THE HOURGLASS

There is a principle of traditional woodworking that the furniture designer Jason Roskey does not adhere to. “The wood has to match; it should be from the same tree; all this stuff,” Roskey says. “I wasn’t interested in that at all.” This makes a good deal of sense: Roskey began his career as a visual artist creating mixed-media installations and collages. He brought his appreciation for combining materials to his elegant line of furniture, Fern Handcrafted, which he designs and builds in Germantown, New York. “A lot of the pieces that I make have a patchwork quality to them.”

Roskey made his first piece of furniture in 2009, on a lark. “I ordered a big slab of wood off the Internet and made a table,” he says. The third piece he built, a coffee table made from Claro walnut, was featured in the The New York Times. By the fall of 2011, Roskey had outgrown his workshop space in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. He relocated upstate and opened a showroom in Hudson, New York, known for its superb antique shops. The Fern Handcrafted line has since expanded to include a range of simple but very inventive pieces, many of them modern interpretations of clean, minimal Shaker designs.

For Whisper Editions, Roskey has designed a gorgeous walnut stool. The Swell Stool features an oversize, hand-carved seat and “swells” within the legs–the wood becomes thicker in the middle of each leg–to provide added strength. Roskey has given the custom stool a signature mixed-media touch: a rung connecting the legs is made from solid turned brass. The design is influenced by 19th-century Shaker farm stools but comes in modern proportions and, at 17.5" high, is the perfect height for a dining table. “The form is based on a Shaker stool I saw in Kentucky,” Roskey says. “The Shakers would use it for counting seeds.”

Click here to shop The Swell Stool, made exclusively for Whisper Editions.