Family Tree

When George Nakashima’s daughter, Mira, stumbled across some of her father’s drawings from the early 1940s, she decided to make them into furniture as “an insight into his early creative process,” she says. She updated the designs, substituting maple for poplar and tweaking the scale to meet today’s standards. The resulting Shoki collection, which will be shown this month during NeoCon, is unmistakably Nakashima, though not entirely familiar: the pieces are made of thin lumber with polished edges, not the mighty slabs the craftsman was known for.