They say you should never meet your heroes, but Isaac Chatterton would disagree. For the Brisbane-based furniture maker, meeting design icon Joshua Vogel sparked a passion for handmade chairs that shows no sign of dimming.
“After doing a bit of carpentry with my dad, I landed an internship with a sculptor in New York in 2018 from sending a bunch of emails out to people in the industry I admired,” Chatterton tells Broadsheet. “I sold everything I owned, moved to New York, and went broke pretty quickly.”
Using his internship connections, Chatterton wound up living in a converted barn in upstate New York and apprenticing under Vogel, a “living legend” and co-founder of the iconic American-made furniture label BDDW. After two years getting paid to learn the art of furniture-making (and partying with friends in Brooklyn), he brought his learnings back to Brisbane and started his eponymous label.
“It feels like a superpower being able to bring something into the world that’s just from my head,” he says. “I love beauty, and I think when you’re a kid you see beauty everywhere that you might not see as an adult. With my pieces, I just want us all to be kids again and be playful and look at beautiful stuff.”
Chatterton’s specialty lies in crafting delightfully chunky chairs handmade from solid American oak. Influenced by Vogel, his creations are less traditional furniture range and more pieces of art that see him experimenting with different forms and materials, from bouclé upholstery to woven seating. “This is more of an art practice to me, rather than a business,” he says. “I don’t do commissions or collections. I just create one off-pieces and hope that people like them enough to buy them.”
Furniture-making is a side gig for Chatterton, who supports his craft working as a build technician at the Museum of Brisbane. Most of his full-time job is spent in a workshop building things for art to go on and in – like tables, plinths, picture frames and walls.
The process for designing and making his own wares is one Chatterton describes as “not entirely cost-effective or time-efficient, but plenty of fun”. He’ll have an idea in his head and sketch it out on paper, then create a mini prototype out of medium-density fibreboard. Once he’s landed on a rough design he’ll purchase the wood he needs, imported straight from American lumber mills. After cutting and shaping, he fits the wood together “like pieces of Lego”, coming up with new design quirks as he goes. The last step is finishing with a natural hard wax oil imported from Belgium.
“All of the furniture I design is also made by me, completely by hand,” he says. “Putting all those finishing touches on the pieces takes the longest time. You hit a wall because you’re expending all this mental and emotional energy. It feels unproductive, but you need those moments of doing nothing to help the creative process.”
