The Nakashima Mystique

Edie Cohen -- Interior Design, 3/1/2007 12:00:00 AM

Mira Nakashima literally grew up in her father's workshop. "I was the shop pest," she says. "It was my playground."

The only daughter of George Nakashima, architect and master craftsman of walnut furniture, she first delved into the arts. She mastered the flute, clarinet, and piano before leaving home in New Hope, Pennsylvania, to study modern dance and preside over the choral society at Radcliffe College. After graduating and moving to Tokyo to explore Zen Buddhism, she earned her master's in architecture at Waseda University, married, and gave birth to the first of four children. The next stop was Pittsburgh, where she designed interiors and gardens.

It wasn't until 1970 that she and her family returned to the Bucks County studio that her father had built himself. Part-time work eventually turned into full, as she helped her dad with projects including a massive altar for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. Succession, however, wasn't an easy choice. "When Dad passed away in 1990," she recalls, "I thought, What do I do with this?" But obligation ran deep. In 2004, she and her brother, Kevin, assumed full responsibility for George Nakashima Woodworker.

Success was hard-won. "About half the orders canceled," she admits. Major acclaim first came with the 1993 opening of her George Nakashima Memorial Reading Room at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Under the aegis of the Nakashima Foundation for Peace, she has gone on to complete commissions as far afield as Russia and India—working with American black walnut trees designated by her father. She also collaborates with the likes of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Iu + Bibliowicz Architects. For private clients, she's often represented by Cristina Grajales, who recently co-organized Mira Nakashima's first solo show, with the Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York.

Opposite: This 1945 photograph shows George Nakashima and 3-year-old Mira at his studio in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

From top: At the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Mira Nakashima stands in front of her father's oil portrait by William A. Smith, who taught her academic painting and drawing in exchange for designing his studio. Her first solo exhibition, a 2006 show at New York's Perry Rubinstein Gallery, featured 10 of her furniture designs in redwood burl.

Clockwise from top: This workshop is the oldest building on the 9-acre site. Mira Nakashima learned to play the flute in high school. She made the redwood-burl Concordia chair in 2003. George Nakashima made this walnut Conoid bench for Nelson and Happy Rockefeller in 1975. Mira Nakashima's table has the same butterfly joints that her father used.