About & Press
Harris By Hand is a family company with a DIY mentality. Jason Harris, and his father Gordon Harris, truly enjoy their work. Each piece is an individual artistic expression, representing their commitment to handmade processes and timeless craftsmanship.
Harris by Hand was founded in 2014, but the company really started in the early 90s when Gordon Harris gave his son Jason a chance at construction work. Ten-year-old Jason built a closet on his first day, and a passion for woodworking was born. Over the years Gordon and Jason refined their woodworking skills as a team. Gordon constructed the neighborhood where Jason grew up, so there was no shortage of woodworking challenges. The Harris By Hand wood shop is still located in this neighborhood today.
Jason continued his exploration of woodworking through creative outlets. With a reputation as both a craftsman and a musician, it’s no surprise that Jason was given the opportunity to install custom woodwork at a recording studio. Jason’s task was to construct wood diffusers for the studio’s control room. The installation needed to be beautiful, while improving sonic characteristics of the room. This challenge reinvigorated Jason’s passion for creative woodworking, and he began experimenting with unconventional woods and techniques. Jason found inspiration in Japanese master woodworkers. This inspiration remains manifested in Jason’s work as a balance between aesthetics and functionality.
Harris By Hand has a clear mission: to create useful, beautiful artwork from wood. Jason and Gordon Harris embody the DIY mentality through handmade processes. Each detail is considered individually, and the natural characteristics of the wood are embraced. The finished product represents proud craftsmen enjoying their work.
Harris by Hand carves out a unique business in Langhorne
Matt Schickling / Times photo – Jason Harris at his Langhorne woodworking workshop.
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Jason Harris laid a hunk of unfinished walnut on the table in his Langhorne workshop. Usually, he paces around for a while before he lays a finger on it, looking at it from every angle. Maybe a few hours pass before he lands on an idea. Last week, he was just talking through the process.
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“I let the wood kind of decide what it wants to be, in a way,” Harris said. “You’ve got to consider every possibility.”
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Harris, 33, started his own company, Harris By Hand, in 2014. Based out of the workshop next to his childhood home, he creates what he calls “useful, beautiful artwork” from wood.
Matt Schickling / Times photo – Jason Harris at his Langhorne woodworking workshop.
If you’ve ever been to Philadelphia’s Bourbon & Branch restaurant or Yardley’s Vault Brewing Company, you may have seen, or heard, his work. For Vault, he made flight boards for beer and other items. At Bourbon & Branch, he’s done a lot more.
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There’s simpler things, like menu boards. Then there’s more intricate projects in the upstairs bar and live music venue, like the walnut extension for the bar and a wooden chandelier that hangs from the ceiling.
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He even helped make the stage and some of the surrounding structures that lend to the venue’s top-notch acoustics. Harris has a relevant background in that as a graduate from Phoenix, Arizona’s Conservatory Recording Arts and Sciences, where he studied sound engineering.
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The acoustics benefit from a wood diffuser that faces the PA system and recycled cedar pallets that distribute the sound overhead.
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Harris knows the benefits this has for live bands and audiences. He’s played in several bands through the years, previously as a member of The Grand National. Now he plays bass with The End of America, a folk rock band in Philadelphia.
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Both of those pursuits, music and woodworking, come from the same creative drive, but there’s a distinction for Harris.
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In playing music, you’re part of a team, collaborating with bandmates to build songs. You collaborate with studio engineers to capture them on record, with live engineers to get the mix right for audiences.
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Woodworking is more individual. Harris guides the whole process independently.
“I feel like it’s mine,” he said. “And I feel a little more pride when I’m done.”
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It’s a skill he learned from his father, Gordon Harris, around the age of 10. Harris’ father owns a construction company, and Harris “inherited” some of those skills working alongside him.
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There’s a room in the Harris home filled with inventory Gordon made over the years — jewelry boxes, cigar boxes, game boards, bird houses, butcher blocks, animal figurines. Every room has a piece of handmade wooden furniture.
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“You name it, he’s made it,” Harris said, eying the piles of finished projects.
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This was not always Harris’ ambition, starting his own woodworking company. It was the process of making a live-edge table two years ago that reinvigorated his passion for it.
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“I started doing things I didn’t usually do and they came out well,” he said.
He posted a photo of the finished product on social media, and friends and family started raving about the work. Since then, he’s been cultivating his own style and ethic, influenced by Japanese carpentry.
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Part of that is an aversion to screws and nails. Harris tries to use joinery to assemble his pieces. The connections fit together like puzzle pieces and are glued to stay in place.
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That’s something he hopes to carry into his own line of furniture, or possibly storefront business.
Matt Schickling / Times photo – A bench made by Harris.
He envisions designing items that are replicable, defining a process and making it repeatable. He thinks about one day having a live workshop, where clients and customers can see the products being made.
Tables, chairs, benches, countertops — these ideas circle as he paces around the workshop. ••
Midweekwire.wordpress.com
A Cross-Section Of Work: Woodworker Jason Harris Presents Furniture And Other Unique Pieces This Week
By Jack Firneno / Wed, Apr 25, 2018
The woodwork Jason Harris will display at the Fairmount House in Northern Liberties beginning this month is both a look back and conscious move forward for the craftsman.
The exhibition, which launches this Friday, focuses mostly on the furniture he’s created: coffee tables and benches made mostly from walnut and cherry wood. Harris describes them as “mid-century modern,” and inspired by Japanese works. There are also picture frames, a bartending kit and other items.
The pieces here are just a fraction of the work Harris has produced over the last few years, however. Since founding Harris by Hand in 2014, he’s done custom butcher blocks and furniture for private homes. Harris is also responsible for the flight boards and other items at the Vault Brewing Company in Yardley, PA.
Under the name Harris by Hand, Jason Harris creates unique, DIY pieces like this coffee table. This and other works will be on display starting this Friday at the Fairmount House. PHOTO: Jason Harris
In Philadelphia, his work is a part of the fabric of Bourbon and Branch, a bar/restaurant and music venue in Northern Liberties. There, he created items from the ornate menu boards and bar extensions to a wooden chandelier.
Also an accomplished sound engineer, he also helped design and create the stage and acoustically-optimized listening room upstairs.
But as intricate and fully-realized as those projects are, they’re not what Harris is displaying at the Fairmount House. Instead, the pieces in this show reflect the work he’s created himself rather than commissions. They’re a combination of his own creativity and, as he puts it, what the wood itself wants to be.
The exhibit presents a snapshot — or, perhaps more fittingly, cross-section — of Harris’ professional work. There’s a piece he started three years ago, a table he put on the backburner for a while. He finally finished it earlier this year, topping it off with intricate inlays.
There is also a set of walnut end tables, the first custom pieces he made. They’re some of his all-time favorites and on loan from their owner.Finally, a grain cherry wood table is his most recent piece. The actual building took about a week, and he completed the finishing work a few days before it’s set to display.
Just as much as the exhibit represents the breadth of Harris’ work, it’s also a re-commitment to why he started Harris by Hand in the first place.
“My goal is to have my own furniture line and have my own products,” said Harris. “In the beginning, that’s what I wanted to do. It’s what I love. I maybe fell off track a little doing more custom work, but this is that push to get back to that.”
Harris’ love of woodworking goes back far beyond his own company. It’s something he’s dabbled in all his life, he says. Harris’ father, a contractor, built a shop on the side of their house when he was young.
After years of woodworking as a hobby, a piece he crafted a few years ago made him decide to pursue the craft more seriously.
Harris had picked out a piece of wood on sale with the intention of making a coffee table. His original idea was to put cheap metal legs on the top he created. But, at the last minute, he decided to build the legs himself.
“It came out really nice, and it made me realize, ‘Well, maybe I can actually do this,’ ” Harris recalled. The people who saw it thought the same.
“I think showing it to friends and family pushed me to realize that maybe this was a good route for me,” he said.
From there, he’s been creating his own pieces along with custom work for his clients. And, he often works alongside his father, who creates his own jewelry boxes, cutting boards and other items.
The younger Harris uses hand tools whenever possible — sanding by hand and using a hammer and chisel, rather than screws or nails, to fasten parts together.
His skills only tell part of the story, however. Like the furniture Harris creates, each piece of wood he uses is unique.
“You can have a set direction you want to go, and then you realize it’s not going the way you thought,” said Harris. “Every piece of wood you get has a mind of its own. It can warp, crack or twist. You do your best to pick the pieces, but you have no idea what the wood is going to do.”