Woodworker Martin Goebel creates signature furniture sought after worldwide

 by Alexa Beattie / Photography by Richard Nichols

On a gravelly patch of North St. Louis, outside a gritty old warehouse, there’s a little cluster of trees. One of them is an olive. Another – a blossoming, divinely scented frangipani. The last (aside from a little fig seedling with a promising future) is a 40-year-old lignum vitae – one of the world’s slowest-growing trees with wood so dense it sinks in water. All three are in giant pots which, when the days shorten and temperatures dip, will be forklifted inside to wait out winter under grow lights. These are master woodworker Martin Goebel’s  “house plants.” Before you even go inside, you get the picture: This guy has a way with trees.

But the trees Goebel mostly deals with are not exactly living. Since 2011, Goebel & Co. has been producing the finest forms of luxury furniture with wood from all over the world, including Missouri. And, for an operation currently of three people, its reach is remarkably far flung. At this point, his chairs and tables, credenzas and coffee tables can be found in all corners of the globe. Yes, you can pick up one of  his cutting boards at a handful of boutiques in Ladue, but somewhere in northern Zambia is a black walnut throne (inlaid with fresh Zambian copper) which he happened to make for Her High Chieftainess, Melambeka of the Lamba tribe, back in 2020.

In person, Martin Goebel is a lot younger than you expected him to be. It wasn’t that he sounded old on the telephone, but that the deep knowledge of his process and the profound reverence for his “raw material” felt of a different era, when form was not sacrificed for function, and beauty and process were first concerns. “It’s like Christmas morning,” is how he describes the arrival of raw timber: Maybe there are 17 trunks of Michigan sugar maple on the truck. Or maybe a monkey pod from the Panama Canal coming via Vietnam where it was initially processed. Or perhaps it’s a 20,000-pound rosewood – a little road weary after its trip, all the way from East India. Using portable saw mills, the trunks are cut, and the sections hauled inside to rest for 18 to 24 months. Moisture readings are taken, and the “logs” – like bottles in a wine cellar – are diligently rotated. “They need to dry as slowly as humanly possible,” Goebel said. “That way, you prevent cracks and warp.”

If Goebel hadn’t found his high school German class so boring, his life could have looked quite different. “Woodworking took place at the same time, and I thought that sounded a lot more interesting.” He skipped out on that modern language and started applying himself with gusto to a very different sort of curriculum. One of his first projects? A Queen Anne-style candle stick. “Some little three-legged thing.” (You just know he’s being modest). “I realized I had an aptitude,” Goebel said. “It was never difficult for me.” 

After he graduated from high school, he went to UMSL for a BFA in Studio Fine Arts. He then dropped out and spent the next few years producing furniture in his (German) grandparent’s two-car garage in Frontenac. But he wasn’t making step stools. Already he was receiving orders, producing beautiful, custom pieces – credenzas, desks, tables, and so on. He returned to UMSL eventually, and the degree he received there, got him a ticket to Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) where he obtained an MFA in furniture design.

“You tailor a piece of furniture like you tailor a fine suit,” Goebel said. It’s a good analogy: His completed pieces do look silky. In his hands, tables and chairs have a satin liquidity brought about by an acute understanding of the ways in which different woods behave. “The wood needs to relax.” He was running his palms over a huge table made of tulip poplar, invisibly seamed and sublimely grained in “ribbons” of light and dark. “It’s a hybrid process of digital design, traditional handicraft and automated manufacturing, all done here in our own facility,” he said. 

Sometimes, Goebel explains, it’s the burl, or irregular growth pattern, in a piece of wood that makes it unique. A pretty blistering may show up in one of his coffee tables; little “clouds” in a night stand. “We work with the tree,” he said. “And we are creating an old-world product.” He means no plywood, no plastic. He means his furniture would be entirely “understood” by the 16th Century shopper looking for a bed, a dining table, etcetera. (Half of Goebel’s top-end work is sold – with non-disclosure agreements – to celebrities and high-profile sports people).

While a lot of Goebel’s furniture is shipped to faraway places, a lot of it stays at home. In 2021, when the Muny’s 140-year-old swamp oaks were giving up the ghost, he was the one to take them down. It didn’t end there: Goebel processed the trees and, among many other wooden features, made a conference table for the theater company. The spirit of those beloved old swamp oaks, in other words (and thanks to him), very much lives on. 

So, yes, Martin Goebel has been living and breathing timber for most of his life. And he’s been tasting it, too. This “woodsman” speaks to the flavor of sawdust like an oenophile, and with a similar thrill: White oak is “vinegary.” Cherry is “sweet with a beautiful aroma.” And red oak “makes you think of cat urine.” When Goebel gives a tour of his giant, 15,000-square-foot workshop, he brings a spray-bottle along. As he passes certain boards – certain raw slabs and slices of rather ordinary looking wood – he gives a quick squirt. He looks a bit like a schoolteacher pronging his recalcitrant students back into their chairs. You wonder what he’s doing exactly. But as the rubbing alcohol works its magic, black Mexican Ziricote turns out to have chestnut-colored veins; Wenge reveals its little gray pores. And the African Zebra shows its stripes.