LEWISTON — John Stass’s hand-crafted guitar stands are used by a long list of famous musicians, including Vince Gill and Melissa Etheridge.

However, the woodworker and his two-man staff at Katahdin Studio Furniture create a lot more than guitar stands in their Hill Mill factory in Lewiston. They’ve even begun offering lessons. The Sun Journal wanted to learn more.

Name: John Stass

Age: 58

Hometown: Lewiston

Single, relationship or married? Married to Paula Stass

You began working with wood as a hobbyist. What first drew you to making furniture? After 12 years on the road as a business consultant, I was looking for something that would keep me closer to home. What started as a part-time effort became full time over a period of 2 years.

Though you certainly make other items, music-related items are a specialty. Why music? In 1997, I had recently taken up studying the guitar. Soon I had acquired a number of guitars and wanted to store them in an artful manner. Nothing to my liking was commercially available, so I crafted my own. Visitors to my home admired my guitar wall-mounts, and with a little market research I discovered that an opportunity was presenting itself.

What was it like when the first famous musician called you? It was in 1999, he was Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, long-time guitarist and keyboardist for Neil Young and Crazy Horse. He was buying a Christmas gift for his good friend Kevin Eubanks, then bandleader on the Jay Leno Show. The conversation was an unusual one because Poncho, in a good natured way, tried to get me to build the piece he ordered ahead of those that were already in queue. I explained that I had customers waiting for their orders to be filled and many had saved for quite some time to afford them. He saw my point, and gracefully allowed me to deliver Kevin’s order following the holidays. I have received repeated orders from both Poncho and Kevin over the years.

A favorite customer of yours was Andy Griffith. Your guitar stands even popped up in TV ads with the actor. What was your interaction with him like? Andy Griffith was exactly the way you expected him to be. He was as interested in me and the other craftsmen in the shop as he was with the details of what we were building for him. Eventually we began making home furnishings for his wife, Cindi. We have made a suite of office furniture as well as library stands and easels to support art of her own creation. Our most recently complete pieces were delivered to the Griffith home just last month.

You make a lot of custom furniture. What’s the most unusual request you’ve had? I designed and made a display cabinet for an antique doll house for a client in NYC. She grew tired of keeping the children of guests from rearranging its fragile miniature furnishings. By enclosing the doll house, she no longer needed to be put into that position of supervising someone else’s children.

You have two woodworkers working with you. Do you still get to work on furniture yourself? I do have two generously talented designer/craftsmen with me now, Caleb Pine and Steven Anderson. Both are recent graduates from Maine College of Art with BFAs in furniture design and production. At this point, my contribution is that of a designer and curator of our rapidly expanding product lines. Most significantly, we are growing aggressively in the area of custom one-of-a-kind pieces for business and institutions. For example, we have been asked by the Portland Symphony Orchestra to develop a new conductor’s podium that integrates well with the interior of Portland’s Merrill Auditorium.

What led you to create woodworking classes for the general public? We have placed our works in all 50 states, as well as in countries throughout Europe and Asia. However, we are still strangely unknown in Maine, so we have been looking for ways to become more visible within our community. Caleb and Steven brought the idea of doing some community woodworking programs early this year. We had some beautiful glossy posters printed, but before we could distribute them around L/A, a series of simple postings we made on Facebook filled the program (Spoon Making with Hand Tools). The reaction of the participants to our first woodworking clinic was overwhelmingly positive, so a second and more ambitious program (Building Stools with Mortise and Tenon Joinery) is now scheduled for April 6 and 13. An intense weeklong program is also in the works for the month of August.

What’s your favorite piece that you’ve made? That would be a cabinet on a stand that I made for my wife to commemorate our 25th wedding anniversary. We will be married 35 years this August, so I had better come up with something else to craft soon.

You always seem to be planning the next move for your company. What happens next? We still need to increase the demand for our work. Much of our product development now is focused on merchandising our relatively new Zen Harbor Living and Katahdin Home websites. When people discover us at a show or gallery exhibit, they become very excited, and orders follow. I have wanted to have a significant retail presence for a number of years now, but the economy has made the investment needed difficult. However, I am becoming impatient. It is my desire to have a small retail store in a tourist center in Maine before the end of 2014. I would do something sooner if I can align Katahdin Studio with other like-minded and compatible artisans. If that idea does not materialize in 2013, I expect that by next year we will contribute a good measure of creative energy into opening a storefront for our various Katahdin brands.

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