Designers craft wooden furniture to mark LA wildfires anniversary

In January 2025, wildfires tore through Los Angeles, devastating the neighbourhoods of Altadena and the Pacific Palisades in particular, and causing widespread damage. 30 people lost their lives, and more than 16,000 homes and structures were burned.

A year later, the LA design and art gallery Marta is presenting a group show of crafted wooden furniture made from trees cleared from Altadena after the Eaton Fire. Titled ‘From the Upper Valley in the Foothills’ (until 31 January 2026), and organised with the sculptor and designer Vince Skelly, the show celebrates the resilience and the regenerative potential of wood, but also of LA’s communities.

‘From the Upper Valley in the Foothills’: creative responses to the LA wildfires on view at Marta

Two dozen designers from the city, each with their own experiences of the fires, have participated. ‘I wanted the show to feel like a true community response to the fires, so we focused on featuring local designers and artists,’ explains Skelly.

The participants partnered with Angel City Lumber, which sources locally downed trees for use in community projects. The lumber mill collected wood cleared from Altadena, including Aleppo pine, cedar, coastal live oak and shamel ash.

Each individual or duo of makers was asked to transform the wood into objects of rest and contemplation. 30% of all proceeds from sales of the objects at the show is being donated to the non-profit organisation Greenline Housing to aid in ongoing rebuilding efforts in Altadena.

Sam Klemick – one of the Wallpaper* USA 400 – hand-carved a stool out of Aleppo pine, designed to resemble fabric draped over a small table. To address the naturally occurring checks in the wood, she added small wooden ‘patches’ that prevent cracks from expanding, and referencing the patchwork techniques she uses in her upholstery work.

‘Patchworking, to me, is about mending something that is broken or needs repair,’ says Klemick. ‘That idea became especially meaningful as I reflected on the source of the lumber used for the show and its connection to the Altadena community.’

Klemick says she will ‘never forget’ the morning after the fires began. ‘The sky was dark and grey and ash rained down heavily as I walked to my car. I was fortunate to live outside the evacuation zone, but I still headed to a friend’s house to hunker down. It was all so surreal; if you didn’t lose your home, you had a close friend that did.’

For her, the show ‘creates a space to remember and reflect – and not move on like business as usual,’ she says. ‘It’s easy for people to come together immediately after something like this happens, but the endurance of support a year later, and for years to come, also really matters.’

Artist and designer Vincent Pocsik, who often depicts human body parts in his sculptural and furniture works, made a stool out of cedar and cherry wood, featuring ears. ‘I believe wood has a very high absorption of energy,’ he says. ‘Since this piece of cedar was salvaged from the fires I knew it would be holding so much of that energy and I wanted to honour that.’ The inclusion of ears signifies the ‘absorption and understanding’ that the material holds, he explains.

‘I think a show like this does speak to the resilience of this city and its creative community, as well as the resilience of humans in general,’ says Pocsik. ‘If the wood is telling a story in this show, it is saying that it survived and still has life to give.’

Architect-designer Rachel Shillander’s piece, ‘Power Pole’, is a stool made from a single salvaged block of coastal live oak. The surface is worked, or as she explains, ‘embroidered’ with nails, creating shimmering images and text. Featured are the lyrics to a folk song commonly associated with the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, ‘Old Lady Leary’, but rewritten for the Los Angeles fires. Elsewhere Shillander depicts flames and a compass.

‘The work draws on folklore, nostalgia, and the way societies narrate catastrophe,’ she says. ‘Visually, the stool recalls the base of a neighbourhood power pole, layered over time with nails, notices, flyers and information, recording community life.’

Shin Okuda, founder of design studio Waka Waka, worked with his textile designer wife Kristin Dickson-Okuda to create a bench from a trunk section of an ash tree. Featuring a single decorative cushion, the minimally crafted bench provides a place to rest close to the ground.

Designer Ryan Belli, meanwhile, created a furniture piece out of Ponderosa pine that acts both as bench and monument, with a boulder-like form for sitting on and a carved ‘gravestone’ topped by a small aluminium urn that symbolises the fragility of life. ‘The devastating fires provided a terrifying reminder of the temporal nature of all things,’ says Belli. His takeaway: ‘Be nice to yourself and others.’

‘From the Upper Valley in the Foothills’ is on view at Marta, LA, until 31 January 2026

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