Passion for the grain: Craftsman’s loved wood since young age

Alfred Anderson calls his custom woodworking business Craftsman in Wood. The name pays homage to his high school shop teacher, who was also his mentor, and who had a business by the same name.

Anderson grew up in Tuskegee, Ala., where his elementary school had shop classes starting at a very young age.

“I’ve been a woodworker since I was about 6,” says Anderson. “This has been just an escalation. When I was a very little kid – in one of those prophetic moments for little kids – I went to the site where my parents were building our new house. I saw it as a grand place, with all sorts of wonderful things to look at. The carpenters had a saw set up, and I went and looked at the pine sawdust and it smelled so good.”

Today, Anderson builds furniture such as altars, pulpits, lecterns, ossuaries and ambries, (no pews) for a company in Seattle. He also does privately commssioned pieces, custom designed for clients.

All his church pieces are architecturally driven by the style of the place of worship, so there is research involved to trace the historical design.

“For example, right now I’m working on a piece for a Carmelite convent, and the nuns there are working on a tradition that started in the 12th century,” says Anderson. “They want to be able to refer to some of these traditional values. So the negotiation process for the design is really quite elaborate. There’s a lot of research. It’s an interesting process.”

Anderson describes his shop as fairly traditional and not highly mechanized. It has 19th century planes that are equivalent to today’s routers. He works with Japanese planes and saws that have had the same style for 300 years.

When Anderson lived in Seattle, furniture making was his main occupation. Now he shares it with caring for his 79-acre property in Colbert. And although he works with other artisans such as glassblowers, ceramists, stonecutters and welders, he does all the wood finishing.

“I do all of the work,” says Anderson. “In fact part of the plan in moving here was to compress the work into something I could do personally, as opposed to more commercial.”

Working by client-to-client referral, Anderson maintains it’s essentially an artistic passion for woodworking, painting and design rather than just plain carpentry. And even domestic furniture offers chances for creativity.

“Right now I’m building a coffee table for my wife’s niece, and it’s also a workbench,” Anderson says. “It’ll have a vise; it’ll have benchdogs. They wanted a coffee table, and they have a 7-year-old, so they’re thinking he could use it as a little workbench.”

Each piece Anderson is working on is his favorite at that moment, but he does have a fondness for one particular request. A neighbor wanted a huge table for Thanksgiving. She wanted it to start at 10 feet long and then expand as needed. He told her what the table might cost, and she reluctantly let the plan drop.

“It turned out that we knew her parents,” says Anderson. “And they said, ‘We’ll buy it for her, and someday we’ll go over and deliver it to her door as a surprise.’ So I put it together, and the parents put a little inscription on it, and one afternoon we put it in the van and drove it over to her house and knocked on the door.

“She was amazed.”