TOKUSHIMA -- Californian furniture maker Cynthia Kingsbury works in a 100-year-old timber storage building at the foot of a lushly forested mountain in Tokushima Prefecture. Dried sticks are piled like kindling beneath her worktable. Her dog Tingi, a black Labrador-Doberman mix, is sprawled across a carpet of woodchips and shavings, chewing on a twig. A branch with a knob evocative of a deer's head leans against one mud and straw wall. ("You see a deer?" Kingsbury asks. "I see a giraffe.")
While other furniture makers design their work on paper and then choose materials, Kingsbury is inspired by the material itself. As the name of her company, Found Wood, suggests, she works almost exclusively with wood she finds in her surroundings, such as driftwood collected at the estuary of the Yoshino River.
When she first began making furniture five years ago in California, she used cuttings from the bush maples on her property. She soon began scavenging wood from trimmings along the sidewalks of San Francisco and in Golden Gate Park. "I like working with wood," she says, "but I don't like cutting down trees."