The subterranean production space at the School of Visual Arts in New York was so tempting that Jake Szymanski repeatedly enrolled in the same metalworking class to use it. Now, as founder of J.M. Szymanski Workshop & Gallery, the design and fabrication practice he founded in 2014, he has the luxury of turning out furniture and objects in his own New York studio.
Located in the Bronx’s Mott Haven neighborhood, the space is close to craftspeople Szymanski regularly calls upon. “It’s an amazing little pocket that allows us to source directly from our community,” he says.
Born in Colorado to “a family of adventurers,” as he puts it, Szymanski spent most of his childhood in Nepal, where his missionary parents did medical development work to fight leprosy and tuberculosis.
“I attribute those years to wanting to explore and travel,” he says, but the design seed wasn’t planted until later, when he was teaching English in Spain and bolstered his classes with visits to Antoni Gaudí abodes and Moorish marvel the Alhambra. This led him to New York, where he studied interior design at the Fashion Institute of Technology and eventually joined local firm Studio Sofield while dreaming up furniture on the side.
That interest was sparked from a photograph of beautiful vases. “I thought I could make them, and when I did, it ignited something in me,” he recalls.
Szymanski’s pieces—a sleek walnut accented desk, a bench fringed in horsehair, and a shearling-swathed chair among them—are united by their largely steel or iron construction. “Steel is what our buildings are made of. It has something to say,” he explains. Site-specific architectural installations, like a towering carved-iron sculpture, are especially fitting for hospitality settings, he says.
History is also important to Szymanski’s designs, which are often informed by luminaries like Isamu Noguchi, Rembrandt Bugatti, and Alberto Giacometti.
Sometimes, they are spawned from what’s lacking. Consider Flora, the soon-to-debut lighting collection resulting from Szymanski’s need for outdoor illumination. The fixtures meld his elegant iron cages with Brooklyn studio KEEP’s imaginative handblown glass forms.
A four-piece table and lamp collaboration with Saugerties, New York-based ceramic artist Michele Quan is forthcoming, as is the 2025 arrival of Mr. Chapman, an online platform slated to sprout a brick-and-mortar showroom the following year. An opportunity for Szymanski to scale up and experiment with new styles and materials, this contemporary interpretation of the guild will put the spotlight on a variety of designers who embrace classical techniques and traditions. “I romanticize the past,” says Szymanski, “and the patina that comes with it.”
This article originally appeared in HD’s August 2024 issue.
