There must be something in the woodgrain
Bucktown artisans push humidors to armoire heights

By MAX BROOKS, Staff Writer

Chicago Journal

December 15, 2004

Photo by Josh Hawkins
Modlinski and Devlin work on an hour-glass night stand.

Paul Madalinski and Michael Devlin, Bucktown neighbors, lived next door to one another for years before taking that sacrosanct step forward in male American friendships: hitting the woodshop together.

Now, as the pair behind M.F.A. Studio—-a custom wood workshop in the Kinzie Industrial Corridor that builds and designs elaborate armoires, tables, fish tank housings, embroidery machine covers and whatever else customers ask them to dream up—-the two Master’s of Fine Arts grads make furniture together nearly every day.

While a quick flip through the yellow pages reveals plenty of carpenters for hire in the Chicagoland area, it is the approach that Madalinski and Devlin take to their work—one immersed in the language of design and creative processes—that makes M.F.A. Studio unique.

Even the story of the company’s genesis has a bit of Eureka-moment inspiration to it, something you might more expect from a foot-loose art student than a tight-lipped handyman.

A 1981 graduate of U.I.C.’s M.F.A. program in sculpture, Devlin was smoking a cigar and sitting, as he poetically tells it, "under the spreading chestnut tree" by his house with Madalinksi when a cousin came by. He suggested Devlin, an avid cigar smoker, make use of his already formidable woodworking skills to make him a humidor.

Madalinski, himself a graduate of the School of the Art Institute’s M.F.A. program, helped his neighbor out on the project and they soon came back to the cousin with a humidor big enough to hold some 300 cigars.

Another friend was so impressed with Devlin and Madalinski’s handiwork that she commissioned them to build a piece much larger and more ambitious: a full-size armoire. A bit like the humidor, but super-sized.

And when they finished that, she asked for a table to match.

With that project, the two started making furniture together full time. They informally agreed on the name M.F.A. Studios, a nod to their common art school backgrounds, and began spending entire days in their first garage workshop.

"The thing that really pushed us over the edge was getting the checks—-someone wrote a check to the company and we were like, ‘what do we do this’?" Madalinski explained. "It requires that you open a bank account and start thinking of yourself as a business."

Now nestled among other small workshops and fledgling design studios in a warehouse space and business incubator managed by the Industrial Council of Nearwest Chicago (ICNC), M.F.A. Studio is among a small group of carpentry firms in the area that will design and build free-standing furniture of just about any wood and style, all the way from drawing up the plans on CAD software to giving the lacquer a final polish.

Madalinski and Devlin’s attachment to their materials—in many cases, to individual pieces of wood—sheds some light on the way their aesthete mentality affects their work in furniture and design.

During the course of a short conversation in their shop, both expressed an almost familial admiration for individual panels and planks that have sat in their workspace for months and often longer, waiting for the right project to come along.

Along the side of their workshop, two small panels of English brown oak-—a seemingly plain, grayish wood—-lean against the wall, each notable mainly for the clusters of small holes, known as a burls, that bore into their sides around a knot in the woodgrain.

"We’ve had these panels for years— we just haven’t found the right piece yet," Devlin said, waxing poetic about the sheen the burl would take on after sanding and finishing. "When we do, they’ll become cabinets."

Later, he admired a picture of a bar the two built for a customer years ago. Even in the picture, the wood shimmers remarkably, as if seen through the ripples of a shallow pool of water.

"In that flamed birch, some of the grain looks like a small city it’s so complex," Devlin said, clearly enthused.

A look back at some of the projects Devlin and Madalinski have taken on over the past ten years reveals a diversity of design and materials they say they have sought after to continue honing their artistic and technical chops.

One piece, a lush, cowhide-covered wooden chest used as a bar, required them to drive in nearly four thousand rivets through the leather. But before they could do that, Devlin and Madalinski had to learn exactly how to go about cutting the leather patterns and affixing them, an old skill they’d never learned and few carpenters still know how to do.

Since then, lining furniture in a goat-skin leather known as vellum, a popular material in art deco design, has become something of a specialty for their business. It’s another example of the strange, small markets they said they find themselves in by remaining open to projects that push their technical skill.

Devlin and Madalinski say it’s their background as artists—Madalinski studied painting, Devlin still dabbles in what he calls "zen sculpture"—that makes learning new techniques seem less daunting.

"When you’ve worked in the arts long enough and played with enough materials, you get kind of fearless about it," Devlin said. "We don’t claim to know everything about woodworking, but we know where to find out."

An armoire that carries one of M.F.A. Studio’s signature details—supporting posts that angle just slightly in and then tack back out—produces the visual illusion that the entire piece is floating in the air, only just barely attached to its dark, ebonized walnut exo-skeleton.

Instead, Devlin said, the angled posts support the whole structure of the piece, despite the fact that not a single nail or screw was used to attach them to the ash and zebra wood body.

"That’s exactly the kind of design challenge we enjoy," Devlin said.

Another piece, an amber red coffee table made from crotch mahogany, features the same angled "four degree" design, though in such subtle fashion you have to look at the hand-carved legs a few times before you notice the slant.

From start to finish, Devlin said, such a project might take them about a month and a half and cost a client about $8,000.

For now, Devlin and Madalinski are working on what they say is a relatively simple Murphy bed—a bed that swings down from a wall when needed and is popular, they say, among their increasing number of clients in smaller, high-rise apartments near the Loop—and a custom, collapsible cover for an embroidery machine that a client couldn’t find anyone else to design.

They say the flow of different projects allows them to approach each piece as a project and an opportunity to learn about new materials and design, years after that cigar under the chestnut tree.

"Our ambition is for no one to go into the house of one of our clients and say, ‘I have a piece just like that,’" Devlin said. "It’s just not gonna happen."