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Image courtesy Evan Germann
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Image courtesy Evan Germann
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Image courtesy Evan Germann
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Image courtesy Evan Germann
Evan Germann doesn’t just make furniture. He is an artist and a craftsman. But don’t let the artistic beauty of a table or chest fool you into thinking his furniture needs to be handled gingerly. Germann, 32, purposefully fashions his furniture for family use and wants it to last long enough to become a family heirloom.
“My work is meant to be used; it is meant to be lived with…not something that sits in a corner and looks pretty.”
Germann started his business, Evan H. Germann Cabinetmaker, in May of 2016. He shares a rented space with two other companies at 17 W. Vine St. in Lancaster, just a block from Penn Square.
When the Kansas native arrived in Lancaster 10 years ago, he held a bachelor’s degree in art history. Earning that degree included as much of the making of art as it did the study of its history, and college is where he started working with wood, he says. It was in Kansas where he met his wife, Jenny, also an artist.
It was here in Lancaster that he decided he wanted to have a career in woodworking. That led him to earn an associate’s degree in cabinetmaking at Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology, studying with Stephen Latta, whom Germann calls his mentor.
While working on his bachelor’s degree, Germann says, he learned what he liked things to look like. And at Stevens College, he says, “I learned how to make things look that way.”
Germann stresses that Latta has been a big influence in his career even though their styles of woodworking are nothing alike. Germann builds his furniture as Latta taught him, but Germann’s style is contemporary. And Germann likes to “overbuild,” he says, meaning he likes to make his furniture stronger than it needs to be.
“I use a lot of exposed joinery, which leaves a real roadmap to how things were constructed. I call it construction anthropology, where you can look at something and see how it was made and the decisions that went into it,” he says.
Quite often, the mortise-and-tenon structure is exemplified in contrasting woods and is a deliberate part of his design. His favorite woods to use are quarter-sawn sycamore and a wood from Africa called wenge. Germann also likes to use reclaimed materials.
Last summer, he took an heirloom five-legged dining room table that was falling apart, and with four of the legs made a new table, a “very modern and practical piece that had a notion toward where it had come from. Then I took the fifth one and made a little side table with it.”
In the midst of starting his business, Germann and his wife bought an 1880 house on Mary Street in Lancaster, gutted the first floor and began the process of rehabbing the house from the ribs out. Together, Evan and Jenny are designing their new home, and Evan is rebuilding it into exactly what they want. They couldn’t live in the house for about a year, and then there was the “cobbler’s wife” phase. Instead of the cobbler’s wife having no shoes, Germann says, “For a long time, the cobbler’s wife had no kitchen sink.”
The couple has collaborated on artwork a little, with Evan making frames for Jenny’s landscape and cityscape paintings (watercolor, acrylic and wood burning) or her making suggestions about his woodworking. But Germann says, “We used to be really bad on collaborating. The house fixed that.”
The house is a combination of both of their tastes, he says. “It’s been a wonderful experience working together on our house. It’s hard to find a crossover for our two mediums,” he says.
Jenny has a similar view of the house project: “It’s an interesting way to grow our relationship. We’ve both learned a lot about the other and ourselves through the process.” Evan and Jenny have been married for eight years.
They met while they both were working on their undergraduate art degrees in Kansas. “We were conditioned to get open critique [on their art]. That’s a skill set not a lot of people learn, how to be honest,” says Jenny, who is the executive director of the Manheim Township Educational Foundation as well as an artist. She sells her art at Red Raven Art Co. in Lancaster.
One can’t help but notice the similarity between the open mortise-and-tenon joinery in Germann’s woodwork projects and the man himself. It’s not something Germann has contemplated before, but he agrees.
“It doesn’t really occur to me to try to present myself differently than I really am,” says Germann.
And not surprisingly, Jenny also sees a connection between her husband and the furniture he builds.
“I think his furniture is a physical representation of the type of person Evan is. He likes to lay the foundation for a quality product. He appreciates putting in the work up front so he has something that will be lasting. It’s how he approaches woodworking and life. He makes choices that are long lasting,” she says.
Germann also likes to create pieces of furniture that are specific to a person’s needs. He did that for a couple who lives in Lancaster city.
The dad of the couple often worked from home while caring for their 3-year-old daughter. So that he could be on eye level with his small daughter, this dad sat on the floor in front of the family coffee table, with his computer monitor on the table. He asked Germann to create a piece that would be more functional for his needs, which not only included being used as a work surface or a coffee table but having an active daughter climbing on it. So Germann created what he and customer called a “lounging” desk.
Germann loves creating furniture that becomes part of the life of a family and does exactly what the user needs it to do. Since these personally tailored pieces of furniture can’t be bought at a big box store or online, Germann knows furniture like this is “not in the scope of what people think they can have.”
But he gives people the option they didn’t know was available. “You can come to me and get exactly what you didn’t know you wanted,” says Germann.
To see Germann’s furniture, go to facebook.com/WoodenGoodsUSA or to evanhgermann.com. To see the Germanns’ home rehab project, go to Instagram and search #maryjanerehab.
