Blog Archives
- Jun 2016
- Aug 2012
- Jul 2012
Category - General
Posted - 08/16/2012 10:28pm Marriage of fire and steel.
Steel Geisha designs has a passion for molten metal.
It’s the oldest story in the world: boy meets girl, sparks fly, heat
gives way to fire. Hot fire. More than two thousand degrees hot, in
fact, fire hot enough to puddle steel. Be warned: this is a love story
that might make your own feel tepid by comparison. But before
surrendering to jealous despair, know that—for a fair price—you can have
a piece of it, too.
Think blacksmith, and Steve and Anastatia
Chiurro don’t readily come to mind. They’re not your prototypical
smiths, even given that the craft itself could stand in as the bespoke
poster child for times long gone. He’s never rocked a handlebar
mustache, and she’s never claimed to whisper in “horse.” They waft a
funky urban chic, in fact. He, a bookish, tattooed James Dean; she a
former child-care provider and jewelry maker.
In a roomy
warehouse on a nondescript stretch of Sonoma’s industrial corridor their
busy warehouse welcomes the curious with a wall of shiny corrugated
steel. Behind the curvy wall, just visible through the peekaboo cutouts,
is Anastatia. Even in jeans and a tee, there is something elegant about
her. On the other side, hunched over a desk handling the phone that
never stops ringing for long is Steve, trending toward dark and
handsome. This is the second time around for both and together they make
a striking pair.
On a far wall in the warehouse various samples
hang: beautifully sculpted hinges, ornate lengths of rail, sconces and
fixtures with details so delicate it’s difficult to imagine them forming
from molten metal. Even harder to imagine is the objects taking shape
at the hands of the pretty woman with the wry smile or her bookish man.
But this is Steel Geisha Designs, the brainchild of two kindred spirits,
where old world meets new and beauty finds its strength.The
business is run with the concept of community at its base. “We do
large, high-profile client jobs but we’ll also fix your pots and pans
when they break. One client brought in a tiny piece of his elderly
mother’s antique espresso maker for repair. He’d tried to convince her
just to replace the old machine, but she was attached. So we dropped
what we were doing and fixed the thing. Is it a moneymaker? Absolutely
not. But it’s a service we enjoy doing. In a small town, our biggest
marketing is word of mouth. It’s how we survive,” says Steve.
After
the pair collaborated on a series of gorgeously Zen bell towers for a
Salute to the Arts festival, Steel Geisha Designs emerged. From the
Japanese, geisha translates as “artist” and the steel part was a gimme.
The two had collaborated on dozens of projects over their years of
acquaintance, and as their association steadily morphed from
professional to personal, discovered—like any well-matched couple—that
their individual strengths complemented the other. They fell in love,
opened a small shop, and married soon after. Steve, with a background in
engineering and design, does much of the artistic rendering, while
Anastatia, a second-generation smith, executes the designs. She picked
up the trade after half-heartedly registering for a JC welding class
that, to her surprise, she “loved, loved, loved.”
Their work is
fabulous, gorgeous, it’s brilliant. But don’t call them “artists.” With
the capacity to render from steel almost anything imaginable, they
prefer to be recognized as craftsmen. “We make things with our hands,
and we take great pride in that. We have materials. You pay us for our
materials and our labor and our talent. But you don’t pay three times
more for our name. I don’t believe in that. I don’t care how big we get,
we still don’t think that way,” says Steve.
You
can’t accuse them of opportunism, either. “We have a product line of
light fixtures, and people always say ‘if you sent this to China you
could get it made for a fraction of the cost and just make money,’ but
that’s not what we do,” says Steve. “I know I could design a hundred
things and send them to China and have them mass-produced. I know that.
But I’d rather sell you something we made with our hands right here in
Sonoma.” His grips the desk’s surface, long fingers fanned wide. “No one
makes anything anymore. We take pride in making things, and making them
here. The creativity, the craftsmanship, the fabrication come out of
this building.” In the distance an anvil strikes steel, its steady
ping-pinging a strange, beautiful music.
In only four years
since officially hanging their shingle the shop has grown from a “mom
and pop” barely making ends meet to a three-man operation with far more
work than can be fit into 40 hours. “We never say no,” explains Steve of
his approach to new business. “We might say ‘you’ll have to wait a bit,
but we never say no.” Started in a small corner of the warehouse it now
fills, Steel Geisha Designs built its reputation the old-fashioned way,
one client at a time. Their lone employee, a cheerful fellow called
Ford, is like an honorary member of the family. “We looked for a long
time for Ford,” says Steve. “Maybe it sounds corny, but we thought of it
like he was joining our family. He’ll be with us as long as we’re here,
and maybe someday when we’re not here, he can still be here. We’re
family oriented in our approach to business.”
And not in the
crazy-drunk-uncle sort of family way. Folks like having the Steel Geisha
family around. “Plenty of our jobs last several years,” says Steve. On
one of their more complex assignments, inspired by the client’s desire
to return his old-world house to it’s roots and starting with an
heirloom chandelier found hanging above the client’s forebears in an
ancient photograph, the Steel Geisha team slowly replaced every hinge
and latch in the house. Every railing, every gate, most of the fixtures.
One rod of steel, one hammer stroke at a time.
Anastatia and Steve: a marriage made in metal.
The
big idea is authenticity. Made in America, can’t find it at Pottery
Barn, one-of-a-kind authenticity. It’s almost quaint, the way they talk
about the work.
It’s an old-fashioned passion for craft that motivates; profit alone doesn’t fire the engines at Steel Geisha. You get the sense that the two feel called to something higher, a need to leave the world a bit lovelier than they found it. A footprint, a legacy, a bequest meant to ennoble us all.
It is somewhat
startling to find people in pursuit of goals loftier than simple
acquisition. It’s seems almost un-American, the sense of soulful
contentment both radiate. As if what they’ve built already is enough, as
if, were today their last, they’d be sated.
Steve and Anastatia Chiurro aren’t gunning for the fast lane. They putter along at a pace of their own making, hands always busy. Building with care and confidence something both beautiful and rare, something exceptional, made to last.