Stephen Paul figures people view mesquite wood as they do coyotes: wild, unpredictable and familiar. It’s also, he will add, gorgeous.
Paul has been crafting custom furniture out of the local hardwood for 26 years. With his wife, Elaine, he owns Arroyo Design.
“I’ve always had a sense of place,” said Paul, a native Tucsonan. His designs are meant to communicate that place in their materials – primarily but not exclusively mesquite – and often, in their style. When Santa Fe style furniture was all the rage in the 1980s, Paul set to work finding a Tucson style, now tagged his Presidio line.
A former environmental educator, Paul was also interested in mesquite out of environmental concern. “Mesquite has a look most people sought in exotics – rainforest woods,” he said. “It’s beautiful, it’s not endangered and it doesn’t cost a lot to transport (from southern Arizona or Sonora, Mexico, where it’s harvested).”
Like place, time weighs heavily on the company’s designs. “The goal is to make things to last for generations that will be appreciated for generations,” Paul said. While timelessness, he admits, is impossible to achieve, good craftsmanship goes quite a distance. The rest of the calculation is some combination of what the customer wants, the fashions of the times, careful attention to proportion and restraint in considerations of ornament, Paul said.
It’s time-consuming and labor-intensive, but the algorithm seems to work. The company’s client list includes the Dalai Lama and Paul McCartney. As much as 80 percent of sales are to returning customers or referrals from true believers. And after 24 years operating a showroom at 224 N. Fourth Ave., in part to establish the brand’s credibility, Arroyo Design is closing its storefront.
An industrial-style office is being built in the rear of the building, adjacent to the workshop, which will remain in place. In the change, the company will embrace the Tucson tradition of hidden treasures, monuments to the meeting of creativity and sharp professionalism opening onto dusty alleyways.
The Pauls – who own the building housing their studio as well as Preen, the Book Stop, Telegram and, soon, a day spa called Corazon – plan to put a sign out front to direct customers to their new digs. The showroom’s spot will be rented out as retail space by the end of the year.
Paul sidesteps questions about the expansiveness of his vision, preferring instead to refer to the immediate, to the hard work. “It’s about survival,” he said to explain the move.
But if past trajectory is any measure, there’s more to it. As a teacher with 10 acres of desert to create an outdoor learning lab, Paul started with a unit on jojoba, which took students outside, then to Globe to observe the plant’s processing for uses that once required whale oil, which led to a unit on whales, which led to a trip to Baja California to watch those whales calving.
Arroyo Design enters a new phase. What that means they can’t yet say.
