One ill-starred night in late September woodworker Andy Cline was in the second-story office of his Kings Beach workshop waiting for some epoxy in the downstairs workshop to dry before pouring another coat.
“As it would happen with deadlines and working late, I fell asleep. An hour-and-a-half later I was awoken by the window popping and flames coming through,” he says.
Though still undetermined, it’s believed that the fire started in the outdoor compressor room of the building. The lower-level construction is cinder block and concrete, so it did not catch fire, leaving the second, wooden story to go up in flames quickly.
“There is only one door to enter and exit through this office. I opened the door to see this enormous wall of flames about 10 feet tall, and instantly knew if I didn’t exit that was it. I leapt over a railing that was on the landing outside the second story and bounced down on some scaffolding holding some slabs we had drying there. [With] 30 years of snowboarding, you roll as you fall … I got a lot of bruises but didn’t break anything,” he says.
Cline and his neighbors watched the workshop burn from the street while the fire department worked to put it out. He felt pain in his feet but figured it was from being barefoot. When the neighbors looked at his back, they told him to go to the hospital immediately. He’d burned roughly 30 percent of his body including the bottoms of his feet and was sent to the UC Davis burn unit where he received skin grafts for his third-degree burns, resulting in nearly 50 percent of his body covered in wounds. He never lost his sense of humor, though.
“I didn’t lose a limb, and even the burns, they’re on my back and I can’t see them. As long as I get function back, I can’t see my taillights,” he laughs, “if the thing can drive down the road I’m stoked. I wish it hadn’t happened on a million different levels, but on a half a million levels it could have been infinitely worse. My path is to look at the fortunate things.”
The structure fire had brought his work to a screeching halt, just three days before the typically lucrative Reno Tahoe International Art (RTIA) show. In a moment, the future of everything he’d built through his business of 25 years and thousands of hours hung in the balance.
The fire happened in studio A, one of two buildings that make up his workspace. The other part, studio C, is across the street. Fortunately, inside it there were quite a few pieces that remained unharmed. They are part of his gallery collection (also called the Cline Original Line), a collaborative effort with his foreman Robert Craig, that began as a move to work together creatively and build spec pieces driven by their love of the artistic craft rather than custom orders driven by a client’s wishes. Those pieces are shown at art galleries throughout the area today, and some happened to be on hiatus at the time. The next day, a dozen friends showed up at the fire site to clean up and prepare the gallery pieces from studio C for the RTIA show.
“This was a mission people were doing on their own accord to help me get back on my feet because of their true love for the craft and for me. It’s unfathomable that they could pull that off with such professionalism. I don’t even have words for that. It shakes me like the leaves on a tree — it shows the appreciation that people have for me and for what I put my life and soul for 25 years into,” he says.
Next, a friend created a GoFundMe for Cline’s expenses, and another group showed up for a second cleanup of his workshop as well. Every half hour he says he’d hear of another new person helping out. All the while, doctors said he was healing miraculously fast, and so he was released early and has been home in North Tahoe healing since late October.
Noticing the existing body of Cline Original work that was preserved in studio C, his product photographer and local artist Abe Blair suggested a literal “fire sale” of works at way below list prices, somewhere around 50% to 70% off, that could support the rebuilding of the business.
“[This will] reduce the inventory that I have to pay to store these pieces, in a time where I need to rebuild the ship. We’re functioning in studio C in a rowboat and we need to rebuild that rocket ship as soon as humanly possible, and to do that we need to liquidate some of these,” Cline says.
But it wouldn’t be as special if it were just an art sale. Cline sees this as a win-win to bring nature-inspired art into the homes of people who might not otherwise get to experience it.
“… if you bring those pieces into your awareness, once the doors are open to that fundamental nature-driven religion, to live within that is what we’re trying to always do,” he says. “There really is the core idea of bringing unique appreciation of nature to someone’s everyday. Like somebody walking into their offices who has to deal with their stresses, but they’re calm because they’re at a desk where the roots of the tree embrace them when they sit there. That’s the takeaway that we hope happens.”
If you’ve been to any locations of the Truckee-born coffee shop Coffeebar, strolled through the RTIA Show in recent years, or decorated a home in the past 20, you’re likely familiar with Roundwood Furniture and Andy Cline. Cline’s iconic brand of bespoke pieces embody the playfulness of nature — striking balance between clean lines, unique metalwork, and the unexpected, like streams of bright blue resin running through the wood, for example.
Born in Homer, Alaska, he developed a love for the environment early on, which would inspire his work in later years. In a 2018 profile for this very publication, Cline explained that a start in log cabin building and design taught him the finer points of construction. Later, when he’d show up to craft ornate railings out of rounded trees, the carpenters would laugh, “there’s that round-wood guy.”
Upon first visiting South Lake Tahoe, he saw what looked exactly like Alaska, but it wasn’t mountains descending into the ocean, but rather an alpine lake. It spoke to him, and so he stayed. Later that year, while backpacking in Desolation Wilderness, he saw dead tree forms that would “totally be great artistic furniture pieces, like a gnarled root base that turned into what looked like a settee.” That inspired a pivot from working on home construction to building furniture. And just like that, Roundwood Furniture was born. Today, no matter the piece, each one is accented by three familiar ellipse-like dots, which are his signature, and “the ever-expanding potential of the artistic process and life itself,” he says.
Moving forward after the fire, another pivot seems imminent. Cline hopes to rebuild his workshop space in a more community-oriented way that unites different interests, kind of like a coworking space.
“It made me want to rethink the facility cost and ways in which we get things done and the cost and overhead. I would like to put a call out to creatives that want to own a space together. If I hadn’t had this time to look at my universe square in the face, and have hundreds of hours of reflection, my nose might have been too close to the road to see that it’s necessary for the idea to sustain,” he says.
FIRE SALE
To support Roundwood and Andy Cline, check out this special offering of Cline Original work that was preserved in studio C, all available far below list prices, somewhere around 50% to 70% off. Scan this QR code to see the sale.
