Into The Woodworks

From koa to monkeypod, each hand-crafted piece born in Satoshis Hālawa Valley studio is made to be lived with — and loved — for a lifetime.
(*All photos courtesy Satoshi Yamauchi.*)

Satoshi Yamauchi is a master furniture maker with an uncanny ability to take remarkable wood and create even more remarkable, unique, custom-made dining tables and chairs, and live edge tables, coffee tables, beds with headboards, consoles and more.

In his studio deep in Halawa Valley, he uses koa, mango, monkeypod, oak, walnut and other woods to create one-of-a-kind pieces for customers who will live with and enjoy them for a lifetime.

Satoshi, 42, was born in Japan and knew as a teen that he would be a woodworker. After high school he attended wood working school, studied in Gifu City at the Gifu Academy of Forest Science and Culture Woodzzworking Department and then trained as a furniture maker in Hida-Takayama, a city known for its wood furniture industry in Japan.

Satoshi partners with his wife, Marcia, a collaboration that began in 2010 in Tokyo. He is the craftsman while she handles most other aspects of the business, from helping in design to the all-important customer service that they believe makes their business unusual among furniture makers in Honolulu.

Marcia was also born in Japan to an American father and Japanese mother. She attended international school and speaks both Japanese and English like a native. She smooths the communication for Satoshi, whose English is not quite up to hers.

They moved to Honolulu because her sister and brother-in-law were living here. Her brother-in-law convinced them that there was a demand in Hawai‘i for top-quality, customized furniture and not many Japan-trained craftsman to fill it.

“At the beginning of a project, we visit our customer’s home and do a pretty thorough meeting with our customer to understand what they’re looking for and how they will use the table or other piece,” Marcia explains. “After that, we do the drawing together and Satoshi finds the wood.”

However, one recent project began with the wood, in fact, with the tree. “We built a live-edge mango slab dining table for a family in Makiki Heights in Honolulu. The customers first approached us with an unusual request, to salvage their mango tree, which was about to be trimmed.

“We reached out to our sawmill friend who came out and cut slabs from the mango log. The slabs were then dried over the course of a few years, and Satoshi built the table,” Marcia recalls.

“We were so happy to give the tree that lived for so many years with the family a second life and it even went back to where it grew all these years!” says Satoshi.

“I feel like conversing a lot with our customers trying to understand what they’re looking for, good communication, is so important,” says Marcia. “Sometimes we end up being friends with them, too.

“We once made a bunch of furniture, maybe 10 pieces, for one family living in Kahala. So, we were working with them for an entire year. And they would invite us to Thanksgiving and holidays like that because we’re both from Japan, so we don’t have a lot of family here.”

In addition to residential work, Satoshi and Marcia offer commercial woodworking services, creating work that can be seen in hotels, cafes, restaurants, airport lounges and bookstores.

The Wayfinder Hotel in Waikīkī and the small CakeM shop at 808 Sheridan are just two places where Satoshi’s work may be seen. “We say, if you are looking for retail display cabinets, tables, shelves and so on, you’ve come to the right place. All our work is made to specification, and we work closely with owners, managers, designers, architects, and contractors to achieve the best,” Marcia says.

Satoshi uses both modern woodworking equipment and traditional Japanese carpentry tools for the detail work. The Japanese tools are best for joinery like the butterfly or bow-tie joint to hold two or more slabs of wood together.

But for all Satoshi’s passion for craftsmanship, creativity and love for the wood, they believe that their partnership is the key to their growing success and the growing number of orders and requests for estimates that keep rolling in.

And when there is time between major projects and leftover wood, Satoshi may make bowls, trays or other small items like butter knives and trivets. But a visit to their website shows the amazing range of large furniture pieces the couple have created.

swoodwork.com