Jason Green combines an array of woods for unexpected color in his pieces, like “Flare Console Table.” Credit: Jon Heller.

Jason Green was in his fifth year of studying towards an economics doctoral degree at the University of Colorado at Boulder when he hit a wall. “I realized I needed to be making things with my hands,” he explains. Although he’d never worked with wood, he was naturally attracted to it, and found a local furniture maker who offered classes in 2003. That led to an intensive 12-week course at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, Maine. At that point, he says, “I knew I could do this for the rest of my life.”

In 2006, he set up shop in Boone, N.C., and started working on commissions until he launched Curviture Studio Furniture in 2009.

Green enjoys the challenge of adding curves to every piece he makes. “I never really did traditional work,” he says. Although he started off with “boxier” commissions with straighter lines and corners, he was never fully happy with them. “Making curves out of wood, which is inherently straight, takes more learning and knowledge,” he says. And he finds the challenge rewarding.

Green lives and works to capture the organic movement in wood. “It’s nature expressing itself through its grain and growth pattern,” he says. To honor it, he works by steadfast rules: he only uses solid hardwoods, won’t work with plywood or veneer, and never adds stains, dyes or paint. Most important, each piece has to be functional. “I almost think of my work in terms of what I don’t do as opposed to what I do,” he laughs.

Green’s favorite part of the process, though, is adapting a silhouette he sees in his head to a prototype. “I love giving shape to something only I can see,” he says. He largely uses bent lamination and string inlay techniques in his current body of work, but hopes to combine natural-edge slabs with elegant curves in future pieces. But don’t expect him to stick strictly to furniture, either. “New work will be smaller,” Green says. “Smaller home furnishing items—possibly for the kitchen.”