Richard Weigand - Furniture Maker
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His studio/shop is where this Virginia furniture maker likes to spend his time working on his next projects, designing a new furniture piece in collaboration with a client or working on a reproduction of some kind.
Richard has a particular affinity for furniture crafted in the Arts & Crafts style as exemplified by the brothers Charles and Henry Greene. But Richard also works in other styles including Art Deco and Contemporary. You can see examples of Richard's work in our Custom Furniture gallery.
A recent commission won him the honor of reproducing some Greene & Greene designed furniture in a Greene & Greene designed home. The Bolton house in Pasadena, CA. Style 1900 recently featured the Bolton house in its winter 2010-2011 issue. You can see one of these furniture reproductions in this feature (a photograph of the original can be seen here). As David Mathias (author of Greene & Greene Furniture, Poems of Wood and Light) in his guest blog entry for Custom Made, said "The Holy Grail of any craftsman working in the Greene & Greene style is to get their work into one of the original houses." Richard's reproductions of this chair and other pieces in the entry hall suite are now in that entry hall in the Bolton House.
Richard says, "I’ve always admired expertise and anything really well built especially older pieces with their sense of history. Not fancy things, just good craftsmanship with lots of care put into it. I particularly like the turn of the last century when the American dream meant building things that would last. Great design, great materials and great craftsmanship.”
John Ruskin was an early inspiration for Richard. Ruskin believed that something should be what it appeared to be, not pretend to be something else. The honesty, quality and care of the Arts and Crafts movement were key ingredients that appealed to Richard.
Favorite Quotes
"It's unwise to pay too much but it's unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing you bought it to do.
The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot. It can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it's well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better!" - John Ruskin (1819-1900)
"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe." - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)