
Uhuru also works with the kind of small mills that provide interesting, hard-to-find woods to the likes of Nakashima’s studio. Much of Uhuru’s custom work involves creating freeform wood-slab dining tables, coffee tables, and beds for interior-design clients, and that locally milled wood comes from sustainably harvested trees or those naturally felled by storms or cut for disease. “We try, whenever we can, to buy flitches, which is what it’s called when you have the sequential slabs from a trunk in order,” Hilgendorf explains.