Nancy Hiller never intended to become one of America’s most famous cabinet makers, just a handful of women in a male-dominated industry. She needed a decent chair.
After graduating from Cambridge University in 1978, she moved with her boyfriend to a small town in central England in search of work. She worked in a metal foundry, but she could only afford an unfurnished apartment. To save her money, she decided to bury it herself, building her first table and chairs from scavenged wood and scrap wood.
Her DIY period took her to vocational school, followed by a series of jobs in bespoke furniture workshops across the UK. After she returned to the United States, she held similar positions in Vermont and Montana before she settled in Bloomington, Indiana, where in 1995 she was named N.R. Opened a workshop.
From there, she has steadily built a quiet but staunch reputation as one of the nation’s finest woodworkers, creating bespoke, precision-constructed cabinets, side tables, and entire kitchens for clients in New York and Chicago. produced. Her offerman, actor Nick, a skilled woodworker and one of Ms. Hiller’s many fans, called her “a master of her Obi-Wan Kenobi level.”
Hiller died at his home in Bloomington on August 29. she was 63 years old. Her husband, Mark Longacre, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
Inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Hiller specializes in clean lines, minimal embellishment, and authenticity in materials and construction. She has created something that has beauty in function and durability.
There was nothing fancy about her work. She resisted the label “artist”, but people tried to take advantage of it. And while she deliberately undercuts her peers, it’s not to bring them down, but to make her work affordable for middle-class clients who appreciate good design and hard work. It was to make it available at a price.
“She didn’t want to do work that only a few people had access to,” said Megan Fitzgerald, a woodworker and editor, in an interview. “She wanted a job that was accessible to everyone,” she said.
Nancy Rebecca Hiller was born on July 2, 1959 in Miami Beach, Florida. Her father Herbert Hiller worked in the advertising industry and her mother Mary Lee Adler was a homemaker.
Later in life, she credited her mother with her craft prowess. Her mother fixed things around her house and built a playhouse in her backyard.
When she was nine, her parents lured a group of bohemians to live on their property outside Miami. As a refuge, they built a cottage in one corner of the property using recycled wooden planks.
“It was amazing to see them building houses with saws and saws,” she said. Lost Art Press 2020 interview, her publisher. “It was so direct. It was amazing to see that with tools and simple materials you could build a habitable dwelling, no matter how crude. It was great for me to see.” was.”
After Nancy’s parents separated (and later reunited) in 1971, her mother took Nancy and her sister to London to attend a school run under the philosophy of Austrian social reformer Rudolf Steiner. and woodworking. By her graduation, she was making decent toys and chotchikes.
Nancy studied classics at Cambridge but got tired of pretending to be in class and dropped out after a few semesters. She later received her certificate from a technical school called City & Guilds. Older than the 16 and 17 year old boys who are studying to be carpenters.
This experience and subsequent work in the workshop instilled in her a proletarian ethos very different from the aesthetic ethos taught in British art schools. Along the way, she found herself drawn to the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris, pioneers of the Arts and Crafts movement.
“Make this table,” she wrote Popular Woodworking magazine project In 2018, he said, “It was just the kind of ‘noble labor’ that Ruskin urged everyone to do. Work that stretches us and brings us what promises to stretch others. “
Hiller’s work was not only arts and crafts as style, but as philosophy. The movement emerged as a response to the mass-produced commodities of the late 19th century, where superficial decoration masked a decline in quality. Critics like Ruskin believed that simple products were better used in an honest and solid way, built to last rather than to impress.
“She made the mundane valuable,” said leading British kitchen designer Jonny Gray in a telephone interview.
Besides her husband and parents, Hiller has an older sister, Magda Malakowitz.
Ms. Hiller was similarly appreciated for her writing. She is a prodigious talent, having published how-to guides in magazines such as Fine Woodworking and Old House Journal, as well as Kitchen Think: A Guide to Design and Construction, From Refurbishing to Renovation (2020). 2009) and wrote wonderful books that transcend genres. A book about history and philosophy as much as how to make a sideboard.
Most of her writings were academic. Her book The Hoosier Cabinet in Kitchen History (2009) is considered a landmark history of the American Arts and Crafts sector. She intended to pursue her doctorate, but after she earned her bachelor’s degree in religious studies from Indiana University in 1993 and her master’s degree in 1996, she decided her mind was a workshop. She decided to be in
The title of one of her books, Making Things Work: Tales From a Cabinetmaker’s Life (2017), captures the heart of her career and what she hopes people will feel about it. It has a double meaning. This book is indeed about creating useful objects. But it’s also the hard work of making things for a living — how to please clients and how to use materials efficiently.
She often spoke of passion in the original Latin root meaning “passio” or “suffering,” and how the true experience of craftsmanship entails an enormous amount of pain and hardship. She wanted to get rid of the woodwork romance and persuade those drawn to it to find another outlet.
“Approaching this work in the most existential way has never let me lose my passion, but it has taught me what deeper forms of passion entail,” she told Fine Woodworking in 2020. I am writing to But be sure to open your eyes before diving in. “