By Jeff Munson
At Lake Tahoe where many have more than one job to make ends meet, two women have tied their local businesses and passion for creativity together to build one dynamic company — Forest Furniture Tahoe.
The art of creativity and a belief and respect in what each brings to the table brought Marianne Rosenfeld and Julianne Kohn together six years ago.
These two are a duo of hard work and tenacity, where one complements the other.
“She (Kohn) is the planner and keeps me on the right path,” said Rosenfeld, a resident of South Lake Tahoe for 30 years. Vice versa, says Kohn, who moved here from the Bay Area in 1991. “Where (Rosenfeld) picks up with me is where she gives me the encouragement to try new things,” Kohn said. “When I got to that point of being burned out on bed framing, Marianne said I should try new things with ornaments and lamps. And from her suggestions, it took off.”
By combining their separate businesses into Forest Furniture Tahoe, they found that their individual strengths complement each other which then in turn allows them to collaborate on new designs and styles. Specifically, Rosenfeld makes furniture and accessory furniture from recycled snow skis, boulders, and faux granite. Living in a ski town, the culture of Tahoe is partly driven by what happens on the hill. Rosenfeld has a knack for finding the skis and shaping them into chairs, tables and even wine racks. “When I see a ski, I’m thinking how I can turn this into something unique,” said Rosenfeld.
“When I see and tree that’s down or a large branch, I see new life in it,” said Kohn.
Kohn will do the occasional log bed, which is how she got her start, but now, she makes fine art sculptures and bear-themed lamps and Christmas ornaments, using wood collected from the forest. She’s made thousands
of them, each with a unique style and a Tahoe signature. Together the pair sell art at craft shows, through word of mouth and online at www.forestfunituretahoe.com. Their work has been featured on the Home and Garden Television Network.
The notion of serendipity in the chance meeting of these two women couldn’t be clearer. Neighbors for ten years, they had known of each other, as artists do in the community, but had not formally met. And then one day, a customer of Kohn said she was looking for someone to make a jewelry display. Kohn remembered her neighbor and the unique furniture that had been sitting outside her home. Kohn told the customer about Rosenfeld. Shortly after the referral, the two introduced themselves to each other, and they became fast friends.
“I was in awe of her reputation in town and these fabulous beds she made. We started talking, and it was as if I just met my best friend and wondered where she had been all this time. We hit it off immediately because she saw what I could do and I saw what she could do,” said Rosenfeld.
Kohn was an apprentice to an artisan that taught her how to make the log beds, and she studied sculpture at Lake Tahoe Community College for many years. She’s studied at LTCC to the point where she continues to take classes in subjects she already knows. The classroom is a great place to get ideas, to hone the craft, to pick up on techniques and to invent your own ways of doing things, she says.
Kohn has made 60 log beds over the course of 12 years. She hasn’t made any recently, however. As the log bed concept became cumbersome and time consuming, Kohn was looking for something new to sell and easier to make. Over time, she found that by taking pieces of wood and branches, she could carve and burn the faces of bears into the wood. What started out small, with a few Christmas ornaments, blossomed into more elaborate creations, bear-carved lamps, candleholders and other furniture assessories.
On a few occasions, she’s seen her early work at garage and yard sales. “When I see what I did then compared to what I do now, there’s no comparison. I’ve made thousands of these bear (decorations) since the first ones and each one is better than the one from before,” Kohn said.
Rosenfeld studied art in Pittsburgh, Pa. Her mother was a painter, and her father was an engineer who taught her woodworking. As she became more skilled with her craft, her father sent her, piece by piece, his
favorite lathe / cutting saw, which she uses for much of her shaping work.
Rosenfeld’s work currently shifts between boulder furniture and recycled ski furniture. Together the two brainstorm about new concepts.
Their work is one-of-a-kind unique and cannot mass produced overseas. The most popular items are Tahoe designs such as the carved bear items and the recycled ski furniture. Custom design pieces can be made for both residences and businesses. Usually, people will drop off their old skis and snowboards at Rosenfeld’s house, which is readily known these days as a dumping ground for old skis.
What once were pairs of skis that took their fair share of turns over the ski season, are turned around by Rosenfeld, literally, into works of recycled art, bringing new life into equipment that would have
otherwise just sat in dusty garages.
“Instead of the skis winding up in landfills, they wind up as furniture,” she said. Rosenfeld also uses a special concrete recipe to make the faux boulders. She starts by making an armature from logs and styrofoam. Then she applies the concrete mixture with a spatula and hand paints granite features on the surface, such as quartz veins and lichen.
Kohn finds branchy wood to carve the noses of her bear and wolf candles and lamps. She draws the face on after she carves the nose and then wood burns the features into each piece. Because they live in Tahoe, their outdoor shows reach people visiting from all over the world. Kohn’s bears have certainly been around the globe, where they sell wholesale to design shops and local gift shops around the lake. Their clients tend to be repeat customers. More recently the team appeared on separate segments of HGTV’s program “That’s Clever.”