Michael Coffey

1928 - 2024

Michael Coffey

Hatfield, MA - Michael Coffey departed this earth on August 10, 2024, leaving behind a legacy of creative expression and beautiful furniture. Michael's dedication to his craft was paralleled by his commitment to social activism, love for language and literature, and the adoration of his family.

Michael was completely self-taught in woodworking, starting his career at home in small basement shops first in Staten Island and then New Rochelle, New York. Driven, meticulous, and detail oriented, he evolved into a master woodworker, emerging as one of America's leading studio art furniture makers. He was the last of a generation of studio art furniture icons. His pieces were shown in art shows and fairs across the world, from the Salon Art & Design in NYC and others in the US, to shows in Paris, England, and Switzerland. His works are in private collections worldwide.

Inspired by European Art Nouveau and the 20th Century Studio Furniture Movement, he made beautiful functional sculptural forms with his unique carving style. He coined the phrase "Geolithic Carving" to describe the deep surface carving that defines much of his work to conjure the erosive action of water flowing over rock for millennia.

Enamored of the curving line, Michael's designs create a sense of movement and action. He felt that undulating lines connect us with nature, with ourselves, with our feelings, with sensuality. He enjoyed toying with illusion and defying gravity, making massive cabinets that appear to float in thin air or balance precariously on a single off-center point. Like Michael's personality, his asymmetrical designs invoked a sense of playfulness and risk, and a challenge to order and control.

Michael stressed the relationship shared by people with their furniture. It was important to him that his creations be used and touched rather than simply collected or displayed. His mission, and the essence of his work, was to create functional sculpture that both aroused passion and stood solid in engineering and functionality.

Soon after Michael's birth in New York City his family moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania to ride out the Great Depression and live off the land. There his family met other renegade transplants in what became a community of artists, writers, academics, and left-wing intellectuals. Until the age of 6 he lived on an isolated ramshackle farm without electricity or plumbing. As an only child, he lived in a world of fantasy and imagination fed by the surrounding fields and forests, and he engineered his own toys from found or foraged materials. These early years planted a deep seed of creativity, and rich imagination.

His family returned to Greenwich Village in the mid-1930s, during a time when the Village was simmering with political ferment, creativity, and Bohemianism. He attended the progressive Little Red School House, where he learned to ask questions and developed a strong sense of social justice. He formed friendships with classmates that lasted his entire life. Thinking he might want to become an engineer, Michael attended Stuyvesant High School. Living in the diverse Chelsea neighborhood during his teen years, he became fluent in Spanish.

As an adult, he took language classes at the International Language Institute in Northampton, joined language conversation groups and became fluent in Russian. His love of language was evident in the creative names he chose for his beloved sculptural pieces, such as Solar Wind, Titan, Megalith and Gryphon.

Following his years at NYU where he majored in psychology, Michael spent a year in Mexico with The American Friends Service Committee. Upon returning to the US, Michael earned a master's degree in group work from Western Reserve School of Social Work then spent 2 years in the armed services. Committed to social justice, Michael became a social worker and community organizer, holding administrative positions with a variety of settlement houses and anti-poverty agencies, first in Roxbury, Massachusetts, then in New York City.

After years of struggling to make a difference, he became disenchanted with trying to "save the world" and moved his family to Vermont, where he continued to design his one-of-a-kind furniture and started the Michael Coffey School of Fine Woodworking.

Michael moved to western Massachusetts in 1989, established himself among other artists and artisans at One Cottage Street in Eastampton and continued to design and build furniture. With colleagues, he founded The One Cottage Street School of Fine Woodworking, catering to the general public, as well as providing advanced education for woodworking professionals. The school became the New England School of Architectural Woodworking under a third generation of owners.

Michael built his dream house in the woods to which he attached his studio and workshop. Near the end of his life, he was finally able to realize an urge he had held for years: to write a memoir of a career making some of the most highly sought after pieces of wood studio art furniture.

Michael remained vibrant, active, and productive, designing furniture until the very end of his life.

He leaves behind his wife Dodie Gaudet; his daughters Linda Coffey and Maria Houston (Jeff); grandchildren Jeremy Zullo, Isabella Coffey-Moore, Dominique Gatto, Austin Coffey-Moore (Autumn Tyler), John Gatto, Dylan Coffey-Moore, and Makenna Houston; great-granddaughter Lanna Zullo; and his first wife, Eleanor Coffey. He was predeceased by his son Daniel.

There will be a celebration of Michael's life in the near future.

In lieu of flowers, consider a contribution to the organizations that made such an impact on his life: Little Red School House, 262 Sixth Avenue (at Bleecker St.), New York, NY 10014 and International Language Institute, 25 New South St., Northampton, MA 01060. In addition, take time to practice a random act of kindness in Michael's memory.