Rural Indiana Charm meets cutting edge sophistication: an Interview with Keith Fritz

“That’s the whole trick in life: find what you love doing and find a way to make a living doing it.”

Keith Fritz is a young, soft-spoken, overwhelmingly polite guy with an incredible talent. He designs and creates some of the most beautiful, rare and customized furniture around. For a designer just ten years out of college, he has a wealth of knowledge about the history of furniture design. When we met him for this interview, he shook our hands with a smile, and in the other arm he held an old photo album, his portfolio, and his current catalog. He was prepared to give us the full tour of his life in design, from pre-high school to present. And he seemed as eager to show us his designs as we were to see them. So we begin at the beginning…

NSI: So, in the beginning, what got you started with all this?

KF: Growing up, I loved antiques, and I loved furniture, and I just wanted to make it. I wanted to copy antiques and the early furniture that we had in our family. My family was very self-sufficient. My dad built houses, my mom sewed clothes and did all the cooking, we cut our own trees, grew our own vegetables, hunted our own meat, we live in this self-sufficient community, so the idea was that if you want furniture, you build it. I actually have no training in furniture making and I have no training in design either.

NSI: Really? What did you study?

KF: I have a degree in Philosophy, yeah, I had a full scholarship in seminary. I actually grew up in rural southern Indiana and I would read books on design. And so when I was a kid I always wanted to go to the schools you’re going to and study what you’re studying but, you know, I just never could. So I envy what you’re doing because I had to teach myself by reading books and studying on my own.

NSI: Was there one book in particular that you were inspired by?

KF: All of them! I have a big collection of design books. When I was in high school in Indiana, in the library there the only things I could get my hands on were American, you know, Federal or Chippendale design. I didn’t know anything about Art Deco or twentieth century design. Then, when I went to Washington DC I became friends with some of the designers there and they would loan me books from their libraries. That’s when I first started to learn about French Moderne and Art Deco which I’m in love with now.





NSI: So these books that you learned from, were they about construction techniques?

KF: Oh, just everything. I probably have several hundred design books. Originally I was looking at construction books. When I was in high school I read Fine Woodworking, I just got any book that I could on it. But then when I was in college it was just any design book. I also have a complete set of Architectural Digest going back to ’72 except for a few in the 2000s that were out of order. Just having that is, I think, important. Just like, if you write music you have to hear music, if you write books you have to read books, so I think to become a good designer you have to see a lot of design. The more you see the better you get. I have a friend who owns an antique shop in France, and he spends his free time going to open houses every week. And I asked him, you know, “why do you go to these open houses all the time?” and he said that he just loves to see how people live, you know? The more you see, the more ideas you have. That’s why people hire an interior designer because your average client hasn’t really seen anything compared to the experience that a designer has. That’s why they’re so valuable to clients. They know what they’re doing.

NSI: Definitely. So when you started making furniture in high school, was it like trial and error at first?

KF: Well, my dad builds houses and he has a construction company, so that kind of got me started. But this here is the first piece of furniture I ever made, and that was the summer before my freshman year in high school. (He shows us a photograph of himself as a fair-haired kid of 13 next to a fully-finished professional-looking cabinet. Though it may be relatively simple in comparison to his later endeavors, the herringbone pattern of the light-colored wood and the delicate inlay of darker wood on the sides of the cabinet are indicative of hours of meticulous labor and the careful hands of an experienced artist that don’t seem to match the child kneeling next to it.)

NSI: Wow, that’s amazing!

“I feel strongly about what fine furniture should look like.”

KF: Well, it looks kind of like a kitchen cabinet. (He turns the page of the old photo album.) Now this is my grandpa and my dad. They’re pulling a log out of the woods. Between my whole family we have about seven hundred acres, so when there was a big storm or something that would knock down a lot of trees I would have these big pieces of wood to work with. So we’d cut it and saw it up. So then I started reading books on American Chippendale (he turns the page again to a new set of pictures and we both can’t help but gasp.) And this was my sophomore year of high school that I made a Boston Bombay Chippendale secretary because I was reading all of these books, and I tried to design up what I thought would be the most amazing piece of American Chippendale. (The cause of the collective gasp is an incredibly intricate and complex piece of furniture with what looks like thirty or forty little drawers and compartments all over it that towers over the same kid that appeared in the last picture. This piece shows an entirely new talent that wasn’t demonstrated in the first: the top of the secretary is carved in a smooth, symmetrical swirling design.) It’s a combination of different American inspirations; I was just a kid dreamin’ you know? I took what I liked the most from different styles and just combined it. Living in Indiana, I had never seen a real one so this was all from pictures in books.

NSI: What kind of contests were you entering with this kind of thing? (Once we could tear our eyes away from the secretary we noticed the big silver trophy in his hands.)

KF: It’s a woodworking competition for high school students and it won state in Indiana, yeah, it had lots of detail to it and now when I look at it it’s kind of crude because I’ve seen the original and my version is not historically right, I mean, now it’s kind of embarrassing. (We can’t help but laugh at that.)

NSI: How many hours did you spend on this do you think?

KF: I actually recorded it, it was 1200 hours. Oh this is funny (he points to another picture of the wheel of a tractor balanced on two pieces of wood) we didn’t have any clamps so we drove our tractor up on there and used it as a clamp. So anyway, when I was in DC I showed this to some designers and they said, you know “if you can do that then you can do anything!” So they’d give me pictures of things and I’d just start making them for them. I graduated from college in ’99, so that’s 10 years ago I guess, and right out of college these designers were having me make things for them. I found myself working for Robert Brown and Todd Davis. Then the Clintons hired them. So I got to do the stuff for the Clintons just one year out of college. I did their dining table among other things. (He shows us another binder full of pictures of more recent work.)

“I mean, if you’re building something that’s going to last forever, and you’re not wasting any of it, I think that’s a good thing.”

NSI: So you must have to choose the wood that you work with pretty carefully then, right?

KF: Well, I love really rare and unusual woods with really special grain patterns. There’s a lot to consider when choosing wood. A lot of our tables have these curved legs that you can’t build out of solid wood because it’ll crack. (He shows us an example of a round dining table.) So that’s a core of Baltic birch plywood that’s hand-veneered. And then that’s a pie-matched top. Wood shrinks and swells in its width and not in its length, so if you made that out of solid it would split and crack. So that’s veneer over plywood. The plywood is an FSC-certified, plantation-grown, sustainably-harvested plywood core that’s veneered so its dimensionally solid and stable. I love working with rosewoods and other exotic wood, but it’s just a veneer because when you saw wood you make a lot of waste, then you sand it and make more waste, but for veneers they slice it. The knife slices it so there’s no waste, which means it’s a very good thing for the environment. So I like to use scarce, exotic woods, but I don’t waste anything from them. I mean, if you’re building something that’s going to last forever, and you’re not waiting any of it, I think that’s a good thing. What good is a “green” product that’s going to end up in a land fill? Now the base of this table is walnut, and that’s actually from our family farm. I knew where it grew and when we cut it down, and we replant all the time.

NSI: So even though you use these rare woods, you have sustainability in mind.

KF: Yes. I love these woods. We like to artistically arrange the grain to try to show it off. I think people buy our furniture because of the wood, you know?

NSI: What about the finishes you use on the wood, can you tell us about those?

KF: Yeah, well everything that we do is all hand-rubbed. Some woods are natural, some are stained, we do custom finishes so we can match anything. I use a lacquer which is real traditional finish it’s not high-tech. Your newer, high-tech, factory finished furniture is finished through a chemical reaction between two parts like an apoxy, whereas my finished dry through a solvent that evaporates out leaving the solids behind on the wood. That’s the more traditional way, and the nice thing is that you can repair it. You can re-liquefy that finish by putting a solvent back on it. Most of the factory-made furniture, the way it’s finished, if it gets damaged you can’t repair it. So you have to just throw a piece away if it gets damaged. So the ones we used are designed to be easy to repair. I try to keep my finishes from looking thick and plasticky, when we get the finish done we’ll sand it with very fine abrasives and rotten-stone it which is like a pumice. It gives it a nice luster, not too shiny, not too dull, it looks like a good French polish, like an antique polish. That’s what we go for. I feel strongly about what fine furniture should look like.

NSI: So, as you said, you go for that classic look and get inspiration from classic pieces, but obviously there are modern elements to your work, so where does the inspiration for that come from?

KF: I love classicism, and there’s different styles historically. I love looking at these different styles and saying “what makes this beautiful?” you know? Just like music, different genres have different takes on harmony, and different furniture styles have different takes on what is beauty. So I try to take those classical notions of beauty and strip them to their essence and do a new design that hasn’t been done before, that is original, but is rooted in those classical notions of beauty. So a lot of what we do is modernized classicism. You look at it, it’s very modern, but it is very traditional at the same time. It doesn’t look out of place in a traditional setting. The designs should be having a dialogue with tradition. It’s very hard to do something that hasn’t been done before. That’s why I like to have a huge library. Sometimes you think you have an original idea, and you see the same thing somewhere else. You have to understand everything that’s been done, in order to do something new. I want our company to stand out and not look like everybody else, and to do that you have to know what everyone else is doing. That way you can try to do something that’s a step ahead. I’ve studied the history of furniture, and in the 20th century there’s all these people like Carl Springer, Tommy Parsinger, and Frankel, and these are people that are known and studied because they did something new, they added something to the design conversation, and I want to be part of that after I’m gone. I want to have contributed something to design. But often times a copy is what a designer wants, and we build what people order, but I really think that some of our pieces are really original.




NSI: So when you’re coming up with a new design, how do you start? Do you do sketches or do you just have a vision in your head and go with that?

KF: Well, I see it in my head. Then, I’m not the best drawer, so I’ll do a rough sketch or get some pictures of a few antiques and I have a draftman who I’ll show you know “do you see line of this leg?” or “see what this is like in a 60” round” and he’ll draw it up and I’ll make changes to it. So I see something in my head, and we have to try to get the AutoCad drawings to match that. That’s where it’s all done and worked out is in AutoCad. But it starts with an idea or picture of an antique.

NSI: So when you say “we”, that’s your company, but how many people are you talking about?

KF: Well, let’s see… We have a core group of about six or seven employees and then there’s people who work with us when we need them, so it all depends. There are certain pieces in our line that are built by certain people. This is how we get our efficiency because everything is built one at a time and one-of. I spend most of my time in the finishing room with one other person. But at a small company, everybody’s got to be able to do everything in case a machine breaks or something. The reason the furniture is expensive is because of the cost of the materials, and that we’re making one. We might have a couple months’ labor in one table. It’s the same if you have a custom-made automobile versus one off the lot; you get what you pay for. But because of that, we can change anything to fit the client’s needs.

NSI: So do you have a favorite finish?

KF: It depends on the client and the project. Personally, I like the antique finishes. They have a casual elegance, they’re not as formal or fussy, they’re livable. But it really depends on the projects.

NSI: Is all of the furniture in your house made by you?

KF: Oh, I end up with the stuff I made in high school or pieces that have been in showrooms for a long time and I’ll bring them back and keep them. I’ve got the coffee table that was on HGTV and the mirror that was in the Washington Post, so sometimes I’ll keep things, but I can’t afford to keep it all you know?

NSI: I guess you don’t have time to make your own furniture anymore right?

KF: Yeah, I just end up with that stuff. Sometimes the cobbler doesn’t make his own shoes right? But I do like to find old antiques that are damaged and fix them up too.

NSI: So what’s going on now?

KF: Well in February I bought an old factory, and so they’re hanging the drywall now. I’ll have a little apartment there. I like to live at work you know? If it’s late and I can’t sleep I can just go work. I can keep an eye on things too. I love what I do and the people that I work with, so I like living at work. I have a little farmhouse that I go to when I need to get away that’s been in my family since 1880 when it was built. But I just love living at work. I’m just in heaven with my new factory. I started a little antique mall in the front, we build our furniture in the back, there’s a lady that’s going to start a coffee shop there too, and then I’ve got my apartment upstairs and I’m just as tickled as can be, it’s a lot of fun. That’s the whole trick in life: find what you love doing and find a way to make a living doing it.

“I try to take those classical notions of beauty and strip them to their essence and do a new design that hasn’t been done before.”

Keith Fritz
Phone: 812-367-1331
Fax: 812-367-1333
Email: info@keithfritz.com