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Stephen Skolnik on a motorcycle journey in Andalucia |
From a career in pop to a life planing pine
Stephen Skolnik made it big in the 1980s playing keyboards with Fischer-Z and the Eternal Triangle – then he swapped the recording studio for the carpenters’ workshop, making a name for himself as a furniture maker, writes Gerald Isaaman
HIS voice doesn’t waiver. “Yes, I’m confident, absolutely confident,” insists Stephen Skolnik, pop star turned furniture maker.
“There may be a real recession, but there are people out there who didn’t behave foolishly and have the funds to fulfil their lifestyle.”
Stephen belongs to an elite band of modern furniture designers – he suggests there are fewer than 200 in the country – who has just made a unique table for one client costing £8,500 and is currently working on another commission likely to hit £20,000.
“We are fine furniture and cabinet makers who are seeking to make the antiques of the future – items that will be loved and cherished by generations now and to come,” he tells me at his home in Highgate.
“So there is a lot of pressure on us at the moment because of the economic downturn, but one of my colleagues has so much work that he has had to turn down new commissions.”
The £8,500 Art Deco-inspired Sienna table (right) Stephen has made goes on display next month at the Millinery Works Gallery in Islington as part of an exhibition entitled 21st Century Furniture: The Arts and Crafts Legacy.
The second commission, still in the making, is a contemporary – and automotive – take on an 18th-century gaming table that combines chess, backgammon and bridge in circular design of four spinning flowers engineered so each one can be used separately.
It is through his love of engineering and architecture that Stephen turned to cabinet making after a highly successful career playing keyboard in the 1980s bands Fischer-Z and Eternal Triangle.
Now in his fifties, Stephen revels in the process of taking a piece of beautiful timber and transforming it into a functional object, using, for example, Macassar ebony for his Sienna table, which has bright steel legs curved to reflect the wheels of a 1930s automobile.
And his love of cars and motorbikes resulted in him naming his company after his favourite Porsche – 944 Furniture.
Since it takes him roughly four months to complete a commission, from original design to delivery, often in his Porsche, he admits that his earnings no longer hit pop star heights. So it is the money from his past career that partly subsidises his passion for creating furniture and his life in Highgate, where he has lived for the past 20 years.
Many of his friends from the music industry are among his clients, though he refuses to name them simply to boost business.
“What is important is to make a reputation for yourself,” he explains. “That’s the hardest thing in the game. And it takes a long time to create a collection of work that is recognised.”
Stephen trained in cabinet-making first at Rycotewood College, in Oxfordshire, and later at Rosewood College, in Canada, as well as studying under the renowned master-maker David Charlesworth in north Devon.
Now he shares his workshop in Acton with fellow cabinet-makers Martin Grierson and Georgy Mkrtichian.
His work has gained him entry into international collections and some of his pieces have featured in Bespoke, the source book of 190 leading furniture-makers put together by Betty Norbury and the How to Spend It magazine of the Financial Times.
But he still yearns for his pop star days, playing his keyboard almost every day at home and writing music too.
“At first it was incredible difficult to give up pop concerts,” he confesses. “You can’t replace the adrenalin of playing before crowds of 30,000 or 40,000 people.
“But it is a bit of a death trap if you hang on and end up falling in the gutter. There are far too many old pop stars around.”
n www.944furniture.com
n 21st Century Furniture: The Arts & Crafts Legacy – a selling exhibition of today’s designer makers is at The Millinery Works Gallery, 87 Southgate Road, Islington, N1, from April 1-26. Tuesday to Saturday 11am to 6pm, Sunday 12 to 5pm. Phone 0207 359 2019 for times opening times over Easter. www.millineryworks.co.uk |
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