Meet the Maker Producing Stunning Furnishings Inspired by Music
A protégé of Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, Jessie Nelson crafts lyrical furniture on display at the new Manhattan gallery Dernier Cri
“I can visualize a song in my head, and know what it’s supposed to sound like—it’s the same thing with furniture,” says Jessie Nelson, a Brooklyn-based designer and maker who is also an accomplished pianist. The Wyoming native—who hails from a town of 12,000 with just two stoplights—favors materials that visibly age with use: concrete, wood, and brass. His latest works are currently included in “Night Shift,” a group show at Dernier Cri, the new Upper East Side gallery by Michael McGraw.
At age 20, Nelson moved New York City “on a wing and a prayer.” Music was his first passion; he’s a certified audio engineer and toured with a Warner Brothers-signed band for eight years before begrudgingly applying for, and landing, a job as a bellhop with the yet-to-open Ace Hotel in NoMad. “Unbeknownst to me, that was going to be a pretty life-altering situation,” he recalls. He worked closely with owners Alex Caldwell and Kelly Sawdon and found himself in the regular orbit of the hotel’s designers Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch of Roman & Williams.
Ultimately, Nelson joined the team at Roman & Williams, working on everything from installs to assisting Alesch in the shop, building pieces for projects including the Chicago Athletic Club and Lafayette restaurant in NoHo. He absorbed their alchemy: “This was the beginning of my unofficial education in design and vignettes…here’s the composition, here’s the mix of materials. High and low, things that are rich and some that are more approachable.”
In 2014, he officially debuted his woodworking studio; one of his first commissions was from the Museum of Modern Art. But his real breakthrough came two years later with the Knuckle on Bone collection he presented at a New York City design fair. He’d been predominantly working with wood, but the show provided the opportunity to explore a new material: concrete. “I like that it was liquid stone. It was malleable,” he says. “It was going to give me different shapes than what I could achieve with wood.”
The collection came together in a very intense five weeks and was well received. Within a year, he’d been picked up by Los Angeles furniture store Blackman Cruz, followed by showrooms Hammer & Spear in L.A. and Fortuny in New York. Working solo in his Gowanus shop, he continues to produce custom works for prominent interior designers including Clodagh, Rockwell Group, and D’Apostrophe Design, as well as Kelly Behun, who commissioned a piece for Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys’s home. “I didn’t know the rules,” Nelson says. “It is easy to break them when you don’t give a damn about them. Safe is boring.”
His influences span post-Soviet Brutalism to Catholic tradition. The High Altar Boy console, for example, nods to his Catholic mother’s weekly candle-lighting ritual, with one candlestick for each member of his family. The Acolyte table, his newest piece, was largely inspired by a trip to the southern Italian town of Matera. But Nelson doesn’t aspire to make clandestine works. “What I like about what I’m doing is you can see the hand, the marring of the wood. The concrete I pour sometimes has bubbles in it, and I’m not trying to hide it,” he says. “I’m not trying to make it look perfect. I want you to see that it’s there.”