Lifestyle
After an L.A. windstorm, he used fallen trees to make furniture with a story behind it
After a devastating windstorm destroyed more than 1,200 Pasadena trees in 2011, architect Chris Peck spent the next six years gathering fallen trees, milling the trunks into slabs, and storing and drying them in his garage and his friends’ garages while he figured out how to use the wood.
At first, he was happy to keep the fallen trees from being cut into stumps, turned into mulch or sent to landfills, even if that meant just selling the wood as lumber.
In this series, we highlight independent makers and artists, from glassblowers to fiber artists, who are creating original products in and around Los Angeles.
At the time, Peck was serving on Pasadena’s urban forestry commission, and, as he puts it, there were “trees everywhere,” including a 30-inch oak on San Rafael Avenue that he would later turn into his family’s dining room table.
“Working as an architect and engineer in Los Angeles, I’ve often seen trees taken down and wondered why that wood was not utilized as lumber,” Peck says. “The idea of utilizing the urban forest for lumber started as a business idea in relation to the Urban Ecology Project, a business dedicated to utilizing urban resources.”
When he collaborated with woodworker Ladislav Czernek to design a dining table from the 100-year-old white oak on San Rafael, the project inspired Peck to do more than just sell lumber. Peck decided to focus on designing and making handcrafted furniture that could last another hundred years.
Architect Chris Peck stands among the wooden slabs that will soon become furniture he describes as “a mix of early American rustic and Midcentury Modern” at Keita Design studio in Lincoln Heights.
After letting the lumber dry for several years, Peck started Keita Design in 2017, a sustainable furniture company that uses hardwoods from Pasadena, South Pasadena and Altadena, along with Aleppo pines from Bel-Air and Sherman Oaks, to create unique pieces inspired by the wood.
What began as a business idea after the windstorm became something more personal for Peck: creating art and giving new life to fallen trees.
“The beauty and uniqueness of that first dining table really confirmed this new direction for us,” he says. “Working with raw wood inspired us to try designs that are different and that respond to the material itself.”
In the beginning, Peck says it was easy to find trees and hire a mobile sawmill to cut them into planks. “We were full of energy,” he says. “We drove around, hired millers, rented trucks and moved lumber to different storage spots until we ran out of space. My wife put up with wood in the garage, driveway, backyard and even the living room, with only a meltdown or two.”
In 2023, after designing an Aleppo pine conference table for Wesleyan University’s engineering department, a coastal live oak dining table for his neighbor and a 13-foot oak table shaped like Michigan for a client, Peck brought together a small team of young woodworkers. The group includes his niece, artist Hannah Peck, 27; woodworker and designer Jessie Blackman, 27; Ethan Casselbery, 28, who has experience in sculpture fabrication and metalwork joinery; and Jordan Kennedy, 36.
Hannah Peck, left, Chris Peck, Ethan Casselbery and Jessie Blackman of Keita Design.
The Hercules bench set, composed of five seats made from the same slab of eucalyptus, $12,000.
Their first project together was a series of nesting tables made from a coast live oak that had fallen on Grand Avenue in South Pasadena. “We chose two pieces of wood, and it turned out they almost nested,” Blackman says. “Hannah was the mastermind who figured out four nesting possibilities.”
“We used tracing paper and pieced it together,” Hannah says.
Their pieces stand out for their simplicity, such as a pair of nesting coffee tables made from a single oak branch. “They were sisters,” Hannah says about the twin tables. “They were next to each other in the tree, so we decided to flip one over to mirror the other.” (Prices for Keita pieces start around $5,000 and can go up to $33,000 for a custom dining room table.)
A nesting coffee table, which was made from a coast live oak that fell on Grand Avenue in South Pasadena, is $4,845.
Keita Design started with a mindset similar to Angel City Lumber, which sells processed wood from local trees and recently started a nonprofit that recovers fire-damaged trees from Altadena and returns them to the community as usable lumber.
“We want to save trees that have to come down, especially after natural disasters,” Hannah says. “But we also care about the design and working with those trees, even using pieces that are warped instead of throwing them away.”
Their pieces include an undulating bench set made from a eucalyptus tree that fell near Johnson Lake in Pasadena, the Luna dining table made from re-sawn oak slabs for a butterfly effect and a five-legged coffee table crafted from the branch of a rescued fallen oak in South Pasadena. You can see these pieces at My Zero Waste Store in Pasadena.
Hannah Peck, left, Jessie Blackman, Ethan Casselbery and Chris Peck work on their latest project: a patchwork table made from leftover wood from previous furniture projects.
All of these pieces have dramatic warps, waves, marbling and imperfections that make them unique and add to their beauty and history. Some of the coastal live oak slabs even have bugholes and signs of powderpost beetles. “That’s part of the reason why we use epoxy,” Chris says.
Adds Jordan, “One of my first tasks here was going through and filling all the bug holes.”
Because some of the slabs are so wavy, Blackman had to get creative when shaping the wood. “I had to put the table upside down and use a chisel and grinder to remove as much material as I could. It took us three tries to get the table right.” She also uses a floating router jib for most of their joinery since the machine can’t rest on the wood’s uneven surface.
A console crafted from a curved slab of fallen eucalyptus showcases its natural checks, knots and eye-catching wood grain.
When they designed a table using a plank with a natural gap, they left the gap in the center, which helped them get the right width and refine its shape. Their tables evolve, Blackman says, as they “consider the profile and the joinery so we can highlight the wood grain and keep live-edge features. We let the wood guide us.”
“I think of their furniture as useful art,” client Diane Rhodes Bergman said in an email about her dining room table, which was made from a large live oak that fell in Pasadena during the 2011 windstorm. “It’s functional, practical, durable, but the beauty of the wood and design is what makes you pause and appreciate it. The tree was hundreds of years old — what did it witness? What did it survive? Who rested in its shade? The design captures the majesty and beauty of its origin. Their furniture goes beyond beautiful and unique; it is designed with a deep respect of the wood and the tree from which it came.”
The Rhombus nesting tables, made from a fallen oak, $4,845.
They often keep the underside of each slab as it is instead of flattening the bottoms.
“A lot of the furniture we make looks alive,” says Jordan. “We keep the bottoms of the tables true to what the tree looked like before.”
“We spend so much time and thought on the legs and the finishing, and no one ever sees them,” Hannah says.
“Our tables are perfect for children and dogs, or anyone else crawling around on the floor,” Blackman says, laughing.
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2
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1. Hannah Peck works on a large slab set up on a planer/jointer. 2. Architect Chris Peck draws plans for a door. 3. Jessie Blackman works on a log on a planer/jointer.
During a recent visit, their Lincoln Heights studio at Big Art Labs was filled with towering slabs of pine, oak and eucalyptus, including the last three tons of wood they picked up from a Sun Valley concrete and rebar company.
Gathered around a large work table, the group talked about their latest project: using offcuts and scrap material from larger tables to make a set of patchwork design tables.
“Chris is the most eco-conscious person I’ve ever met,” Blackman says. “He’ll see offcuts in bins and ask, ‘Why is this in the trash? This is going in a table.’ We have a lot of hardwood scraps from our larger tables, and we’re going to use all these cool little pieces.”
Although the young crew at Keita didn’t have much experience in fine furniture-making when they started the shop, Hannah says the Big Art Labs community where they work has supported them throughout their journey.
Chris Peck inspects a slab of wood at Keita Design in Lincoln Heights.
“There was definitely a learning curve,” says Hannah, who works full-time in the shop with Blackman. “But the Big Art community is full of makers and woodworkers, and everyone was kind and helpful when we were starting out. Jon Meador taught us some rules of thumb for grain movement, and another shopmate has a CNC [Computer Numerical Control] machine that’s been helpful to us. Now, we’re more experienced, more organized and have more people in the shop.”
These days, the group is making furniture for a show at electric vehicle brand Rivian’s space in Venice on April 19 and at Gallery 945 in Chinatown from May 1 to 31. They’re also working on a new line of pine tables with metal bases, which they hope will help them increase production since these are less time-consuming to make.
As they use up the rest of their hardwoods, they plan to keep working with fallen trees, whether through Angel City Lumber or other sources.
Although Blackman says that balancing “labor and sustainable values” can be challenging, they are committed to preserving the life of L.A.’s magnificent urban tree canopy.
“It would be much easier and faster to make a solid wood table, but we really care about the trees,” Blackman says. “We want to use every piece. We don’t want anything to go in the trash. And in the end, we end up with this gorgeous stuff.”
Unpacking my third suitcase in our new West Hollywood home, a sharp pain shot through my chest. I felt dizzy and short of breath before sprawling out on our mattress, which was still covered in plastic.
“What’s wrong?” David asked.
An hour later, on a gurney in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai, I waited to be admitted overnight. What a great start to our new life — back in L.A. after seven years in New York City — David sleeping alone at our apartment while I was to keep close to the paddles and operating room in case what had just happened was a heart attack.
I was 33, practicing yoga and exercising almost daily. A few months earlier, my New York doctor noticed I had high blood pressure, and I was feeling terrible, so something clearly was going on. Was an artery blocked? Nope, the tests revealed; physically, I was fine. What had happened was a panic attack.
“Your health will be better in L.A.,” David had promised before returning to L.A.
Now I took no pleasure in his being wrong.
After growing up in Temple City (hardly L.A.), I went on a high school trip to the Big Apple and knew it was where I needed to be.
Exactly five years later, the time to escape California arrived after a miserable breakup from a three-year relationship with a guy that I hid entirely from my family. I was desperate and depressed, down 15 pounds from not eating much, my diet consisting largely of cigarettes and red wine. At the Archstone, my Studio City apartment, I did ecstasy alone on a Wednesday. One has to take a good look at himself when he’s in his bedroom, by himself, rolling, and so I decided it was time to start over in New York.
On the other side of the country, I thought it was normal to hook up with a new guy every third night. Which I suppose, for a gay man who’d spent the first 27 years of his life denying his sexuality to a family he feared wouldn’t understand, it was. My self-esteem was in the gutter, though you wouldn’t have known it from the outside.
After a three-digit number of hookups on Grindr, I met David, a guy who lived on the same Manhattan corner as I did. We did what people do on Grindr and hooked up a couple of times.
But one morning, we bumped into each other on 9th Avenue. I left our short chat feeling uplifted by how smiley and polite he was in daylight and while we were sober. That night, we went on our first date, and the rest is history. But I hid what I assumed wouldn’t be well-received.
“Let’s move back to L.A.,” he said after four years of life together in New York.
“I’m really not ready,” I said. I loved living in New York and never, ever expected to leave. He understood, but he wanted to return to “the coast.” I knew that in a healthy relationship, it couldn’t be just what I wanted. So eventually, we packed up and moved to an apartment on North Flores Street in West Hollywood.
And now, I was in the hospital.
After having to cancel the welcome home party our L.A. friends had planned for us, and being released from Cedars, my life fell apart. But being the one who kept everything together, I kept it together better than most would, at least in the presence of others.
I’m fine, I told myself, but I worried my heart was broken, and there was something medically wrong with it. To heal it, I’d need to accept truths that I didn’t want to.
Growing up was devastatingly hard for me. Being gay and misunderstood, with the unacknowledged pain of it kept inside, was quite literally eating me alive. Being back in L.A. meant being near my past. I told my mom I was gay before leaving for New York. She said she still loved and accepted me, but to this day, the struggle has never been discussed or acknowledged. I knew I was a disappointment to my family.
I went to Westwood what felt like 70 times, and after visiting a bunch of UCLA’s specialists, I found myself in the office of a neurosurgeon who took one look at me and said, “You don’t belong here. What you’re suffering from is plain old anxiety, and you’re going to have to work with your therapist on this.”
“I have been,” I said, “and it’s not helping.” But before I finished, he had walked out the door.
Before long, the panic attacks got so bad, I could hardly drive. David chauffeured me, under the palm trees and bright sun, around as much as his schedule allowed, and when he couldn’t, I made the best of it, lugging my laptop with me for the hour-long trek to yoga-teacher training at Equinox in the South Bay, using that extra time in the back of an Uber to write.
For almost my entire adult life, I’d been in therapy, but it was couples therapy with David where I felt supported enough to admit, first to myself, that I’d been terrified of being fully myself. I was afraid he’d leave me if he saw the real me. Secretly I had been keeping a lifetime of pain bottled up inside because of fear — I didn’t want to risk losing him by being too emotional or having too many feelings.
Three months after that therapy session, the pandemic arrived, and being together 100% of the time for the next year, I let him in fully. He didn’t run — instead, he proposed.
It’s been eight years since that neurologist, and six since I’ve been able to fully drive again. And here in L.A., in a city characterized by its distance, I have, with David, built a close chosen family that supports and fully understands me.
Now, I feel “at home” at our Spanish-style Hancock Park house, the one we bought because we wanted to start a family of our own, only after L.A. allowed me to heal and live peacefully, and now, anxiety free.
Had David not dragged me back, I wouldn’t have learned what I did about myself, my story of origin and living a life that’s so beautiful and that’s so true to me.
And certainly, we wouldn’t be bringing our baby daughter, Lucy, named after Lucille Ball (who’s more Hollywood?), home in mid-July by way of surrogacy.
The author is a writer and coach who helps established business owners build lives that feel as good as they look. He lives in Hancock Park. He’s on Instagram: @iammattgerlach.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
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“E Pluribus Unum,” or “Out of many, one.”
That phrase, engraved on some quarters photographer Blaise Hayward was counting in his New York City kitchen in July 2023, intrigued him. They were marks of the 50 State Quarters, a series of coins issued by the U.S. Mint from 1999 to 2008 for which each coin featured a symbol representing one of the 50 states.
With Hayward’s growing concern about the vitriolic condition of American politics, the phrase felt resonant.
Blaise Hayward looks over printed works of his “Quarters of Confederation” series, highlighting Canadian coins.
(Blake Ogden)
That moment sparked his photo series, “America ~ The Statehood Quarters,” and sent him on a quest to the bank to find every coin. Now a collection of 50 images, one for each state’s quarter, the series explores American unity, shared history and constant exchange.
“My goal was to gather these coins and present them in a cohesive, inclusive manner. Every state is represented,” Hayward said. “Everybody’s equal. It’s about equality, representation.”
Those interested can find his photos on his website, where he sells editioned images of the coins, ranging from $1,200 to $5,000.
Ahead of the United States’ 250th anniversary on Saturday, Hayward reflects on the series and its relevance today.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Your photographs remind me of portraits. As large close-ups, each quarter has a unique character. Tell me about your approach to capturing them.
I started my career in the 1980s, and I was an analog photographer. I was late to digital. These are all captured digitally, as is most of my work now, but the most important aspect to my work is that it has an analog feel to it.
My goal was to present it as realistically and honestly as possible. I photographed them as they are, and I also do that with my portraiture. I’m a portrait photographer at heart, and portraiture is my first love. But I’ve found with my fine art career that unless they’re famous people, people aren’t drawn to buying portraits and hanging them in their house. But they are drawn to still life, so a lot of my artwork now is centered on still life. My portrait background probably played a subconscious role in how I presented the quarters.
The California state quarter.
(Blaise Hayward)
In your photographs, the quarters are old and tarnished, not shiny and new. Why?
That was important to me. If you go onto Wikipedia and type in “Statehood Quarters,” they photographed all 50 of them. They’re bright, shiny, right out of the Mint. I made a conscious decision to photograph them in circulation. I wanted them to emulate the hands they’ve passed through and illustrate the history of the country and the state.
How do you think about the people who held these quarters in relation to the project as a whole?
I think it tells the story of commerce and the story of exchange. I imagine there are a couple in there where people saved up some quarters and bought something personal. Some of these quarters could’ve been collected by children, and then they could’ve gone out and bought their first candy bar. Or they could’ve put the quarters in the soda fountain machine and got a Coca-Cola and been so excited.
I’m very attached to coins and bills. I see the artistry in it. It’s unfortunate that we’re going toward a society where we won’t have that tactile feeling anymore. There’s a difference between holding a handful of money and paying for a good than pulling your phone out and tapping.
The Delaware state quarter.
(Blaise Hayward)
You’re originally from Toronto, and have lived in New York for the last 30 years. How has living in the U.S. as an immigrant shaped the way you perceive America and represent it in this series?
It allows me to be an outsider looking in. I love the fact that I’m Canadian. It’s a badge of honor for me. It allows me to have a more sympathetic, wider and different understanding of what it’s like to live in the States.
With the “Statehood Quarters,” I don’t know if it influenced me when I photographed the project. I was just in awe of the history. If you start reading about the States and how the whole country came together, all of the people that made that journey were immigrants. Unless you’re Native American, we’re all immigrants here. I thought about that a couple of times because I was reading about the people that started it all.
Your series centers unity in a time of extreme divisiveness in American politics, whether it’s surrounding the federal crackdown on immigration or LGBTQ+ rights, among other issues. What does “unity” look like to you in this context? What do you feel Americans should be united on?
Americans could stand to be united on what a great country this is, even though at this present moment it’s not feeling like that for everybody. America is a great country. It’s been a beacon of democracy since its founding, and countries all over the world have held it in such high esteem.
Without giving away my political leanings — I don’t even mean to go there — sadly, in this present moment, I don’t think the country is showing its best self. We could stand to take a step back and reflect on the history and unity of the country. We could stand some compassion. We could stand some understanding. We could stand to be better listeners.
We don’t always have to agree. It’s just vitriol out there. It’s tearing the country apart. I think it will be a collective effort on both sides of the aisle for us to come together and dial the heat down.
I’m hoping that on this 250th anniversary, people put their political leanings aside and celebrate America. It’s got so much potential to be that beacon again, that leader in the world. At the end of the day, why can’t we just embrace “E Pluribus Unum”? Out of many, we are one. We are one nation.
For many people, America’s 250th anniversary will be a time of celebration and patriotism. For many others, it will be a time of criticism and protest. How do you feel your series engages each of these attitudes?
I hope that people look at the series and look at the country in a broader stroke, and say, “Wow. What an amazing collection. This ‘Statehood Quarters’ collection is so inclusive and symbolic of this great nation. Look at all these beautiful coins from these beautiful states.”
Kansas is one of my favorite coins. I’ve never been to Kansas, but the coin in the collection made me appreciate the state. It has gotten me thinking I’d like to visit every state and meet the people and have a meal and see what they’re like and see the landscape. I hope this collection inspires people to celebrate the country as a whole rather than looking at it state to state.
The Kansas Statehood Quarter.
(Blaise Hayward)
What does it mean to “celebrate the country”?
I’m an outdoor person and a nature person. For me, it means celebrating the land, and with that, celebrating the people in that land.
I was listening to somebody on the radio who was here for the World Cup. They were from Morocco, and they said every person they’ve met in New York has been so nice.
It’s time for this country to start being nicer to each other. I hope this project helps people be a little bit more kind to each other, a little bit more tolerant, a little bit more understanding, a little bit more loving and a little bit more hospitable.
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