Is that business still operating?
BRANDEGEE: They changed the name to Akoya and are doing extremely well in many of the same areas we worked in.

Rob, you’re how old?
BRANDEGEE: Okay. I’ve been telling people that this is my three–quarter mark, but a dear friend said, “Oh don’t be such a pessimist. Make it the halfway mark.” So it’s the halfway mark. I’m 75.

When you decided to sell the business, did you have plans? Did you say now I’m going to do A, B, and C? Had you already been doing some of it?
BRANDEGEE: I had already been doing a lot.

Can you elaborate on some of that to me?
BRANDEGEE: We had an antique business running concurrently with our primary business for years, buying and selling American antiques and decorative arts. It was a way to feed our antique buying and collecting habit. About two years before my official retirement in 2000, I also started to design furniture.

The furniture design was in the making two or three years before you sold the business?
BRANDEGEE: By the time we’d sold the business, I’d designed a lot of this stuff [pointing at some of the pieces of furniture around his loft] I think some are still among my personal favorites of the things I’ve designed.

And what led you to say “ I want to do this ” and “ I can do this ”?
BRANDEGEE: There were actually three things. Number one; I had supervised graphics people in our business for years. So I had a strong sense of design. I felt very comfortable with graphic design. Number two; we had the antique business, so I was used to looking at furniture and proportion, scale, surfaces — art of all kinds, actually. I learned to distinguish what was good and what was bad, so I had a pretty well evolved aesthetic sense in the antique field. And number three; in 1995 we bought a log cabin, circa 1840, in Bedford County. In the process of restoring the cabin, I looked at the materials and they tugged at the corner of my mind. I thought some of this stuff would be really interesting to rework into furniture. We bought another cabin about a year later, after we’d restored the original cabin. The second cabin had been about five miles away. We dismantled it, loaded it up, and rebuilt it, connecting it to the first cabin. At the end of the restoration project, Jim — the guy working on the cabin — had a heart attack. When the doctor told him he couldn’t continue to do that kind of very rigorous, outdoor work in the winter, et cetera, I asked Jim what he wanted to do. When he said, “I’ve always wanted to make furniture.” I responded with, “You know what? I’ve got some ideas for designing furniture. How about you working with me for a while?” That’s how the furniture design production business started.

Photo By Heather MullTell me which comes first. Do you first have a furniture design in mind and then you look for the materials? Or do you see the material and visualize the finished product?
BRANDEGEE: I have to say, generally, I start with the materials first. I think, I can take that and do this with it. Subsequently, it has gone in both directions. I’ll see materials that trigger something, or the other way around. A client will ask for a particular kind of piece, or they’ll just say, I have this space. Make something. My first commission came from one of our clients — our consulting clients in Washington — over dinner. I was describing a table that I’d like to make, and Ada said, “Oh, you always talk about designing furniture, but you never get around to it.” Marsha said, “I want the table. Make it. Make it for me. Sell it to me. I’ll buy it.” That’s the table we’re now sitting at, having this discussion. It’s the first serious piece of furniture I ever made. She bought it, and subsequently, six other pieces. As time went on, she would say, “I have this problem area.” She said, “I’ve got this 10–foot wall over here, for example. I don’t know what to do with it. Nothing fits there.” I said, “How about a bench.” And she said, “Oh, that’d be good. How would you do it?” And I sketched it. And it became that bench over there that I’m pointing at, a nine-foot bench. That was the first of what I’ve called ‘the thicket’designs, with a row of vertical sticks. The reason that we have those two pieces is that our client subsequently moved and they didn’t fit. She ended up with a larger dining table for a larger dining room, and she no longer had a 10–foot wall, so we took both pieces back and I made her some other things.