Evergreen Living

Designer-Craftsman Pat Morrow:
A Wizard with Wood
by Kathlene Sutton
Since Pat Morrow designed her home and tucked it into the trees on Snyder Mountain, she has gradually filled it with her inventive “art furniture” and decorative carvings. Beneath her entryway window, a graceful gazelle rises from a rustic pine bench, creating both a functional back-rest and an arresting sculpture, carved and painted by hand. Around the corner, an elegant maple chest comes alive with mythical creatures flowing across the intricately carved mahogany drawer-fronts. Handmade wooden masks — Grimm-inspired trolls and colorful bogeymen playing hooky from Mardi Gras — line an adjoining hallway.
So how did a former weaver, painter, newspaper photographer and producer of lavish multimedia shows for mega-corporations end up excelling at a craft usually dominated by muscular male woodworkers? It all started when she suddenly realized that she yearned for a life centered on her art, rather than on “corporate America.” Pat immediately mapped out an ambitious strategy to escape her corporate career in Chicago and reinvent her life in Evergreen. “It took seven years,” she notes, “to make the transition, come here all by myself, build this house and change my life.”
Ironically, after designing her new home around a sizable weaving studio, she discovered that weaving large-scale tapestries and other complex textiles did not excite her nearly as much as designing her house — fashioning the built-in cabinetry, piecing together quixotically angled rooms and customizing her windows to capture the heart-stopping views. In yet another epiphany, she realized that artistic furniture design would “bring together everything I had a passion for.” In one mind-bending afternoon, she “came up with enough ideas and designs to last for years and years.”
With her usual unstoppable determination, she went back to college “to learn how to make furniture properly.” By the end of her training, she recalls gleefully, “the guys would come and ask me how to do things.” One of those guys told her, “I’ve never seen a woman so enthused about woodworking.” Smiling broadly, Pat says, “It fits me perfectly.”
Though she resists labels, Pat suggests that “sophisticated whimsy” probably best describes her style. But when she custom-designs furniture for homes other than her own, the whimsy is always secondary to ensuring that her designs capture her clients’ vision and each home’s distinctive environment.
When Dianne and Jerry Berk commissioned two occasional tables for a multipurpose room in their upper Bear Creek home, Pat faced a daunting challenge. The furniture not only needed to be as versatile as the room, but it also had to harmonize with the rainbow of woods in the Berks’ eclectic furniture. Focusing on the Berks’ Chinese art, Pat infused her mahogany tables with a subtle “Oriental flavor” by fashioning slightly flared, hand-shaped table legs and accenting the side aprons with ebonized wood carvings. She also designed the tables so they can serve as end tables, can join to form a sofa table and can double as handsome trays for dinner in front of the TV.
They were so delighted with their tables, Dianne says, that she and Jerry then commissioned a sizable screen to divide the room’s two main areas. Dianne searches for the right words to capture the thrill she felt when she first saw the finished screen in Pat’s studio: “It is just beautiful,” she keeps saying.
Requiring four months to complete and incorporating five different woods in dozens of handcrafted parts, Pat’s Asian-inspired, five-panel screen would be equally at home in a display window on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue or at an exhibit of America’s top contemporary designers. The screen’s stunning central panel features beech, curly birch and cocobolo, a rare tropical hardwood; their clean vertical lines and the subtle interplay of their dappled grains create a perfect foil for the panel’s dramatic centerpiece, an asymmetrical mahogany carving. Pat picked each piece of raw wood with care “so the grain becomes part of the design.” The screen’s five panels seem to float in their frame—an effect Pat achieved in part by hand-crafting mortise and tenon joints throughout, rather than using nails and screws. “I do traditional Old World joinery,” she explains, “to design for the wood, which is constantly moving,” and “to fit all the pieces solidly together, so the [furniture] will last hundreds of years and become somebody’s heirloom.”
Pat’s “Mondrian Table” — produced in collaboration with glass artists David and Danna Cuin — is clearly destined to become another future heirloom. Colorful fused-glass panels decorate the top and all four side aprons of this elegant cherry sofa table. David says simplicity went out the window once they conceived the creative possibilities of “playing with … levels of glass and mirror” to capture Mondrian’s bold geometric paintings and earlier, more traditional work.
Using up to 60 multicolored glass shards to create a single panel, the Cuins painstakingly reinvented several of Mondrian’s 5-foot-square paintings on 3-inch squares of hand-fused glass and sandblasted other Mondrian designs onto clear glass. Meanwhile, Pat’s woodworking task was equally complex. She managed to hand-build a table echoing the clean lines of mission-style furniture, despite its numerous “pockets” meticulously crafted to cradle the Cuins’ glass panels. David reports that virtually everyone who sees the table comments that “it belongs in a museum.”
The high-end Ben West Gallery in South Dakota’s Black Hills recently chose to showcase Pat’s furniture in its promotional materials and at the front of the gallery. “Your furniture is what art furniture should be,” co-owner Janna Emmel told her.
Apparently, Pat’s local admirers agree: she reports that, during this fall’s Open Door Studios tour, she attracted enough commissions to keep her saws buzzing and her drills dancing until next year’s tour.
To view Pat’s magical creations, visit trailmixstudio.com. To contact her: pat@trailmixstudio.com or 303-674-1203.