O&G Studio is known for their modern approach to making furniture inspired by New England historical craft. Over the past 15 years, their work has earned the attention of publications like The New York Times, Architectural Digest, and Vogue. Jonathan Glatt is the studio’s creative director and co-founder. Their factory in Warren is a classic old mill building once used for making zippers and Samsonite luggage. Glatt said he didn’t set out to be a furniture maker, but studied jewelry and metalsmithing in college.
“One summer I applied for an internship at Sotheby’s in New York, hoping to be around metalworks, jewelry, silver, arms and armor,” he said. “I got into the program, but they put me in the American Furniture Department, which I was peripherally interested in, but didn’t really know a whole lot about.”
During that internship, Glatt saw thousands of pieces of antique furniture and learned from the top experts in American furniture history.
“I got to learn a lot about furniture construction and then also a lot about seeing,” he said. “With pieces that are good or great to the casual observer, a lot of times there’s small differences, and the experts were really tuned into these small differences. And it was a real education in how small differences really made a big difference in the final effect.”
After the internship, Glatt returned to jewelry making. He opened a studio in Warren within the same building as Warren Chair Works, a company that specialized in traditional Windsor chairs, a style that began in 18th-century rural England and became popular in colonial America.
“At the time I wasn’t really finding a place where I wanted to be with jewelry and started doing larger metal work, which turned into furniture, which turned into much larger metal work,” he said. “So from, you know, hardware up through architectural metal.”
In 2009, Glatt started O&G Studio along with co-founder Sara Ossana, moving away from jewelry entirely to focus exclusively on furniture – beginning with the Windsor chair.
“What makes a Windsor chair unique from other, the typical type of wood chairs is, you have a solid wood seat and everything is attached to the seat. Most chairs, the seat comes last. So the Windsor chair, you have the solid wood seat. It’s carved from a big two-inch-thick board of wood. And then your legs, which are turned,” Glatt said. “And then above the seat, you have very thin spindles that are all put in tension against each other by piercing through steam bend arms, or what we call a bow, which is the big bend part that forms the back of the chair. So there’s a lot going on in a Windsor chair.”
You can find Windsor chairs in Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport.
“It’s an amazing design object and a fairly unique one that developed to a really high level in this particular area of New England,” Glatt said. “They combine material knowledge, tools, ergonomics, aesthetics, style. So it was an object that really combined all the things that make for an interesting design problem. … It doesn’t use a lot of material. It doesn’t use a huge diversity of tools. And you build something that is greater than the sum of its parts.”
On the factory floor, each piece of wood is carefully selected to avoid imperfections, and each chair assembled by a highly skilled team. The result is a simple, beautiful piece that looks contemporary yet classic. They’re painted in bright colors and manage to look both delicate and sturdy. Most of the chairs are unadorned, but O&G has made a couple of chairs with a few extra flourishes, like a carved snake along the back, or hands at the ends of the chair’s arms.
“We have one palm that’s open towards the sky and the other a fist that’s wrapped around a small sparrow, and the palm is going to get little freshwater rice pearls and the sparrow has eyes that are two dark little garnets,” Glatt said, describing one of their chairs. “What I love about them is from a distance, it looks like a regular chair. And then as you get close, you realize these little surprises.”
O&G Studio has gone on to make cabinets, dining tables, beds, sofas and other furniture that match the design aesthetic of their chairs, but the Windsor chair still makes up more than half of their sales. Most of their work is in homes, but you can also see it in local offices, restaurants and places of worship like Touro Synagogue.
“We build these pieces. They’re meant to look good,” Glatt said. “But they’re meant to be, you know, intellectually intelligent, aesthetically beautiful, and they’re built very carefully by people that really take pride in their craft. So I think there’s a lot that you’re getting beyond just something to sit on.”