By Jennifeer Hicks
Stephen Robin Woodworking in Woodstock, N.Y. is a co-op style custom woodworking shop run by its founder, Stephen Robin. Robin, who’s 85, has spent most of his professional life building custom furniture while growing his business and reputation. As he eases into retirement, Robin remains focused on ensuring his talented team of subcontractors will have their own businesses to fall back on.
“It’s the idea of setting up in a way where people can work together, as opposed to being an employer/employee type situation, where they can build their own businesses and own clientele,” says Robin, who’s been in business continuously since 1967.
“And that’s what makes it reasonable for people half my age to want to be with me. I’m looking out for them and they’re looking out for me. So that concept is interesting, and you have to be truly independent. You have to be in control of your time and whatever else you do, and you have to be cooperative because all parties agree it’s the best thing to do.”
Stephen Robin's Woodworking ShopJimi Billingsley
Even with a solid succession plan in place, Robin isn’t slowing down. He is busy developing a new public art gallery, the Robin Elliot Gallery, with his longtime partner Joany Elliott.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Robin has always had a passion for building things. He had an A.C. Gilbert erector set as a child and made his first workbench at age 12. He attended a local community college where he received a degree in Mechanical Technology then went to work as a metal fabricator, producing baseboard heaters in Queens for several years.
After a few other jobs, including teaching shop, Robin settled in Woodstock in 1965. Aspiring to sell some of his own furniture, he put a sign out in his yard and started developing a clientele. He hired several employees to handle other projects so the business could sustain numerous custom woodworking requests while he strived to be at the top of his game as a master craftsman. Three years later he was in full force.
“I visited (furniture maker) Wendell Castle, bought a bunch of tools like the ones he used, and started building furniture,” says Robin. “I was able to have showings at museums and taught at a couple community colleges. For 10 years, I did straight commission art furniture and for galleries. I did well in terms of establishing a reputation.”
CNC router from C.R. OnsrudJennifer Hicks
His also became a representative for the American Craft Council for New York, which introduced him to the likes of George Nakashima and Sam Maloof.
“For a 28-year-old guy that was in the business two years, I would say I did well. It was good.”
In 1983, Robin and Joany bought four acres about a mile from downtown Woodstock, known for hosting a historic musical festival in 1969. They designed and built their dream home, which is full of his furniture and Elliott’s artwork, and an adjacent shop.
The shop is approximately 3,800 sq. ft. and features two floors for woodworking and a third-floor office. It contains a huge collection of hand tools and a massive CNC router from C.R. Onsrud, purchased in 2007 with a matching grant from the U.S. Forest Service and the Watershed Agricultural Council’s Forestry Program in New York.
“I first saw a CNC machine at IWF in 1985 and thought it was really cool, but never thought that I would buy one. I bought the Onsrud because it has the capability to work sideways for making pockets and all with the right tooling,” says Robin.
“If you know what you’re doing as programmer, it makes your machine closer to a 5-axis machine. Ninety percent of people buy XYZ (3-axis) machines and cut plywood, but we carve things. We do really complex work.”
The CNC is also a good resource for other shops.
The team includes (from left) Steven Liebowitz, Ande Chase, Gary Rawlins, owner Stephen Robin, James Mayer, and Matthew Medenbach (not pictured).Jennifer Hicks
“We work now for seven or eight shops in the area that come to us for CNC work. With CNC, it’s really the skill of the draftsman and the programmer, and the ability to draw, and these are the things we excel at.”
Robing says the majority of work the shop produces is fully custom, but they do outsource drawers and other components as needed from major suppliers.
The co-op currently consists of Steven Liebowitz of NY Fab Shop, Matthew Medenbach of Woodstock CNC Woodworking, James Mayer of Mayer Construction, craftsman Gary Rawlins, and Ande Chase of Veillette Guitars.
Everyone has their own arrangement with pay and hours based on their personal qualifications and situations.
“We want people that are successful,” says Robin. “They’re essentially building their own business. So, they have their own clientele and do their own marketing. Sometimes I build it; sometimes they build it. But basically, we just have an arrangement that allows everybody to make their money before I make my money. I take all of the up and down risk.
“In order to be a true subcontractor, you have to be working your business. You can’t just work here and not be in your own show. Gary, for example, just brought in a job from a friend in Connecticut and ran it through the business, but he prospered because he brought it in.”
Robin makes it clear that the team is exactly that and assures the system is nothing like a car dealership with salespeople competing for commissions.
“With a co-op, there’s no formula. There’s no advantage to one guy over another selling a job.”
The new gallery, scheduled to open next spring.Jennifer Hicks
Robin and Elliott plan to open the new gallery on their property by next spring. It will feature their and others’ work.
“The next step is to draw people from downtown to come see the art and purchase it,” says Robin, who never seems to have enough on his plate.
Robin has another house on Cape Cod (Mass.) next to his daughter, Sarah, that he’s renovating. He’s also an avid biker, motorcyclist, swimmer, skier and kayaker, and dabbles in photography.
By Brian Holander
Take a tour of Stephen Robin’s house and woodworking shop, and your eyes will pop out at almost every twist and turn. You’ll find stunningly artistic and strikingly functional wood creations — beds, cabinets, desks, tables — greeting you at almost every corner, much of it built by the hands of this master craftsman. Throughout his long career, some of it fashioned on a giant CNC (computer numerical control) machine purchased partially with forestry grant money.
“I’ve been in business since 1967 continuously. I think you’ll find that I’m the oldest woodworker in Ulster County that’s been continuous,” said Robin. “There’s been a lot of people that came and went, like Harry Sanger before me. Don’t forget, I’m 85, and I believe I’m on top of my game. I believe that, and I believe that what I do in the next couple of years will be really cool. At least I’m looking forward to it.”
Robin hopes to open a gallery on his property with an entrance on Route 212 near Easton Lane in the next few months.
His guidance of the tour evokes a characteristic fount of enthusiasm. “The sign you see is a temporary one .… You walk up the path there .… We’re working on the property until it’s pristine ….
“We’ll have Ed Martin sculptures outside. I want to show his stuff, so his family can get the money,” he says, and then goes on. “This is from the old days. That’s going to be our sculpture courtyard over there. This stuff [pointing to sleek pieces stashed in odd corners of the house] is just overflow because there’s no room to put it in the shop.”
And he points to more. “This is stuff we made a long time ago, and will eventually sell this furniture. Here’s a little gallery entrance, it’s fairly formidable .…”
Ah, the old days. That’s where I first met Stephen, early Seventies, when I manned a booth for him at a crafts fair. The booth had a magnificent desk taking up most of its space. Of course, everyone wanted to know the price, and of course Stephen, the same enigmatic contrarian he is today, refused to put a number on it.
“C’mon, you gotta know …” they’d say, and I could only laugh and shrug.
“The trajectory of my life,” explains Robin, “in general has been, the first ten years of doing this, I was a furniture maker. Then I was a house builder, had a shop that worked for other builders and other makers, a general guy for hire. In ’86 I built my cousin Freddy a house up in Grog Kill …. Built a house in Amagansett for Stanley Diller. I ran this job.”
Working with others
The elegant quality of his work is on display in different locales you might run into.
“When you were doing the craft shows,” Robin tells me, “I was showing with the best of them, the big names of furniture. After two or three years of making stuff, I came out like gangbusters. We’re talking 1968, 1970. I basically had ten years to do essentially what I wanted.
“I had Eric Brugnoni running a frame shop which I owned, and he basically supported me for a good amount of time. I had a show at the Brooklyn Museum. Schenectady Museum. There’s something called the DeCordova Museum .…
“I was able to do whatever I wanted to do, independent of making anything anyone would buy. I was invited around and I had a promising career as an art-furniture maker but no money to support a family. So I went to work for Belmont Towbin, a financier, and I basically had an A-list clientele that had a lot of money, and I built houses and I built furniture. The last ten years we worked for this one guy, who never wants me to mention his name, we’re not particularly friendly anymore but we still work for him…
“So I’m not saying I know everything, but I know my way around plumbing, electrical, running people … these people who work with me, they all like me. I try to keep people happy.”
Robin has independent contractors working with him, all of whom run their own businesses out of their own shops. “We’re more like a co-op,” says Robin.
There’s Steven Liebowitz of NY Fab Shop, Matthew Medenbach of Woodstock CNC Woodworking; James Mayer of Mayer Construction; and craftsman Gary Rawlins.
“What I’m going to do is start building furniture that I want to build and load the gallery up and see what I can do, and let the business go on. On our website [www.stephenrobinwoodworking.com] there’s a portfolio section that shows everything, the art furniture, the art that we made for the Woodstock Jewish Congregation Temple, to everything we made for Bard College’s library [to house and display Alan Sussman’s donated rare book collection], and it shows the staircase we made last year for Family of Woodstock in Kingston.
“They had an 1850 staircase, very ornate, and it ended on the first floor, and the finance people at Family are in the basement, and Michael Berg [Family’s executive director] wanted the basement and rest of the building to be connected, so he commissioned us to build a staircase. So we built a railing and all of those twists and turns. and Jim Mayer was the lead person on staircase design for Family.”
We go into the shop
“It’s a conventional wood shop, but it’s loaded with every imaginable tool. This is my stash of Japanese stuff. Then over here …” He pulls open shallow drawers, filled with chisels.
Tools? Robin’s stream of consciousness flows as he tests a chisel. “Hundreds. In the best of all worlds, you see, it’s not always perfect … but you can see that it’s like a razor … so we try, and all of them are as good as the rest of them. But generally speaking I would say if I really counted they’re all that good … mostly, not always, but most of them are pretty good. All of what you see here are essentially conventional woodworking tools.”
We watch cutting being done by the CNC machine.
“There’s a client in Stone Ridge who makes this furniture out of plastic, and all the pieces are interlocked.”
The CNC machine consists of a table, maybe ten to twelve feet long, maybe eight feet wide with a computer-run cutting tool. “What it does is, it takes the material, whatever it is, picks it up and cuts what’s in the program. That block of wood [he points] is going to become a three-seat loveseat, curved to fit the contour of your back, and that’s all going to be from drawings.”
The $150,000 machine was purchased in 2007 utilizing a $43,000 matching grant facilitated by congressman Maurice Hinchey from the U.S. Forest Service and the Watershed Agricultural Council’s (WAC) forestry program.
“Curves are as easy to cut as straight lines. Complex 3-D structures are relatively easy to produce. Even the number of machining steps that require human action have been dramatically reduced by automation,” Robin says in an article in a WAC online posting (www.nycwatershed.org/forestry/stephen-robin/).
Robin offers CNC machining services to other shops. “In the Woodstock area, there are many guitar builders and woodworking studios like mine who will favor a local alternative,” he said in the WAC article. “Craftsmen spend thousands of dollars to ship products across the U.S. to other shops with the CNC technology. Now, they can save time and money by keeping the wood local.”
“Once upon a time to make a desktop like this required a certain amount of skill,” Robin says back in his office. “Now in probably a couple of hours you can glue it up and take it downstairs, and an hour later you have the top, including the undercuts and everything.”
Keeping life interesting
The tour continues through his living quarters, accompanied briefly by Joany Elliott.
“This is our house. It’s sort of a work in progress, mostly done …”
Stephen: “We made all this stuff…”
Joany: “He made all this stuff…”
Stephen: “Joany has tons of stuff, tchatchkes .… Occasionally some of it gets used.”
She points out a dining-room table with two leaves. Stephen says, “You look underneath, everything is wood. Everything we build looks as good underneath as it does on the bottom as it does on the top.”
He shows off some expert tile work.
“We copied this from Olana…”
Up more stairs …. Joany’s office, the computers networked…
More tile work in the bathroom. “I’m not a tile guy, I don’t do this professionally, but I can do it. When we were in Italy we copied that, I made that piece by piece.”
Beds, dressers, mirrors, nightstands…
“All this stuff is dovetailed, no nails. Just about everything I make is functionally as good as you can make it. Benches have two mortises, there’s no cheats.”
Robin likes to shoot hoops, so we hoist a couple, though it’s a little muddy outside. And like many old-time Woodstockers, he’s got a couple of Dylan stories to relate, though he doesn’t harp on them.
His daughter is 52 “in Cape Cod, she has a restaurant, a husband and a child…”
“I own a house in Cape Cod next to my daughter,” Stephen said, “I’m gradually fixing up. Little house and outbuilding … and if I have time … well, I find that I have more money than I have time. I’m not going to outlive my money.
“I swim every day for a half-hour with my cousin Freddy Hand. I like biking, motorcycle riding, kayaking. In the winter I ski …. I have a pretty full life. But in my own house I’m embarrassed I don’t have dining-room chairs, so that’s my next project.
“I have two weeks to do a project, then I’m free. I’ve decided I’m retired from anything beyond …. Well, I’m the only guy that knows how to spray-finish, so I do that. But I’m sort of trying to back away from the business …. But if people want to make money, the business has to support itself. If we hit a slow period, I’ll hire everybody to work on furniture, and we’ll spend some money and see what happens. Just, you know, trying to keep life interesting .…
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