(reel clicking) - You'll be dreaming of spending part of the cool winter relaxing in front of the fireplace in a Windsor chair by Rich Grell.

It will cost you $250 up, depending on the style.

And how available are these chairs?

Well, he's now taking orders for Christmas.

- The Windsor Chair is something that you just can't go buy in a store.

You can't buy a handmade chair that's built around you to fit you, your size, the color, the style that you want.

So I'm trying to bring back being able to build chairs, custom made for the people.

The wood comes outta my woods.

It's not processed, it's just cut down and split.

It's certain bit of self-satisfaction and pride that comes from cutting the tree down, bringing it home, splitting it, turning into a piece of furniture that you can make your living off of.

- [Narrator] It takes Grell a full week to make one of his Windsor Chairs.

If he used power tools, he could turn out several chairs in that length of time, but he would never think of such mass production.

- If they were made by machines then they would have no character.

They would be too perfect.

They just would not look good at all in a room with antiques.

They have to be made by hand.

The hand tools, the same processes that the pioneers used in order to make them authentic.

And that's how I build the chairs.

(film reel clicking) (gentle bright guitar music) (birds chirping) (gentle bright guitar music) - This was a small farm.

Hudson had a lot of just small little farms.

Some of the farmers would have other jobs, but we had pigs and chickens, sold eggs.

I grew pumpkins and sold them.

Early on I was an entrepreneur on a small scale.

(gentle bright guitar music) Probably my earliest recollection is when I was probably three years old, and my grandfather would give me tools that, because I wanted to build things, and my hands were just constantly making things.

I had to pound nails, I had to saw, I had to cut.

I was just driven to create things.

And I was encouraged to that by a father and grandfather that just would help be patient with me.

And when I wanted the little toy tools that were being sold at the store for kids, I never received those.

I got real tools that were already very old to begin with, sharpened up and ready to use, and then I was educated and enlightened on how to actually use the tools and to take care of them.

And that has been the basis for my work that I've spent my entire life doing.

My name is Richard Grell, and I am a Windsor Chair maker.

(gentle bright guitar music) (birds chirping) (leaves rustling) My ability to work with my hands was something that I wanted to do with, or at least more of a mechanical or engineering sort of thought, as far as a career goes.

And that's what we all go through when we're teenagers trying to figure out what it is that we wanna be.

(plane whirring) - [Narrator] Every second of every day an average of five airplanes are taking off or landing somewhere in these United States.

- At the time, in the 60s, the aerospace industry seemed to be where everything in the world was going to be happening.

And I had a brief career working for the airlines doing inspections on airliners when they would come in at night and doing all the things and running around and checking everything out, which I thought was going to be where I would spend my life and my career.

But the airlines went on strike.

They shut down.

So they furloughed everyone that was working.

And at that time, I decided that I would try to start this business of furniture with the intention of teaching myself how to make chairs.

(bright music) (tools scraping) - Chair making itself is this real specialized craft.

It's something that goes back millennia.

The Windsor Chairs, interestingly enough, they had kind of humble beginnings.

They started out as he's kinda like what we call today stick chairs.

Pretty primitive, country.

They just took a plank, used an ax to carve some little sticks, put 'em in the bottom, and that's as opposed to fancy carved chairs that the rich would've used.

These stick chairs were more the common person's chair, but Windsors themselves, they were much refined from that kind of primitive stick chair.

There's just a small amount of wood, almost nothing there.

It's gotta be sturdy, it's gotta be comfortable, and it's gotta be beautiful.

- Making the chair was the first challenge, teaching myself, spending times in museums, restorations, private collections, and just educating myself now about the chairs and how they were made.

And then I had to figure out, was there a market?

How would I sell them?

And there was no roadmap.

This was still before the country's bicentennial in '76, which was a big catalyst to get people interested in traditional American crafts.

I spent evenings after I would work in my shop, going out and speaking to groups for nothing about Windsor Chairs so that I could help them educate themselves about the historic aspect, the engineering aspect, all the elements of the Windsor Chair.

(hammer banging) (bright music) - My mother was an interior designer.

Because of that, I was exposed to what she did for a living and career.

She shared the same passion that she had with me, and I think that passion is more innate.

You realize, I did early on, that that's what I enjoyed.

When Rich and I met we only dated 79 days and then we were married.

So basically we really didn't know each other.

We just knew that we had similar interests.

He had already established his business for three years.

To continue that I just kinda jumped in and started helping him, as far as manage the business.

I liked to do creative graphic design, so I would design our brochures and even simple things like the price tags.

And when we would do shows, I would design the booth.

He's the craftsman, he's the chair maker.

But I was always combing through books, looking, and I would find a photograph of a historic period Windsor and flash it in front of him.

What about this?

And...

Okay, I'm gonna make that.

We'll do that one.

- I'm Richard Grell, and I'm demonstrating Windsor Chair making at the Case-Barlow Farm Harvest Fest.

A beautiful day.

Beautiful weather.

- I think the first time I ever saw Richard, he was out doing demonstrations on how to make Windsor Chairs.

And then following that, there was this crazy cult following, almost, of many of my friends and a lot of people in Hudson that you needed to have a chair made by Richard Grell.

And I love old things.

I've always loved old things.

So this is my ability to grab a little authentic piece of the past and have it in my home.

And it means more to me because I know the person who made it.

I know the love that went into it and the personal attention to detail.

- When I try to place Richard, one of the things I think about him is he is an extension of this craft tradition that's gone back for many, many generations.

He is not reproducing Windsor Chairs.

He's making his own chairs.

They're refinements on chairs that have gone before him.

And when I think about those chairs and what's really attractive about them, kinda go back to this modernist thing that happened in the early 20th century.

One of the things about that movement was it was the idea that the machine is the ultimate destination of where mankind is going.

And the emphasis was on let's make products with real sleek surfaces, flawless surfaces, that don't look like they've been touched by the human hand.

And actually, I think over time people have chafed at that idea that everything we touch is machine made and perfect.

People like to feel like the feeling of a pebble in a stream or whatever that nature has touched.

And his chairs really reflect the touch of a human artisan.

They've got contours to 'em, that they look like they've had a life.

And when you touch those and you feel 'em and you look at 'em, you get that sense that these are the result of nature and a human hand.

(gentle guitar music) - When I first started making the chairs I was following some period pieces just almost exactly as far as the proportions and the height of the seat and things like that, and people like that.

And especially in the 70s and the early part of that time period when people were still looking at the old chairs.

So the chairs had a more diminutive look to them.

They were smaller.

And as I progressed in time, and people were using the chairs, maybe in homes that the scale was bigger, I kind of would creep up on the thickness and variations of things so that I sort of adapted the chairs up a little bit.

But I always have given people the option.

So when I build the chair it's made to exactly what they prefer in their own eye on how they would like to see the chair.

(tools scraping) - Initially we would start at an outdoor show that he was a part of early, before we were married, and that was kind of a rustic show.

Our booth was rustic, but it didn't really complement the chairs.

And next thing we were doing for the show in the following years, we pretty much built a room, but I always tried to feature the chairs.

I always felt that was the priority and his work.

We've always been a team, even to this day, we work together.

Wait, we usually have a little space.

- Right, but I'm saying.

You look at it from out there so you can see what you're visualize that.

The booth is, remember the booth is a foot or two shorter.

- Okay.

- Wherever that one is, we'll put this one.

- I think we're both, by this time in life, pretty aware of our strengths and our weaknesses.

So we, I think for the biggest part of the time, we do respect each other's strengths and weaknesses.

I know when to defer to Gay on things.

- I mean, I didn't really like the idea that I had weaknesses.

I wanted to think that I could just do it all.

But as you age, you realize, and you're wiser to your own potential and what you're capable of.

(bright guitar music) - Aba.

Look it, remember the... (indistinct) These are some projects that I'm working on.

I call Richard a meticulous maker, where everything is clean and neat and in the same spot.

And I call myself a chaotic creator, where I like everything going on at the same time.

So I have a whole bunch of moldings here that I'm making, I have here.

And I have a whole pile over here that I'm making right now.

I'm an emergency physician at the Cleveland Clinic.

I've been there for about 10 years.

And I got into woodworking about six or seven years ago.

I was always a hands-on guy.

I always liked doing things using my hands, which is what I do in my job.

Lots of procedures and things like that.

I built this table, which was really beautiful, hand carved, aprons, a turned pedestal base.

Once the table was done, I kind of had a dilemma.

I didn't want to make these very ornate chairs and then obstruct the table.

So I ended up falling into, researching what are the options?

And I found a guy locally named Richard Grell who led this master's class and said, "Hey, we could work a one on one, "and we can build a Windsor Chair."

I didn't know much about design, and little did I know that he knew about the design.

- The Windsor Chair has a element of design that is very sculptural.

When you look at it, you can actually see through the chair.

So when it is a in a room, you kind of see things behind it, and it just sort of is very airy.

So it's a very elegant piece to have in various designs and styles.

But they're also very strong.

And that goes back to their origin in England is that the chairs were made, not by cabinet makers or furniture makers.

They were initially made by turners and wheelwrights.

- Wagon makers wanted to make their wagons very light and very strong so that you've got your horses, you don't wanna wear 'em out pullin' around a heavy wagon.

You wanna pull as much freight as possible.

And what they did was they took woods that were exactly the right strongest species of wood for things like the tongue or for the axles or whatever.

And wagons ended up being built out of multiple kinds of wood.

Well, Windsor Chair makers did the same thing.

The seat's made out of pine or poplar.

The legs are made out of maple.

The parts that need to bend and flex like the little spindles in the back, they're often made out of ash or oak.

So you've got this hybrid design, and the result is you can make this chair that's very light.

- The skills that were required to make a strong wagon wheel would be able to apply to the chairs and give the strength of a wheel, and yet everything comes into the seat, like a hub of a wheel and the spindles and the legs and everything all emerge from the seat.

The elements are very similar to that.

And the strength is inherent in the engineering and design of the chair.

- In order for things to look pleasing, there's certain rules of design that Richard always talks to, his friend George talks to, is in that back in Greek and Roman times they had columns and they had orders, and those are based on what they considered beautiful.

And those have stood the test of time.

What's available commercially now, Richard calls it Velveeta cheese.

He kind of says that it's neither Swiss nor mozzarella.

It's this newfangled American cheese.

So they take designs and they just stretch 'em and someone decides that, hey, this looks good.

- [Narrator] The modern designer creates beauty through simplicity, bringing to active business a look of casualness, a look of luxury, combining to create a new look to American efficiency.

- For most of our history, in terms of craft, artisans had three things that were really important to them as far as what made something good or what made something excellent.

It had to be sturdy and long lasting, it had to be functional, and it had to be beautiful.

Those axioms started to come under fire with the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

There was this term called form follows function, but the reality of it was a lot of the function that they built into things had a lot to do with making the thing mesh with machine processes.

You wanted something that would work, but you're more interested in, can I put this on an assembly line and make it very quickly?

- I had the opportunity very early on to sell the chairs to a company that would market them, but I would have to change my methods.

I would have to be purchasing parts, doing things that actually increase the production.

And from a dollar standpoint, it sounded interesting, but I knew that it would be a compromise.

I'm sure that anything is possible to knock anything off anymore with technology.

With 3D printers, and with CNC, I have no doubt that that would be the case.

I think the problem is that with people that really would like to have something that's genuine and signed, your signature, your name, your association with that and the quality really becomes the factor, not the duplication of the piece.

I also am not sure that a CNC or a copier can make the selections that I make along the way.

That's a human factor.

I look at, I touch, I feel all of the pieces of that chair as they're going together and as I'm selecting the wood - In nature, there's something called a golden ratio, and it's the hand to the forearm, the the upper body to the rest of the body, and when you design furniture using those proportions, things will look pleasing and balanced, hence, beautiful.

These are golden ratio calipers courtesy of the Marc Adam's School.

And so this ratio to this ratio has a pleasing effect.

If you can take a look at the curve at the bottom, how high up should this curve have been in order to make it pleasing?

When you look at it, I think it looks very pleasing and very balanced.

But if you just go ahead and use the calipers you see that the peak of the curve comes more or less within the golden ratio.

- Leonardo DaVinci had a real famous series of paintings he called Grotesques where he would just make the nose too big or the ear too big or the mouth outta position.

And he was illustrating that proportions is really important.

Well, it spilled over into our buildings, it spilled over into our furniture.

A Windsor Chair maker looks at the spindles on a Windsor Chair, and he's constantly looking at all the other parts, and he's kinda taking the same thing, as the parts need to relate to each other.

- And the people that appreciate my chairs understand and they touch and see exactly what I'm doing.

And if someone does not see that I will encourage them to go buy the cheaper chair.

But for my clients, they really have an eye for the handwork and the detail that I put into the chairs.

(bright music) Hello, I'm Richard Grell.

Welcome to my shop.

Just carrying in a fresh piece of maple to start workin' on some of the chairs.

Might like to come on in and get a little look of my world and 25 years of makin' Windsor Chairs.

(gentle bright guitar music) - I have tremendous admiration for Rich.

His talents, determination, works harder than anybody I know.

I think of all the work that he's done for both of us, even though we've done it together, a lot of the physical part has been his responsibility.

It's hard work.

It's not easy being self-employed, and you...

I don't think about it.

If I think about it, it's daunting.

(gentle bright music) - It's a difficult path.

No one says that building furniture this way is easy or that it's it's the most efficient way.

It's just, it's his way of doing it.

And it's a time honored way of doing it, but it's very physically taxing.

I know for myself, when I'm using a hands, playing on my workbench, it gets my heart up.

'Cause it's physical work.

It involves sweat and muscle and burnin' lots of calories, and it's quite the process.

(gentle bright music) - In a way you can call him a specialist of a chair maker, but he's not.

He makes Windsor Chairs, and Windsor Chair is a completely different bird than anything else, because there's not a single flat surface on the chair.

You have to be an expert at joinery.

You have to be an expert at carving.

You have to be an expert on turning.

You have to be an expert on wood movement and wood species and understanding all of that.

I think making a Windsor Chair is like getting your PhD in woodworking.

If you can make a Windsor Chair, you can do anything.

- I always said my name is carved in the bottom of the seat, and that's how it's gonna be.

And if the chairs are not selling, they're still gonna be expensive.

(laughing) But that's always been the case.

that they've just been, we've had clients and people who appreciate the work.

- We have been very, very, very fortunate.

- Yeah.

I mean we have more customers that become friends over the years.

- And that's the best part, I think, of what we do together.

And that is the people we've met.

- Yeah.

- The experiences we've had, the places we've traveled, and just the diversity.

- He's very gentile, as is Gay, and they're very humble people who like to do things well.

- To him, the wood is just a medium.

I think he's more of an artist than anything else.

When you sit on the chair, you're sitting on the maker and you know that you're kind of connecting with the person that made that piece.

The only way you know that somebody made it is when you see the mill marks, when you see the tool marks, or you see the inconsistencies and you know that's human.

I'm sure if someone doesn't have an eye for the beauty or doesn't have an eye for the design, it wouldn't make a difference to them.

But if someone does know the difference, it makes you smile when you see that little finishing touch.

- When I think of Richard as an artisan, I think of him as someone with a lot of creative freedom.

And by that I think of as different than maybe we think about creative freedom today.

Our idea of freedom today is you get to choose between a bunch of options or you go out and you do some real novel thing.

Or in a craft tradition, creative freedom was something very different.

It was choosing the good over and over again to get to a destination, to some kind of an ideal.

The chairs that he made 30, 40 years ago I'm sure were different than the chairs he's making today.

And the chairs that he's gonna make in the future are gonna be closer to that ideal form that he's been shooting for all his life.

(gentle bright music) - It's so perfectly straight grained, very few knots of anything in its life.

So we're looking at perfect straight grain.

It's a hickory, which is one of the best for bending and back spindles.

And this is just a perfect section of that tree right there.

A lot of chair parts in that tree.

(gentle bright music) I think this is my favorite time of year, in the fall.

With the nuts fallin' and the squirrels busy stashin' everything away for winter.

Light shinin' through, just barely, comin' through the leaves.

Leaves turnin' slowly.

(gentle bright music) A lotta years of my life looking at these trees as they've grown.

(gentle bright music) And I love 'em.

(gentle bright music) (gentle bright music)