Long pieces of ash and walnut criss-cross each other in the back of Brian Fireman’s beat-up red Durango. The wood, purchased at Gennett Lumber in Asheville’s River Arts District, is destined for Fireman’s shop outside of Tryon.
He will transform these chunks, some of them long enough to reach from the van’s back door to the front passenger seat where a seat belt secures them, into a “Bella Table” — one of the craftsman’s many upscale, commissioned pieces of furniture.
“It’s a lot of work,” he says, sipping a coffee at an outside table in front of Mosaic Café in Biltmore Park. “Most days I’m covered in sawdust and sweating from grinding wood and sanding. I don’t like sanding, and I never will. But I do it a lot, there’s no other way around it.”
His vision now is straightforward — but Fireman took a roundabout way to his current career. A geology major with no desire to become a geologist, he first worked as a videographer for a rafting outfitter on the New River in West Virginia. He sometimes lived in his car to save money for traveling in the off season. Then he returned to school, earned a Masters degree in architecture, and pursued jobs in that field.
Architecture led him to woodwork. He didn’t want to be the draftsman who never swung a hammer, so he took summer jobs doing stick-frame construction and working with a timber company. One day, flipping through a catalog, he saw an advertisement for a woodworking book by Sam Maloof.
He checked the book out of Virginia Tech’s library, bought similar tools to those Maloof wrote about, and used the school’s wood shop to practice.
“I don’t have any formal training in woodworking, per se,” says Fireman. “I learned by doing and reading books and cold-calling a thousand people to ask questions. Architecture gave me a foundation in design and how to approach things. I like structure and want to see the logic in construction.”
Trial and error have been the foundation to Fireman’s success.
“I’ve thrown away so much wood,” he deadpans. “I can’t even tell you.”
From the missteps, though, he found his path. A mix of high style and durability, his pieces would be as welcome in a gallery as in a home. He went large, opting to make dining-room tables, rocking chairs, consoles, credenzas, and shelves instead of cutting boards or wooden spoons. Pieces range from $750 to five digits.
Painting and staining weren’t part of his early plan: he opted simply to rub oil on the furniture and let the grain shine. He chooses local, domestic wood types such as walnut, cherry, maple, oak, ash —“woods from your backyard,” Fireman calls them.
“All that said, it’s also really fun to work with exotic woods that are imported in,” he adds.
Fireman’s business acumen, along with his persistence, pushed him to take his creations across the country. To drum up business after he began Brian Fireman Designs (family and friends were his first three customers), he traveled to trade shows and stepped, mostly uninvited, into showrooms.
He finished his first Swallowtail chair — now one of his signature pieces — the night before a trip to New York City, and then had a relative double park his truck outside of galleries as he ran inside to hawk his work.
It worked: the showroom placed the chair on its floor.
“I’d say other people would consider it art [as well as] furniture,” says Fireman, “[but] I never set out to be an artist. I just want to build and work with wood, because I love the material.
“Furniture I appreciate, because it’s not just a sculpture, it’s functional. It’s a table you can use, or a chair you sit in. I like to think of myself as a woodworker.”
For more information about Brian Fireman’s work, see brianfiremandesign.com or call 828-712-6660.