Incollect Magazine - Issue 14

Incollect Magazine 85 C ontemporary furniture designer and maker Eben Blaney is the son of a midcoast Maine wooden boat builder. For those unfamiliar with the area, MidCoast Maine is a region along the central Maine coast, renowned for its rocky shoreline, picturesque towns, bays, fishing boats, and sheltered harbors. Blaney was born and grew up here, and today lives and works a few miles from his old family home. His father’s wooden boatbuilding business was next door to the house. Tradition and heritage, it goes without saying, are at the core of his woodworking skills and techniques. Blaney was not always destined to be a furniture maker. He initially rebelled against a career in woodworking, moved to Seattle, and spent the majority of his 20s there. “I wanted to be a rock star,” he says, then laughs. In Seattle, he found out that he loved music, but “wasn’t a performer”, so to make money, he dipped back into working for local builders, doing custom cabinetry for homes. He returned to Maine, finished an English Literature degree, but once again found himself working in woodshops to make ends meet. “I think it was about 1997 or 1998 when I made my first piece of furniture professionally,” he recalls. “I was 30 years old and had done plenty of carpentry and custom cabinetry by then, all as an employee. But I landed a job working for a custom furniture maker. I quickly appreciated the creative potential of furniture design and began envisioning my own pieces. It was the combination of both the building and the designing that I found not only extremely satisfying, but was something I was cut out to do.” Today, he operates a design and woodworking studio in a two-story building in Edgecomb, Maine, with the studio on the ground floor and a gallery upstairs. He designed and built the building himself in 2003. He makes and sells 20-30 pieces of furniture a year, usually to collectors in Maine, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Some are ready-made pieces from his showroom, others are custom commissions. “I’ve had a surprising amount of pieces commissioned by architects for their private homes,” he says. More and more, his work is being purchased by designers, and he has sold pieces to prominent NYC interior designers Victoria Hagan Interiors, Shawn Henderson, Jarvis Studio, and others. The studio portion of the building is filled with machinery — a mixture of vintage tools and modern power tools. There is a large space for a couple of workbenches, a smaller solid Clockwise from right: 1. Eben Blaney in his Edgecomb, Maine, woodworking studio. 2. The Cirrus Console with a top case in bleached ash and curved, bowed drawer fronts, and a base in white oak with exposed, pegged mortised and tenon joinery. 3. Any wonder why this is named the Crane Console? As sparely elegant as an origami crane, this piece has mortise and tenon joinery and is sculpted by hand to its exquisite finished form.