibit as well as designed the gallery space itself.

One pallet in the gallery holds pieces of hardwood, templates and chairs in various stages of completion, all borrowed from Maloof’s studio. “Oh, so that’s where that went,” says the designer, reaching to touch a slab of walnut that has the word “table,” the name of its future owner and its final dimensions written in white pencil.

The self-taught woodworker maps out a design in his head, not on paper. He then selects the wood and cuts the parts on a band saw. “I started doing it this way because I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to,” he says.

He spends some of his 12-hour workdays refining pieces with hand tools or putting them together with his signature joinery. Three assistants will do the finishing work on the 75 pieces he will complete this year. (Maloof opposes mass production and has turned down lucrative offers to sell his designs.)

Although he could have retired decades ago, his heart is here. “I still enjoy working in my shop,” says Maloof, “where the smell of the wood is pleasing and the look of the wood is so warm.”

“The Furniture of Sam Maloof” continues through Sept. 30 at the Beverly Hills Municipal Art Gallery in City Hall, 450 N. Crescent Drive. (310) 288-2220. For information on tours of the Maloof home and studio, call the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation at (909) 980-0412 or e-mail malooffounda [email protected].