History of Old Stones Furniture

Using reclaimed woods and hand-collected native sandstone that is prevalent  in Southwestern Colorado, Cappy White has blended craftsmanship and art to create Old Stones Furniture.  With inspiration borrowed from the stacked sandstone cliff dwellings of ancient Anasazi Indians, the Old Stones Furniture he creates also incorporates traditional wooden joinery throughout to insure structural integrity. Hand-rubbed finishes enhance the natural beauty of the ancient timbers, which in turn, beautifully embrace the delicately stacked stones.  By imaginatively embedding the miniature stone pieces into his finely built custom furniture, Cappy has created a marriage of wood and stone that has become his functional works of art.

This union of wood and stone has given Cappy a new artistic release from his twenty years of building and joining furniture by hand.  “I never considered myself an artist,” Cappy says, although his wood-only pieces are works of art in themselves.  By hand-stacking stone pieces into his impressive furniture, Cappy has taken his woodworking craft one step further.

Cappy White is a mostly self-taught artist who has been building furniture of all types for twenty years, although he does consider Klaus Kesselhut, a master furniture maker from Germany , to be his mentor.  Kesselhut, “just walked into my shop one day and stayed for four years.”    Cappy has also admired the work of Mary Coulter, whose buildings at the Grand Canyon showcase her efforts to achieve organic structures in a natural environment, and reflect the ancient, stacked stone structures found in places such as Mesa Verde or Chaco Canyon .

The craft of rural American folk artists from all over the country, working with found objects and native materials, have shown Cappy what he considers to be, “the soul of the artist:  a contemplative and intuitive exploration into one’s imagination.”  This same exploration is intensely visible in music, which Cappy considers one of his many seeds of inspiration.  “I try to infuse my work with passion and spontaneous personal interpretation,” Cappy says, “the same passion and interpretation I hear in Ray Charles singing America the Beautiful, or Doc Watson playing country blues on his guitar.”

“In a way,” Cappy muses, “my art, my furniture, is a result of everything I have seen and heard for a very long time.”  It is also his self-expression, and a way for him to say, “I love, and I am loved.”

Cappy White creates his Old Stones Furniture in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, and Austin, Texas. He hand collects the stone he uses in his art from the forests that surround Pagosa Springs.  His work can be seen at Handcrafted Interiors, a unique store in downtown Pagosa Springs that he owns with his wife, Monica.  The store showcases the handmade, high-end work of craftsmen and artisans from all over the country.

For more information, call 970-264-9663, 
or e-mail handcrafted@frontier.net.