BRIGHT-MINDED HOME – February 2014
By Melissa Coleman

Q+A with Doug Green of Green Design Furniture

For the past 20 years, Doug Green of Green Design Furniture in Portland’s Old Port has been perfecting a unique manufacturing process to produce high-quality furniture that’s easily assembled at home.

Q: How do you ensure that a piece of furniture lasts a lifetime, or more?

A: We eliminated the reasons why a piece of furniture works itself loose and falls apart, and that was a good start. Nevertheless, a perfectly crafted table won’t endure if its design fails to reach the level of beauty and elegance that will make you want to live with it for the rest of your life and have your children fight over it when you’re gone. Restraint is the key to designing a contemporary classic that never wears out its welcome.

Q: How does your company create sustainable products?

A: We developed and patented a precision-cut interlocking joinery process to produce high-quality, solid-wood furniture in components that ship flat and assemble without tools, glue, or fasteners. The result is furniture with a remarkably small carbon footprint. As well, sourcing only sustainably forested local hardwoods has been our practice from the beginning.

Q: In what ways do you live sustainably at home?

A: Adding a high-efficiency natural gas heat and hot-water system, blowing in insulation, and plugging air leaks left my 1910 bungalow smarter and leaner. Maybe I’ll add a wind turbine on the roof when the zoning rules change.

Q: Anything new you’d like to share?

A: Lately, I’ve been possessed with learning to carve netsuke, the traditional Japanese art form of exquisite miniature sculptures that are small enough to carry in my shirt pocket.