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).
“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.
