I sold my Rolex to buy a chair, and it was the right choice

It’s a cloudy early winter day when I pull into the wooded compound on the outskirts of New Hope, Pennsylvania, that has housed George Nakashima’s namesake furniture studio since the mid-1940s. Japanese maples blaze overhead, and yellow gingko leaves litter the wet bluestone path before me. I am here to buy a piece of furniture, dubbed simply by Nakashima Studios as the Lounge chair. And to do that, I just sold my only watch—a sought-after Rolex GMT-Master II “Batman,” recognizable by watch collectors for its two-toned black-and-blue bezel.

Why would I do this?

For one: The Lounge chair, like virtually all of Nakashima’s creations, is a beautiful, singular piece of design. It was first created in 1959 by Nakashima, who founded his furniture studio in Seattle in 1941. (That effort was soon interrupted when he was sent to an internment camp in Idaho during World War II—he moved east and restarted his business in 1946.) The chair has a planed seat, grooved downward in halves to more comfortably accommodate one’s glutes, and it angles upward but averages a height of 13 inches off the ground. Its back is made of finely whittled cherry spindles, with a steamed and curved walnut top. The piece is supported by sturdy walnut peg legs, the front of which are oriented in a more conventional up-and-down manner, while the rear’s splay outward at sharper angles. There’s no fabric or cushion; the seat is made of “glued-up wood” in my specific chair’s build, which boasts an almost pearlescent sheen (every Nakashima piece leaves New Hope with an ample oil massage).

A dining set inside Nakashima Studios in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

“My dad once said that a good design is a good design,” says Mira Nakashima, George’s 83-year-old daughter, who has served as the studio’s proprietor since her father’s passing in 1990. “You don’t have to change it just because the times have changed.”

We’re sitting in Mira’s office, known as the Conoid Studio for its dramatic curved roof. “I really feel that way about our furniture,” she continues. “The designs were wonderful when they were first made. There’s one chair that Dad called the New chair, and that was in 1956. We still call it the New chair, but it’s made the same way it was back then.”

The broad reason for my chronometer-to-chair swap is this: I’ve always been materialistic, and I’ve valued said material, but lately I’ve found myself seeking things that are not only timeless but that also feel rarer. I don’t mean that merely in the sense of scarcity, but rather a rareness of heart, of indispensability, of years passed and stories layered, of being really made. It’s a feeling I haven’t gotten from watches, and by extension luxury goods, in a while. Batmans and Birkins are built to last, but I feel there’s something associatively ephemeral about them too.

Mira Nakashima, who has led the family business since her father’s passing in 1990.

Furniture seems less that way—and there have been a number of recent arguments that “home is the new fashion,” though I’m wary of how definitive and lasting such a statement can be (and also, really, why does one have to replace the other?). Rather, I think the resonance, at least in my case, comes from the fact that furniture can be sensed and recognized across the tangibles of creativity. We live with it, on it, and in it, after all. Take Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair, with its cantilevered steel base and iconic boxy cushions. You can see how the chair complements New York’s Seagram Building, which van de Rohe also designed, and you can feel the kind of strange draw of the upscale and old-school corporate taste the architect’s oeuvre emits. Or, in a more contemporary sense, there’s Rick Owens and his brutalist furniture: marble slabs and heavy metals and stag antlers, all in perfect harmony with his alt-beauty clothing and never-wavering from his made-you-look aesthetic.

Mira offers some insight here, at least in regards to Nakashima Studios: “There’s been sort of a continuum of interest in my father’s designs. More and more of our world is manufactured rather than made by hand, and I think people realize that [what we do]... it’s different. It’s something special.”

Maybe I’m overthinking this. Maybe it’s just the fact that I’m getting older and looking for things that are settled versus splashy. Whatever the reason, and with only a certain budget for such indulgences, Nakashima Studios is doing it for me. Call it—not quiet— but stable luxury.

A clutch of Nakashima chairs awaiting their new homes.

To this day, most everything the studio delivers is made to order, with the current wait time being around a year, or longer if the job is more complex. (The chair I was buying, however, was already made: It had been on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for a number of years. Mira had written “The Met” on its base, but added my last name once the charge went through—surname marking is a longstanding Nakashima practice. To be transparent, my chair cost $4,500—less, actually, than what the Batman generally demands at resale.) Every single item that comes out of New Hope is one-of-a-kind (the company does license a few select pieces through Knoll, which are factory-produced, but even these are unique in their wood patterns). And then, maybe most importantly, there are the soft-spoken insights and inputs from Mira and her family themselves, which only add to the rareness of heart mentioned above.

At one point, I ask Mira where the studio sources its vast wood supply, which is stored in a pole barn on the grounds. “Mainly right here,” she replies, gesturing outward to the gray glow of the windows. “With our arborist. In Bucks County.” Did the wood, I venture, come mainly from storm-felled trees? “Not really,” she says. “Sometimes they have what we call wind shake. They look fine on the outside, but they’re sort of split and damaged inside. Sometimes it ends up with a beautiful or interesting grain. Sometimes, it all ends in cracks. And, sometimes, a tree will have lived in an exposed position, and it will get wind shake that way, too. Because it had to learn how to survive in the wind.”

Some of the wood, she reveals, is still from George’s time: “There’s still one pile that he purchased back in the 1970s.”

Sliced wood ready to be fashioned into Nakashima furniture.

Maybe one day, if and when the budget expands, I’ll add to my collection—a Conoid Bench with a live edge slab (unfinished on the seat’s contours, as the forest deems, and inset with more of those cherry spindles) or a Frenchman’s Cove dining table with butterfly inlays to help secure natural gaps in the wood. Or maybe it will be one of Mira’s own designs. She made something called the Concordia chair for her musician friends, with a small, curved back bar, allowing for freedom of movement when playing an instrument. Maybe I’ll spring for a large coffee table, similar to the one she designed for President Obama when he was in office. “I don’t know if he read my inscription underneath,” she says, laughing. What did she write? “Oh, I just told him I hope that he would always work on promoting peace in the world.”

Or maybe, perhaps most tantalizingly, my next Nakashima purchase will be something not yet made but imagined decades ago. “There’s always something new and different that we find from my dad that I didn’t know about,” Mira tells me, as we stand at the Conoid Studio’s door, watching the clouds break above. “I don’t think we’ll ever uncover everything.”

Time will tell. I just won’t see it happen, in my case, on a Rolex.