Beautification of public spaces is in Lexington’s DNA. It’s there in the flower-topped whiskey barrels in the east Lexington business district along Massachusetts Ave., the gardens that frame Emery Park, and the soft, symbol-rich mural behind the Depot.
It’s also there in wood. Specifically, in fine wooden furniture designed, crafted, built and donated by members of the Lexington Woodworkers Guild.
Steve McKenna and four of his friends — Dick Wolk, Steve Reznek, Robert Scherzer, and the deeply missed Warren Woodford, who passed away in February — form the core of the guild, with others drifting in and out of projects. All are members of LexArt, where they often meet on Wednesdays to do their woodworking together.
“This is a bunch of people that are pretty gifted in their own way,” McKenna said. “They don’t make furniture, necessarily, but they have their own little thing they do.”
It’s probably fair to say that McKenna is the group’s leader, designer and taskmaster. Before he started building furniture in 2011, he spent some fifty years as a carpenter in the construction trade. Building furniture “was something for us all to do as a group,” he said. “We’re all good friends, and we became much better friends because of this whole thing.”
Even if you aren’t familiar with the guild’s work, you’ve likely seen it around town. Their Sam Maloof-style, three-seater cherry bench graces the entrance to the Lexington Community Center. Cary Library is home to their lectern, table and Children’s Room bookstore cart. A couple of Lexington nonprofits — LexArt and Douglas House on Oakland St. — are the recipients of their bespoke benches. And their tables can be found at the Bedford Public Library and Fowler Branch Library in Concord.
Typically, the institution pays for the materials — $300 or less per piece, by McKenna’s reckoning — and the team does the rest. Each piece boasts “Built and donated by the Lexington Woodworkers Guild” and bears the signatures of its creators.
Why donate such fine works to public spaces? McKenna said, “it’s a nice legacy.”
Each piece is shaped by nature — the nature of wood and the nature of people.
Take the children’s bookstore cart at Cary Library. “We immediately made it much harder than it needed to be, but that seems to be the way some of my work goes anyway,” McKenna said.
Before the guild got involved, the bookstore was operating off a cart made of sheet metal. McKenna had some new design ideas, but they would have required the store to run on a new routine — which turned out to be an unwelcome prospect. McKenna got the message. “The cash box that’s on the outside of the thing was the cash box that was on the sheet metal cart,” McKenna said. “All the little partitions, everything is pretty much the way that they were on the other sheet metal cart.”
McKenna’s woodworking friends insisted on adding carvings to the cart’s panels, which extended the production schedule by several months. “I had to go back and kind of reconfigure how we were going to do it,” he said. The carvings are child-friendly depictions of animals — a camel, a duck, bird, horse and puppies — on separate pieces of basswood. The cart is framed in cherry, the dividers are Baltic Birch plywood, and the entire thing is completely charming.
The story of the LexArt gallery bench starts with the axing of the big old pear tree that once shaded the art center’s Waltham St. property. “Somebody saved the trunk and they had a guy come in with a portable sawmill and cut it into pieces,” McKenna said. “I built a cover out back and we air-dried the thing for years.”
Eventually, guild member Bobbi Tornheim brought the wood to her home shed to continue drying. When the idea for making the bench came up, someone remembered the pear tree. McKenna went to Tornheim’s shed and noticed a curved branch from the pear tree among the lumber. “I designed the bench partly around that curved branch,” McKenna said. “A lot of what I do has that idea to it — you should try and make the wood look as good as it does because it’s a beautiful thing.”
McKenna’s designs are elegant and whimsical, and reflect his admiration for three 20th century American woodworking masters: MacArthur award-winner Sam Maloof (1916-2009), architect George Nakashima (1905-1990), and Wharton Esherick (1887-1970), who is considered a leader of the studio furniture movement.
Their influence is fully present in the LexArt bench, along with a twist of Steve Reznek, the guild’s woodturner. Reznek took up woodturning when he retired some twenty years ago, after a varied career in academia (physics), government (the EPA), and industry (Cabot Corporation). Woodturners spin wood on a lathe and use handheld tools to shape it. Reznek learned the craft from longtime LexArt member Willis Hunt, who passed away in 2023 and mentored many of LexArt’s woodworkers.
Reznek is responsible for the stunning spindles backing the LexArt bench. Those were already a challenge — Reznek had to contend with McKenna’s “here’s the design, you figure out the rest” sensibility — and then he upped the ante.
He bonded bloodwood to maple on each spindle and then arranged the bloodwood sections to follow the curve of the back of the bench. None of this was straightforward. “You had to figure out how to drill the holes right and get the distances right,” Reznek said. “But we like that kind of thing. I mean, that’s what woodworkers do.”
The guild doesn’t have any public projects right now, but McKenna’s hands are always busy. He recently filled requests from his grandsons for wooden dragons, and now he’s planning a couple of tables for his brother. He pointed to his notebook, where he’s been sketching, erasing and resketching the design. “I want the top to appear to be floating,” he said. It will undoubtedly be beautiful.