A row of the original bars lined up back at Drain’s studio, with part of a new project in the foreground: Wooden panels destined for a New York restaurant whose interior he’s collaborating on with Rafael de Cardenas. They’ll be installed next month at the base of a 6-foot-tall dividing screen made from wood woven around metal rods. “Each of the stripes you see here is a different piece of wood, and the easier thing to do would have been staining them before putting them together,” he says. “But stains bleed, so we ended up having to prime the entire thing and paint the wood grain back on. No one’s ever going to see this part, so it was a really anal thing to do.”