A furniture maker puts his art and soul into his home
‘I have constant interaction with the furnishings and the architectural elements…’
A slow tour through artist-craftsman David Ebner’s open living area tempts the visitor to linger on objects of exquisite design and impeccable workmanship touched with natural elements: a console table with sinewy underpinnings, its surface laden with potted orchids, a William Morris wallpaper, a leaded glass window.
His fool-the-eye kitchen blends into one wall, barely recognizable as a work space behind a camouflage of wood cladding, its refrigerator sheathed in Sapele wood, its handles replaced with lengths of bamboo.
Now at the pinnacle of a 30-year career as a master furniture maker, Ebner, 61, has filled his Brookhaven hamlet home with retro classics that coexist smoothly with objects culled from his archetypical museum- quality body of work with domestic and exotic woods. “I think of furniture as sculpture,” he says. His Renwick Stool, named for the gallery at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collection of Fine Art, is part of its permanent collection.
The structure that shelters these unique embellishments is somewhat at odds with its contents. Built in the 1920s as a one-room boat-builder’s shack that was heated with a pot-bellied stove, the house was expanded over the years to its current seven rooms in a style roughly reminiscent of the Arts and Crafts movement.
“I had my eye on this place for years,” says Ebner, who settled in the adjacent Bellport area a few years after he took his bachelor’s degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1968 under the tutelage of sculptor Wendell Castle. The house came with a behemoth of a detached workshop where boats were built and then slid into the water. “I knew it would be perfect as a home and studio for me. When the complex came on the market, I snapped it up,” he says.
During an ongoing renovation, Ebner upgraded the house with rich details that reflect his originality as well as his admiration for iconic woodcrafters like George Nakashima - he rebuilt all the windowsills with “wild-edge” planks that leave the natural bark exposed, a Nakashima signature - and built sconces in the Frank Lloyd Wright tradition of walnut and handmade paper.
And he replaced all the door hinges with era-specific cast brass reproductions embellished in repousse with a twining vine design. An authentic reproduction wallpaper adds an Arts and Crafts touch that complements the house’s architectural style.
Ebner’s fondness for a natural phenomenon - sassafras trees that have been distorted by invasive vines - sidetracked him into crafting the convoluted shapes he calls “twisted sticks” into banisters and newel posts, candlesticks, stools, chairs and replacement legs for a washstand that he found in the house; he even had some samples cast in bronze and fabricated a two-foot piece as a door pull for his studio.
All the fabrics in the house - bedspreads, curtains, upholstery - were his part of a barter deal with famed textile designer Jack Lenore Larsen, who received several pieces of Ebner’s outdoor furniture as his end of the bargain.
Corbels inspired by those at the East Hampton railroad station support a portico lighted with a cast bronze period lantern. A Japanese rain chain and a latticed window that was salvaged from a local mansion’s renovation flank the rear door. The window above these improvements will be upgraded during an upper-story renovation now under way.
Of his house, so filled with art of the past and antiques of the future, Ebner says, “These are things I see and touch every day; I have a constant interaction with the furnishings and the architectural elements. It’s a vital part of my lifestyle.”
