Todd St. John’s Gowanus studio is one of many faces — literally. There’s a wooden man with a rounded nose peering over the edge of a shelf in one corner, and another with an aqua blue combover, also crafted of wood, next to a pair of candlesticks on tabletop display. There are woodblock animals — an alligator, a bluebird, and a marigold-yellow lion with a sharp-toothed underbite — in a glass case; a face with parts held together with yarn sits in the studio’s adjoining workshop. “I do a lot of animation, illustration, and narrative work,” says St. John, whose background is in graphic design, and whose clients have included The New York Times, Prius, Nickelodeon, Pilgrim Surf Supply, and MTV. “So I’m often experimenting with and developing new characters. There are tests around here everywhere.”
The designer, whose 15-year-old studio, HunterGatherer, specializes in animation, illustration, film, and video, has made multidisciplinary experimentation a way of life since childhood. “I was one of those kids that was interested in too many things,” he says. “I liked music, drawing, animation, video. I’ve always had a polymath way of working. Often one thing feeds into another; I’ll work on a project and it’ll give me an idea for something else. That process works really well for me.” St. John’s most recent endeavor, and the one that caught our eye, is a five-piece furniture collection of classic household staples, reimagined in brass and walnut. With it, he was able to combine a lifelong penchant for building (a hobby his father encouraged over the course of his childhood in Hawaii), with a well-honed eye for sophisticated design. It’s an undertaking that started much like his others: “Sometimes when I start a project, I’ll have no idea how to go about it,” he says, “but I’ll teach myself. I identify a point that I don’t know how to get to, and then it becomes about figuring out how to get there — and what happens after that.”
As always, he’s got his mind on what’s next. “I think designing a whole library would be interesting,” he says. “A library has everything: a learning aspect, an environmental aspect, a graphic aspect. That sort of 360-degree project appeals to me. I’m drawn to exhibit design for the same reason: It combines a lot of skills that I’m interested in that are normally split up among lots of different people.” No matter where his work takes him, St. John’s trademark virtue — the one that’s driven his creativity since childhood — is sure to remain constant. “I’m curious,” he says. “I like trying to figure out how to do things myself. There’s an excitement to that that never goes away. That’s just who I am.”
Miscellaneous scraps lay piled in a shelf in St. John’s wood shop. “I try to reuse them when I can, even using unusual shapes for quick collages sometimes,” he says.
Slabs, planks, and dowels line the wood shop wall. “A lot of the work I do — including illustration and animation — is built to begin with. I build it, construct it, and photograph it, so for the past ten years, I’ve always had some sort of shop attached to my studio. I’ve also always built just for fun, for myself. My furniture line was a matter of just deciding to go public with that, essentially.”
A workbench dedicated to smaller tasks like wire work sits a few feet from St. John’s desk.
“My shop is tiny, but it’s efficient. Everything is set up to move the way I need it to,” the designer says. The shop is also a space he shares with his three children — or, at least, tries to. “I try to get the kids to come down with me on the weekends, but half the time they’re playing video games on the computer. They’ll come into the shop, make a quarter of something, and then I end up making the rest.”
Tiny treasures among the tools: a miniature chair, bits of colored wood, and (unpictured) a jar labeled “Walnut Dust,” a substance that sounds straight out of a fairytale.
One of St. John’s many faces. “I have little guys everywhere,” he says.
The latest addition to St. John’s repertoire is a line of furniture, which made its debut this spring at ICFF. “We really set aside a good amount of time for this,” the designer says. “We worked with a lot of ideas that had lived in sketch form for a long time, and making those a reality felt substantial. To see the line come to fruition in a way that I was a happy with was gratifying. Of course, as soon as it was finished, I was already thinking about what I could do next.”
“I’ve always liked the idea of collapsible furniture,” says St. John of his Folding Lounge Chair, constructed of walnut, nylon, and brass. “And I love the built-in constraints of creating a piece of furniture that folds. Everything has to be in the right place. These chairs were inspired by those 1960s lawn chairs everyone’s familiar with – I thought, how could we remake those in a really nice way?”
Within reach on St. John’s desk: coffee, headphones, and his own wooden Wave Tape Dispenser, first made for a craft sale at California’s Mollusk Surf Shop.
The Relief Credenza is made of hand-cut walnut pieced together to form an intricate wooden patchwork. “It’s a mosaic technique,” St. John says. “It feels like it has an underlying grid to it, which I like. It has little pulls hidden inside — you have to learn where they are to open it.”
The studio is filled with relics from past jobs, including a set of colorful woodblock animals once used as props in an animation called Circle Squared. “We made these a while back as part of part of a project about the food chain,” says St. John. “They function a little like Russian dolls.”
Maquettes find a home on studio shelves. “These pieces have to do with supporting panels within a thin armature. Some are related to larger items I’ve designed, like the Room Divider.”
“I’m always just pushing, pushing, pushing, and expanding out in terms of mediums. My hope as I move forward is that while the mediums may get broader, the focus of the messages – and the forms used – get a little narrower. I’m interested in a lot of things, but I don’t want to be completely scattered.”
HunterGatherer has operated out of its Gowanus studio space for six years (St. John’s home, conveniently, is within walking distance). “This is where 80-90% of our work takes place,” he says, “but we have a shared workshop in Red Hook for larger projects. The number of people we have working here expands based on whatever it is we’re working on, but there’s generally three or four people here all the time, including myself.”
“This is a piece from 2005, when I was doing a lot of experimenting with intersecting drawing.”
St. John’s projects often begin with a simple sketch. “There’s lots of drawing,” he says. “And lots of editing after that. I’m not someone who always comes to things easily. I tend to produce a lot, and then edit.”
More pieces from the food chain animation project. “When I think of creative heroes, Jim Henson is the first person I think of,” St. John says. “He really affected the way people my age view the world — even our senses of humor, too. Given that I’m an animator myself now, he’s someone who’s constantly coming to mind, however many years on.”
Room Divider 01, a stand-out of St. John’s furniture line, is a graceful, solid brass wonder. “It’s not meant to function as a privacy thing,” he explains. “It’s more about spacial separation, a way to demarcate areas within a room. This is obviously a stand alone piece, but something I’ve always envisioned is doing customized versions with similar forms – maybe a floor-to-ceiling option. Someone spoke to us recently about putting plants below it so they’d lace in as they grew. I thought that was interesting.”
A duo of Folding Lounge Chairs rest beside a sprawling bookshelf.
“The furniture line has already generated a few projects and commissions since it launched,” says St. John. “As a designer, being engaged with clients is really fun. Seeing that your work has given other people ideas is exciting. It’s interesting to see what comes of a project.”
“I’m always experimenting, but for the most part, I try to keep everything fairly simple and reductive. If something’s truly a good idea, you can usually execute it fairly simply. I think that’s something that connects all of my work: a certain sparseness. There’s not much to it – when you really get it right, it just physiologically feels right.”
It goes without saying that not every artist who grows up in Toledo, Ohio, famed birthplace of the American studio glass movement, ends up dedicating their life's work to that medium. But for John Hogan, that's exactly what happened — he started experimenting with glass at a young age and, even after relocating to Seattle a few years back, hasn't stopped since.
On a shelf in the home office designer Kiel Mead shares with his girlfriend, the performance artist Sarah Boatright, sits a set of drawers stuffed with backstock of his Forget Me Not rings, little string bows cast in precious metals. Mead’s breakout design when he was still studying furniture at Pratt, the rings were the genesis of the 27-year-old’s fascination with casting objects into wearable reminders — of childhood, of holidays, of lost loves, of an old car he once drove. Boatright, 23, also deals with the preservation of memories in her work, dressing up in goofy wigs to make reenactment videos of family Thanksgivings or furtively recorded interactions between strangers, which go on to enjoy eternal life on YouTube. So if you’d expect the couple’s Brooklyn apartment to be decked out with the kind of overstyled chicness typical of two young creatives, one of whom practically runs the Williamsburg branch of The Future Perfect, you’d be mistaken: Like their creations, the possessions they keep on display are more about storytelling than status.
Like a lot of American designers fresh out of school, Todd Bracher found himself, in the late ’90s, a newly minted graduate of the industrial design program at Pratt designing things like barbecue tools, remote-control caddies, and spice racks. “I remember scratching my head, thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is what design is?’” he recalls one morning from his studio in Brooklyn. Convinced there was something he was missing, Bracher applied for a Fulbright and ended up at age 24 heading to Copenhagen to pursue a master’s in interior and furniture design. What followed was a nine-year boot camp in the rigors of designing for the European market, studded with turns in Milan at Zanotta (where he was the legendary Italian company’s youngest ever designer), London at Tom Dixon (who poached Bracher to help build his London office) and Paris, where he taught part-time and eventually opened up a studio. But personal reasons brought him back to the States in 2007, and the director at Pratt — one of the only people Bracher knew at that point on this side of the ocean — hooked him up with the space he currently occupies in the no man’s land that is the Brooklyn Navy Yard. “My fear, in some ways, is having a place that doesn’t feel like me — which is hard because I don’t necessarily feel like myself in America,” says Bracher.
