Alumni Gazette

Chairmaster

CRAFT MASTER: Miller began making furniture to support himself between jobs as a trumpeter and is now a nationally recognized craftsman and author.

Designing chairs, says Jeff Miller ’81E (MM), is a furniture-maker’s ultimate challenge. Miller likes his chairs to be comfortable, structurally sound, and eye-catching. Finding just the right balance can take days of experimentation.

“It’s an enormous amount of work to get the prototype set up, then you tweak it, and the tweak changes everything,” says Miller one day at J. Miller Handcrafted Furniture, located in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, just four blocks from his home. “Three or four prototypes later, I may get it.”

For Miller, designing and building finely crafted furniture is part of a business that has thrived over two decades. It’s also part of a career shift that began shortly before he was diagnosed with a form of kidney disease that has required two transplants.

Nationally known for his contemporary pieces in cherry, maple, and mahogany (one of Miller’s spider handkerchief tables is in the Chicago History Museum’s collection), Miller teaches woodworking to weekend warriors yearning to learn their mortise-and-tenon joints from a master. His writing, meanwhile, has found a broad audience in how-to books and Fine Woodworking, the preeminent magazine in the field.

“I get pictures from people who’ve made chairs or beds from the books,” says Miller, who married his wife, Becky, in 1989, and has two children, Isaac, 13, and Ariel, 12. “The pictures are kind of like my grandchildren.”

Miller wasn’t planning on becoming a master craftsman when he entered the Eastman School in 1978 to study trumpet following undergraduate studies at Yale. He took a year off from Eastman to play with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. After graduation in 1981, he found freelance gigs in New York City before joining the Chicago Chamber Brass in 1983.

After a year of touring and recording, he left the quintet. In between freelance jobs, he started making furniture to pay the bills. Then he was struck with kidney illness, which required medication that made him so jittery that playing the trumpet became difficult. But he found he could focus on building beds and tables. And he discovered his knack for design.

“Technically, the woodworking came easier, and it satisfied my inner desire to create, only more so,” he says. “As a musician I was a good performer, but I was never a composer, I was never able to create music that way. With furniture, right from the start I had this three- dimensional creativity.”

Though he had always been intrigued with the structure of the world around him as he grew up in New York City’s northern suburbs, he has no formal training in furniture making. So he read voraciously, put those ideas into practice, made plenty of mistakes, and kept improving. His first pieces were sold to family and friends. Some were simple, spare designs, inspired by the Shaker tradition. Others were more modern, with sharp angles and surprising lines.

As his business developed, Miller relied on skills honed during long hours in Eastman practice rooms.

“You need technique, you need to practice, and you need to be able to sustain your concentration to execute whatever you are doing,” he says.

Woodworking, however, is not performance, which gives Miller a chance to fix a mistake. That’s not possible on stage.

“In musical performance, everything is on the line, and some people thrive on it,” he says. “Music is in time, and what I’m doing now is in space. I feel more comfortable with that.”

The kidney disease that struck Miller in 1984 remained under control with medication until 1994 when his health deteriorated and he had his first transplant. By 2002, that organ also failed, requiring a second transplant. This time, a longtime skiing chum, John Olin, donated his kidney.

Olin also was an avid cyclist, so Miller dedicated himself to getting in shape to join Olin on a challenging 270-mile ride over two days in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. In the summer of 2004, he celebrated his return to good health by completing the journey.

That inspired him to compete in the United States Transplant Games, which took place last summer in Louisville, Kentucky. Miller won gold medals in the time trial and road race. Olin was at the podium to drape the medals around his neck.

“We have developed a phenomenal bond,” says Miller. “It’s almost too big of a gift to feel comfortable getting, and I wondered if I would feel too indebted. But John kept pushing. It meant so much to him, and it ended up not feeling in any way a burden to receive such a gift.”

—David McKay Wilson

Wilson in a New York–based freelance writer. For more about Miller’s work, visit www.furnituremaking.com.