Former monk Tucker Robbins, left, travels to remote communities, like the Sagada Mountain province in the Philippines, right, to find furnishings made by local craftsmen.

"Cut the breasts off," Tucker Robbins is instructing a worker, amid the din of electric saws in his studio near Manhattan's meatpacking district. The mass mastectomies are being performed on a group of voluptuous African chairs. In their preop state, the wooden breasts jut right out of the chairs and poke the back of the sitter. Robbins wants to make things more comfortable. Once used in a marriage ceremony performed by the Nyamwezi tribe, the chairs will soon grace the VIP rooms of Ian Schrager's new Sanderson and St. Martin's Lane hotels in London.

Welcome to the home of "modern primitivism," the moniker by which Robbins refers to his unique furniture collection. For the past 15 years, Robbins, a former monk, has been a cultural ambassador, traveling between trend-setting designer showrooms in New York and the remote jungle communities where he hires local craftsmen to help design and build his furniture.

To some, employing native craftsmen to make one-of-a-kind pieces for wealthy clients smacks of cultural imperialism. But Robbins sees himself as introducing a positive form of globalism into the jungle. "The open market is unique to America," he says. "My gift to the tribal people is this New York openness and willingness to cooperate with one another."

Although he has been in business a relatively short time, Robbins's client list reads like a who's who of design mavens. His work appears in Edgar and Clarissa Bronfman's recently renovated New York apartment and in their country houses. Donna Karan has at least one of his pieces in each of her residences. Robert Redford sleeps under a Robbins-designed headboard. High-profile interior decorators such as Juan Montoya and Clodagh say they are using Robbins's work in most of their jobs. What's the stampede all about? "His furniture is very comforting," says Clodagh. "It reminds us of the past. If you own technology, it's already out of date. This stuff is never out of date. There's a continuum about it."

Located off bustling Ninth Avenue, Robbins's showroom does not announce itself to the public. A small metal placard embossed with his name hangs next to the freight-elevator entrance of a huge anonymous warehouse with grimy windows. But a ride up the dusty elevator transports one into a large open space with the tranquil feeling of a church or a temple. Rice-papered window screens let through a diffuse white light. The rich, glowing patina of dark-hued tables and stools makes them look as though they have been around for eternity. Among the recognizable objects are more mysterious ones that could be artifacts from some ancient religious ceremony: large, perfectly round wooden balls; a golden corrugated boat struck through with tree branches, looking as though it has sailed to Hades and back; a bed filled with black volcanic stones.

A slender 47 year old with a prominent brow and penetrating, deep-set eyes, Robbins looks more like a sage than a designer. Before he embarked on a career in the decorative arts, he spent 10 years as a monk, observing vows of poverty and celibacy. During that time, he lived in a group house in New Haven, cooking and cleaning for his daily keep. "I wanted to learn about the world inside of myself," Robbins says. His spirituality today is informed by the main precept of all great religions: Know thyself. But he won't describe his faith, or identify it, saying that like his furniture, it does not fit into a conceptual framework. "It's a place where there is no up, no down, no left, no right," he says.

Robbins is the product of privilege and old money. His family founded Spalding sporting goods, and he was raised in a Fairfield, Connecticut, house filled with colonial antiques. But from an early age, Robbins rebelled against comfort and convention. "I had come from a background of plenty," he says. "I wanted to experience the essence of things."

Robbins always felt like an outsider. He attended the preppy Westminster School, where, he says, "I learned about the culture I lived in--their fear of being different." He found a kindred spirit in his grandmother, Elizabeth Brown Robbins, with whom he would travel during his summer vacations. Although his grandmother was from a blueblood New England family, she was anything but conventional. "I don't want to retire to the back of a Cadillac," Robbins remembers her saying. She taught English in Greece and on a Navajo reservation in Arizona.

During a trip to Arizona with his grandmother, Robbins became intrigued with Native American culture. Later he returned to the state to attend Prescott College, a small environmentally oriented school that incorporated Navajo and Hopi approaches to life. Robbins spent a year and half at the college. Then he met a man he calls his "teacher of life" (Robbins refuses to identify or even characterize him) and began the long "internal journey" that took him to New Haven.

After a decade of self-examination, Robbins felt that he was ready to reenter the world. He left the order in the early Eighties and, casting about for something to do, accompanied a friend on a trip to Guatemala to organize a weavers' cooperative. There he was entranced by the Mayan's handcrafted wood furniture. "The appeal of the stuff was its authenticity," Robbins says. "There's not enough of the hand of the artist in a lot of modern design. But the hand of the artist is also disappearing in the third world."

Robbins sees his business as a way to help ancient cultures survive. "My interest," he says, "is in supporting the indigenous people, giving them work on their own terms." Many of the pieces that Robbins found in the more accessible Mayan villages were imitations of European styles. The simpler hand-hewn furniture appeared deep in the rain forest, in hamlets cut off from European influence. "Because of the remoteness, they would use an axe instead of a saw. An axe of course leads to a different design," Robbins explains, pointing out a table in his studio. Indeed, Crate & Barrel would have trouble coming out with a knockoff of this particular item. The table is smooth to the touch but alive with ridges and depressions. "The richly patterned grain comes from being milled by hand," he says.

Mayans don't have a furniture tradition in the European sense, Robbins explains. Frequently the pieces have a dual application. Stools are concave on one side for milling wheat, but when flipped upside down, they serve as seating.

The hand-hewn pieces were hard for Robbins to find, and the craftsmen who made them even more so. As Western methods and tools came to the rain forest, traditional woodworking had begun to disappear. Chajul, Guatemala, the village that in Robbins's opinion produced some of the best craftspeople, had been shattered by a civil war. After tramping deep into the rain forests, circumventing both rebels and the army, Robbins located several surviving craftsmen. Because of the fighting, they were working as agricultural laborers. Robbins was able to put them back into the carving business by finding clients in the U.S. to buy their work.

Shortly after he started importing Mayan stools and benches about 15 years ago, Robbins, who had no formal training in design, began developing ideas for new objects himself. Usually he comes up with a rough concept and then explains to a craftsman what he wants. He is currently designing a chair that will help Westerners sit cross-legged on the floor. As part of the process, he reads widely. A slatted wood cabinet next to the entrance of Robbins's showroom is stacked with art and anthropology books with such titles as Patterns That Connect: Social Symbolism and The Soul of a Tree.

Robbins had little trouble finding an appreciative and influential clientele. An old family friend, interior designer Albert Hadley, recalls that in the beginning Robbins was selling the furniture out of his grandmother's house in Connecticut. Hadley uses Robbins's furniture in traditional rustic settings as well as in more modern, minimalist ones. "It's the perfect complement to a more open space," he says. Interior designer Juan Montoya finds a similar versatility to the Robbins line, using pieces liberally in country houses but more selectively in sleeker apartments with Formica and glass surfaces. "In modern environments, his pieces become unique, one-of-a-kind things," Montoya says.

Although his objects might function individually in a Western household, Robbins says that when he is out in the field, he always looks for pieces made in series. "I look for multiples, outmoded agricultural tools, outmoded housing that can be utilized," he says. "That's the ideal situation." He also looks for the objects that tribal craftsmen continue to produce on their own, such as the African chairs.

Even in the jungle, culture is not static. Techniques and objects can fall out of use. Ironically, without the support of Western patrons, some age-old crafts could be forgotten and lost to the world. Robbins says this almost happened with the Guatemalan carvers, who had stopped producing and only started again when he appeared on the scene and provided them with a market for their wares.

Robbins also owns a few tribal sacred objects. He points out a large ceramic piece with spikes: a nineteenth-century fetish jar from Burkina Faso, West Africa. Women would fill the jar with various potions and liquids, cast spells on it, and then drink from it in an effort to nurture their pregnancies. Robbins only buys this sort of object when a tribal people no longer has any use for it. Certain ceremonies and practices lose their magic, and as a result, once-venerated objects no longer have the same significance in that culture. "There are sacred objects that lose their power," Robbins says, "and then they go on the marketplace."

After Guatemala, Robbins's next stop was the Philippines, where he started working with lowland tribes. Soon he learned that some of the work he most admired came from the Igorot, a tribe that lived in the highlands. The lowlanders warned Robbins that the highland tribes were headhunters and could not be trusted. This only piqued his curiosity.

A Frenchman that he met in the lowlands gave Robbins the name of an Igorot trader. Armed with nothing except that name, Robbins took a 16-hour bus trip high up into the hills. It was night when the bus let him off at a remote spot near a path leading into the forest. After the bus rumbled off into the darkness, Robbins ventured down the path toward the Igorot village. Although it was pitch black and he was visiting a tribe of headhunters, Robbins says that he was not scared. Some-thing about his ramrod-straight posture and the ethereal intensity of his gaze makes it easy to believe him.

When he arrived at the village, throngs of excited tribesmen, some dressed in traditional cloth G-strings and others in blue jeans, surrounded him. He pronounced the name of the Igorot trader and was immediately escorted to the man's hut, where he was greeted with great hospitality. Robbins claims that the Igorot still occasionally practice headhunting, but only as a way of enforcing their rules. "Visitors usually have nothing to fear unless they break tribal laws," he says.

The next day the trader took Robbins on a shopping expedition through the jungle. As they stopped at various huts, the trader would ask people if they had anything to sell. At one old woman's hut, Robbins made his first purchase: a basket used for the storage of locusts. "Before World War II, locusts were the main source of protein for the Igorot," says Robbins. He paid the woman $10 for the basket, more money than she had ever seen before, upon which she ran out of the hut to show the money to her neighbor.

Ordinarily Robbins bargains with people. "It's just like working in a fruit-and-vegetable market in any part of the world," he says. "They throw out a price and either I accept it, or I give them a price. Often we meet somewhere in the middle."

Robbins calls his work a collaborative enterprise. He maintains that he is both helping to keep age-old crafts alive and cross-pollinating them with more modern ones. His Guatemalan partner from the early days is currently in the Philippines training Igorot craftsmen in the art of cabinetry.

Since his first meeting with the Igorot, Robbins has become their economic lifeline to the modern world. He has about 30 Igorot craftsmen on his payroll, and the dollars he brings in are helping the tribe to move into modern houses with electricity and telephones. Robbins sees nothing wrong with the Igorot modernizing certain aspects of their lives. He believes that ancient cultures can preserve their traditions even as they acquire Western luxuries. He claims to send about $500,000 a year to overseas indigenous communities. While the money that he sends is making major changes among native peoples, Robbins says he is just breaking even.

Currently Robbins spends about three months a year visiting indigenous groups in rain forests around the world, constantly expanding the range of places he visits, not only learning about different types of carving, but also increasing his stock of exotic woods. Unlike more temperate climates, rain forests have an enormous variety of distinctive woods, and Robbins is constantly on the lookout for new kinds, be they rare rosewood from Timor or black wood from Borneo. For Robbins, tropical woods--with their different sheens, colors, grains, and densities--are like wine: Each region produces unique vintages.

Because many of the tropical woods that Robbins utilizes are illegal to harvest, he uses only recycled wood, often more than a hundred years old. Old wood is more valuable to him: The best patina is from human use--oils from the hands help condition it. In the same way that Western castoffs might contain treasures for an indigenous community, the detritus of their culture is valuable to Robbins. It seems that almost anything made of wood can be recycled or refashioned into a piece of furniture for his showroom. Thus, the boards from old houses that the Igorot leave behind as their way of life modernizes become tables in Robbins's workshop. Old Igorot baskets made out of vines turn into rice-paper-covered lamps, some of which now hang in the windows of the Polo store on Madison Avenue. Even the enormous roots of dead tropical trees are dug up and, with minimal carving, made into coffee tables, their sinuous twisting shapes resembling some frozen primordial force.

By stressing raw materials, Robbins is not so much transforming nature as working with it, continuing a non-Western approach to furniture design. "The substance informs the shape of things in Eastern and Native American design, but in the so-called civilized world, we don't do that," says Jonathan Fairbanks, a curator emeritus at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. "In general, the Western world has a different take on raw material--we try to overpower it."

But as Western society is inundated with machine-made objects, people are becoming overwhelmed by a kind of "visual fatigue," Fairbanks says. "A lot of people have been living in glass boxes. Now they've made a discovery of texture and tactile experience, which has been missing in modern life." Clodagh, who says she designs for all the senses, concurs. "It's a desire for grounding," she says. "There's something tactile and reassuring about a really beautiful piece of wood."

In a sense, Robbins's work with indigenous peoples is an extension of the ascetic life he lived as a monk. He finds the same spare qualities in the tribal people's furniture that he strives for in his religion. For Robbins, it is as if the objects that he sells have a spiritual life of their own. "To introduce an element of humanity into environments that are modern and man-made reminds us who we are," he says. "It reminds us of our consciousness."

Alex Ulam lives in New York and writes frequently about design and planning.