Sam Maloof; pioneered wooden furniture trend

Mr. Maloof died Thursday at his home in Rancho Cucamonga, his longtime business manager Roz Bock confirmed.

No further details were given.

Mr. Maloof, whose career began six decades ago as the American modernism movement was becoming popular, put usefulness before artistry and turned down multimillion-dollar offers to mass produce his designs. He worked out of his home workshop, shaping hardwood, one part at a time, into rocking chairs, cradles, and hutches that were shorn of unnecessary adornments.

His hi-fi cabinets, cork-top coffee tables, and other modern pieces were praised by magazine editors and interior designers. His walnut chairs and bar stools were installed in several of the so-called Case Study Houses - the modernist, experimental homes in the Los Angeles area built between 1945 and 1966 by Richard Neutra, Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, and other progressive architects.

"He was trying to make other people appreciate what it was like to live with a handcrafted object in which there was a kind of union between maker, object and owner," said Jeremy Adamson, who wrote "The Furniture of Sam Maloof," published in 2001 to coincide with a retrospective exhibition of Mr. Maloof's work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

President Jimmy Carter, a woodwork hobbyist and friend who visited Mr. Maloof's home, signed a photograph "to my woodworking hero."

Carter and subsequent presidents used Mr. Maloof's signature rocking chairs in the White House. Elongated rockers on the chairs look sculptural, but they were made to keep the chairs from tipping over.

Mr. Maloof was the first craftsman to receive the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant, in 1985. The self-taught designer would select a piece of wood - walnut was his favorite because of its texture and durability - and cut out parts freehand on a band saw.

Instead of following plans, he matched an image in his head. He would then refine the shape with hand tools to make the finished piece of furniture comfortable, functional, and beautiful. He considered the appearance of every angle of the piece, even chair backs and cabinet interiors, as well as grain pattern.

Using innovative joinery, his pieces were assembled without nails or metal hardware. Even hinges and underbracings were wood.

Mr. Maloof's modern furniture fit handsomely in the post-and-beam dwellings blanketing new suburbs after World War II. In the postwar housing boom, the wood, leather, cork, and other natural materials he used softened the hard edges of emerging minimalist architecture.

He didn't believe in keeping trade secrets and was eager to share knowledge earned through trial and error to save "a struggling craftsman" hours of frustration. He turned his 1983 autobiography, "Sam Maloof: Woodworker," into a how-to book with more than 300 photographs. It was followed by a popular instructional video.

When admirers made pilgrimages to Mr. Maloof's workshop, he would interrupt progress on orders that were backlogged for years and take them on a tour of his 6-acre property. Inside two large buildings, he stored a half-million board feet of rare lumber and timber from trees hundreds of years old, including Macassar ebony and Brazilian rosewood.

There are two houses on the property. One he shared until his death with his second wife, Beverly Wingate Maloof, whom he married in 2001, three years after Freda Maloof died. Beverly Maloof hosted fund-raisers and art receptions on the property and improved the gardens.

The other home, in which he lived with Freda and their two children from 1953 until her death, is "a living monument to the creative impulse," wrote Adamson.

Working on Saturdays for four decades, Maloof transformed a "dingbat" bungalow in a lemon grove into a timbered 22-room house with a hand-carved spiral staircase, door latches shaped like miniature golf clubs, and a treehouse loft.

The home, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is open to the public, attracts 3,000 visitors a year.

Mr. Maloof's business, which he started in 1949, didn't make a profit for 20 years. In the beginning, he was the designer, builder, and deliveryman. Like other studio furniture makers such as Wharton Esherick and George Nakashima, Mr. Maloof put in long days. Even with three longtime assistants - Larry White, Mike Johnson, and David Wade - and the help of his son, Slimen, he produced only 50 to 100 pieces a year, fewer than a small factory would do in a day.

He never wavered from his contemporary design, even when wood furniture lost favor in the plastic-and-chrome 1960s, '70s, and '80s. The coldness of factory-made furniture, he said, could not compare in warmth and character to wood that a craftsman had worked from start to finish.

Samuel Solomon Maloof was born Jan. 24, 1916, in Chino, the seventh of nine children of Lebanese immigrants.

His father, Slimen Nasif Nadir Maloof, was a dry-goods salesman. His mother, Anisse, ran a women's dress shop.

Mr. Maloof spoke Spanish and Arabic before learning English. His lettering was very precise, which helped him earn money as a calligrapher.

While in elementary school, Mr. Maloof used kitchen knives to carve wooden toy guns, swords, and trucks, and to make a breadboard for his mother. At Chino High School, he took courses in mechanical drawing and carpentry, and made plywood cabinets for his family's house. He graduated in 1934 and initially found work as a graphic artist.

After serving in the US Army from 1941 to 1945, where he drew artillery emplacements, he worked as an assistant to Millard Sheets, a well-known painter, designer, and head of the art department at Scripps College in Claremont.

In 1947, outside Sheets's classroom, he met Alfreda Ward, a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, an ex-Navy WAVE and painter who spent eight years teaching arts and crafts on American Indian reservations. They married the next year.

Freda introduced him to American Indian art and together they socialized in the artists' colony nurtured by the Claremont Colleges. Today, the nonprofit Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation for Arts and Crafts has an impressive collection of American Indian paintings, pottery, and weavings as well as contemporary art.

Mr. Maloof became a furniture maker out of necessity. The newlyweds didn't have money to furnish their first small house in Ontario, so Maloof designed and built an efficient room divider with an attached table and benches.

He used discarded fir plywood and oak shipping crates and borrowed tools.

Soon, friends asked for copies of his no-frills furniture.

When Freda, who handled the finances, complained about Mr. Maloof's meager salary from Sheets, Mr. Maloof quit in 1949 - the year their son Slimen was born - to start his business.

In 1954, their daughter, Marilou, was adopted.

Within two years of being self-employed, Better Homes and Gardens magazine published photographs and plans of Mr. Maloof's furniture to show readers how to economically decorate.

Also in 1951, Mr. Maloof got his first important client, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, who designed the Singer sewing machine, Hoover vacuum cleaner, and other appliances. Dreyfuss wanted him to not only make 25 pieces for Dreyfuss's new contemporary home in Pasadena, but to also design them.

In 1957, the American Craft Museum in New York displayed Mr. Maloof's work in its first exhibition of studio-craft furniture.

The Museum of Arts & Design in New York owns a version of the space-saving cradle-hutch he built for his grandchild. It combines a swinging baby's bed, pull-out changing board, and storage space.

His furniture is also in permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

But his business card always said "woodworker."

"I like the word," he once said. "It's an honest word."