KAPAAU — At the end of a dirt road in Kapaau, Michael Felig and his business — Ainakoa Furniture Company — can be found.
His workspace is an old sugar mill outbuilding where they used to pull the motors for sugar cane haul trucks. Today, the building houses work tables, jigs, sanders and saws.
But what’s most impressive is the wood — stacks and stacks in all shapes, sizes and varieties. The koa, monkeypod, mango and other woods are literally the building blocks of Felig’s livelihood.
The wood is stacked as high as the ceiling in some places to let it air dry. Drying wood slowly is as important as the work that goes into making furniture. If it isn’t dried correctly, big things can go wrong.
Wood dries at the rate of an inch per thickness per year, Felig said. If he buys two-inch-thick pieces, he lets it sit for two years and then, if needed, pops it in a kiln he has on site.
“It takes about a month of a cycling period in the kiln to get it down to the percentage of moisture I like to work with,” Felig explained. “Wood is like a sponge, slowing absorbing or losing moisture from its surroundings.”
He organizes and segregates his wood stash by wood types and what it will become. For example, based on the grain pattern with a special curvature in one piece, Felig already knows it will be the crest rail for a rocking chair.
Placards in front of the stacked wood piles note the type of wood and when it was purchased. The variety includes slabs of mango from Waipio Valley, a piece of four-way curly koa with lines resembling tiger stripes and a 10-foot, nine-inch piece of monkeypod.
Felig isn’t self-conscious about the obscene amount of wood he has collected for more than 20 years. In fact, he’s just the opposite — immensely proud of his treasure trove.
“I’m such a collector. I mean, I’m a wood junkie, right?” he said. “But it beats other addictions.”
Someday, Felig plans to start selling off the wood as a way to eke out a retirement. But that someday doesn’t seem to be anytime soon.
A California native and business graduate from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Felig made it to Hawaii via Alaska, where he’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to pour concrete in frigid weather. He came to Hawaii to get warm and catch a marlin, and ended up staying after responding to an ad that read: “Cheap rent, carpenter type preferred.”
The job was reconfiguring a house for his landlord, Evan Hansen, in exchange for rent. When that job was done, Felig went to work for Kelly Greenwell running a sawmill atop Hualalai. Tai Lake, an award-winning Big Island woodworker, was the project manager on the job in charge of overseeing the taking of koa on the land.
He didn’t train under Lake long, but it was long enough to know that woodworking was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
“Tai was a true inspiration,” Felig said. “Besides the fact he’s won just about every show he’s ever entered, he’s just a pure master and a kind gentleman.”
And in woodworking, Felig had found something he liked and was good at.
Another early inspiration for him was Peter Blackwell, who now lives in Florida. And like many others, Felig also revered internationally renowned woodworker, Sam Maloof, who died in 2009 at age 93.
Felig shapes hardwood into simple but elegant furniture. He feels it’s not the number of pieces that make a piece beautiful, but how the pieces come together. Felig thinks about the practicality of a piece as well and strives to make each piece of furniture ergonomically comfortable.
He also carefully considers the appearance of every angle of a piece, as well as grain pattern and joinery.
“I always try to pick the right piece of wood for the showpiece part of the furniture,” Felig said
In one of his latest pieces, recently delivered to a new homeowner in North Kohala, Felig painstakingly chose the wood for a headboard based on the direction of the grain and used matching wood for the bed frame. He fashioned the headboard slates in such a way as to suggest palm trees swaying the wind.
For years, Felig has studied the best practices of great woodworkers but his greatest lesson came early on in his career, from the least likely of places.
“In my formative years I was trying to make a chair because I thought the penultimate of a furniture maker was making a comfortable chair — not just a rocking chair but a comfortable dining chair,” he recalled.
Felig went through woodworker magazines trying to trace the back but to no avail. Then one day he found just what he needed at the Hawi dump.
“Sitting there, right in front of me, was ‘Mama’ — a turn-of-the-century, English, white oak chair. I looked at the back leg of that chair and thought, “Okay, I can do that. And look at that curvature… I got good inspiration from that and she’s probably the queen mother of well over 250 chairs,” Felig recalled.
In 26 years, he and his staff have created nearly 4,000 pieces of furniture with him personally laying out each piece in regard to wood selection and design. As a designer, Felig always asks himself, “Where’s the prettiest part of the wood and where should it be showcased?”
“If you just think about it, you’ll know,” he concluded.