“My home is a living laboratory where I test timber ideas,” says woodworker James Carroll, aka Stickman. Join his outdoor classroom and learn simple lumber skills in the Wicklow woodlands.
If you go down to the Wicklow woods today, you’re in for a big surprise.
You will see a different kind of hedge school, more like a woodland classroom where you connect with nature in a hands-on way.
The teacher is woodworker James Carroll, who goes by the name of Stickman, and the immersive experience takes you into the soul of the woods.
The whole experience is rustic, starting with the location. Rising directly above Glenealy is Carrick woods and mountain, a place where James has set up his home and workshop on family lands.
You’ll see a grindbygg, a south Norwegian traditional type of post and beam Viking timber structure, one of the first in Ireland in about a thousand years, he believes.
He’s hoping to get a shingle roof on it before the weather turns.
He lives in what was once a playhouse to the family summerhouse, a place he spent all his holidays as a child.
The location is an extension of his work.
“My home is a living laboratory where I test timber ideas,” he explains.
The ground floor is largely open plan with a kitchen painted primrose yellow.
A dining table and an L-shaped sofa the colour of the summer night sky fill the other half of this space, which is lined with floor-to-ceiling upright timber slabs, the first cut off a log that is usually discarded.
“For me it was always the most interesting part of the tree.”
Guitars, an old yellow Harmony from the States and a Spanish strummer, hang on the walls.
A rooflight on the opposite pitched ceiling brings daylight deep into the space.
There’s a bedroom and bathroom at the back of the ground floor. A handmade ladder leads up to a mezzanine level that leads out to a deck.
There’s an appetite now for the handmade.
The newly opened Ómós guesthouse and restaurant in Abbeyleix, Co Laois, co-owned by Stripe co-founder John Collison and executive chef Cúán Greene, designed by architect Ryan W. Kennihan, features some of Stickman’s stools, for example.
In the UK, his furniture features in five-star Heckfield Place in Hampshire.
It’s been a big, long learning curve over decades, he says of the place where he lives with all his mistakes, like wood not cut at 90 degrees.
He’s a fan of American rustic furniture and revels in his learnings. He loves the work of maker Daniel Mack and the work and ethos of American architect George Nakashima, who was born in 1905 in Spokane, Washington, to Japanese émigré parents.
He believed that a tree was humankind’s most intimate contact with nature and that “solid wood moves, breathes and lives, even when it is made into furniture”.
How did the classes start?
"I wanted to be back working with wood and had attended what is now the Atlantic Technical University in Letterfrack and Cloeg Sir Gâr", the West Wales School of Art in Wales; the latter was affiliated with Grennan Mill in Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, where he also studied.
During his three years in the Land of Song, he helped out his female colleagues, showing them how to use tools he had been lucky enough to grow up with.
After the COVID lockdowns, he started giving basic tool and woodworking classes and found a lot of females signing up.
Now you can attend a day-long class where you can learn how to use tools, including power tools, and acquire the skills to make a rustic stool that can have pride of place in your home.
The day will also be peppered with information on the materials and how the wood grows.
He has a little workshop in the garage, along with his own sawmill.
Further classes are planned for the spring.
These include a parent and child one where you make a bench and a coffee-and-coffin one planned where you get to make your own basic coffin that you get to use as a coffee table until you die.
He also intends to include a week-long cabin building masterclass that he hopes the next set of students will be able to stay in, on campus if you like, while they attend.
“It will be an all-immersive experience,” he says.
Stickman’s Make a Stool workshop takes place on Saturday, September 5th in Glenealy, Co Wicklow. This stickwork session will use branches of trees as legs and includes lunch, which is homemade pizzas from his pizza oven. it costs €150. To book, visit stickman.ie
