How a Chain Saw Prompted Stefan Bishop’s Return to Design

The multi-disciplinary designer and artist wrote off his creativity until he picked up the power tool

Photography by CHRISTIAN ANWANDER
Words by DEGEN PENER

There’s a powerful muscularity to Stefan Bishop’s designs. Inside his Glassell Park workshop, an enormous, almost-completed custom bed is highlighted by a black-stained ash headboard that looks, from the side, like a row of robust upper backs lined up. Huge snakelike wood sculptures, boldly assertive in their materiality, hang from the ceiling of the space, a former auto shop. “A lot of these sculptures I just make in between all my designs — all of these are in-process big things that I am just compelled to make,” Bishop says.“I’m just lucky that I have created this space where I’m able to make stuff and let my stamp come through.”

It wasn’t always this way. Bishop, who grew up in Oregon and Colorado, briefly made furniture in his early 20s, but left it behind to pursue interior design and later real estate. After the latter career flamed out (“I lost all my money in 2009,” he says), he wasn’t sure what to do next. “I had sort of completely written off the idea that I was creative and set it aside,” he says. That’s when his wife bought him a chain saw for Christmas and he jumped back into furniture design.“I had an epiphany, just out of nowhere, visions of all this shit I wanted to make,” he says.

“I had an epiphany, visions of all this shit I wanted to make.”

Since then, Bishop — represented since 2020 by blue chip design gallery Ralph Pucci — has carved out a singular aesthetic in the design world; call it lumberjack meets abstract sculptor. His pieces, collected by the likes of John Legend, Jennifer Aniston, and Barack and Michelle Obama, include his Puddle tables, bronze works that call to mind pools of water, and imposing consoles in black walnut that have a primordial presence. Right now, his dream project is to supersize the fine art side of his practice. “I would just go big with it and lean further into the sculptural world,” says Bishop. The one hitch? His joints are feeling a bit abused after more than a decade of revving up that chain saw. “My whole body is telling me to slow down,” says Bishop, who has started relying more on digital cutting at the front end of his process“by necessity”, and finishing pieces by hand.“It takes some of the heavy lifting out. But that’s like a bittersweet thing for me because my favorite thing is working in the shop. It’s where my creativity happens.” ralphpucci.com.