‘Ideas Just come to Me’
Furniture Design was Career for Wilton’s Claud Bunyard
By Alexis Maislen
Monadnock Ledger
WILTON, NH—Claud Bunyard likes to quote the poet Robert Frost when he said, "Poetry gets lost in the
translation." The poetry that Bunyard found in life inspired the furniture he designed.
Bunyard, now 89 and retired, earned his living by designing furniture and then contracting with craftspeople to
turn his designs into reality.
He now lives in a converted barn he designed himself, complete with a spiral staircase. He sold thousands of his
Windsor-style chairs to pay for the building of his Wilton home, where he’s lived for 20 years. Large colleges
bought most of the chairs.
"Ideas just come to me," he said. "I never know where the ideas come from."
A majestic looking chair made of walnut wood with a cream-colored upholstery seat sits in front of the hearth in
his living room. His inspiration for it came from the pure, austere and uncomfortable Shaker period furniture.
While the chair looks similar to its Shaker ancestors, Bunyard’s chair rebels with the curves of its back supports
arching upwards.
"This is a romanticized, very comfortable version of a Shaker chair," he said.
The seeds of romanticism were planted in Bunyard in Finchly, the London suburb where he grew up.
"The Bunyard family came from Kent," he said, noting that Bunyard is a very common name in Kent.
Horticulture played a large role in his family’s life.
"It’s where I get my feeling for wood and love of nature," he said.
Bunyard spends lots of time in his garden, which is surrounded by a pine grove. Scattered on the steps leading
to his bungalow are a Wayside gardening catalog, a poetry book by Emily Dickinson and William H. Pritchard’s
Lives of Modern Poets. There’s a small gazebo at the top of the garden.
"I’m working on a big project out in the garden," he said. "I’m planting several hundred patches lupines using
pieces of drain pipe to concentrate the water and fertilizer."
The leaves and branches of a wisteria tree that he planted 20 years ago when he came to live in the United
States canopy over the deck, forming a shady place to relax. He didn’t plan it that way, but when his original
awning ripped and the tree kept blooming, he let nature run her course.
"I’m very ginger at pruning it," Bunyard said. "But it grows back constantly. A few weeks ago, there were
massive purple flowers blooming and a robin’s nest. But a neighbor’s cat pulled the nest down. I was mad. I
could have shot that damn cat."
Music is also important to Bunyard.
"I love to listen to it, and used to sing. I haven’t sung since 1939." As a child, he sung in the choir at St. Paul’s
Cathedral for four and a half years. He apprenticed with Heal & Son, a fifth generation family business, for eight
years learning the furniture trade. He preferred to design the furniture and work with a craftsman to build the
piece.
"I’m no craftsman," he said.
During World War I, he served in the British army. He was captured by the Germans in the Battle of Crete and
spent the war as a German Prisoner of War. Through his experience, he made some unexpected friends and
obtained a treasured piece of wood—a shepherd’s crook he keeps by his fireplace. A shepherd he met while
visiting Crete 12 years ago presented him with the crook after learning he had fought with the British.
"He threw his arms around me and then presented me with his crook," Bunyard said. "It must be 100 years
old."
From 1953 to 1960, he worked for a while in Cambridge, Massachusetts at an innovative firm called Design
Research, while Bunyard said has a fine collection of furniture. While in Cambridge, he stayed in an apartment
that had some interesting looking wood, leaning against one of its walls, left by a previous tenant.
He later learned that the wood came from an old shipyard in Nova Scotia.
The wood now sits in his living room as a coffee table.
It is fashioned into the shape of a tree stump.
Bunyard left the Cambridge firm in 1961 to start his own interior design office in Boston. In addition to his
office, he set up a national marketing organization for selling his work and the work of other designers.
At 89, Bunyard doesn’t have the energy to do what he once did. Lately, he’s been spending his time compiling
his thoughts on a book that he may write someday reconciling the differences between science and religion.
"I wake up in the night and words are pouring through my head and if I don’t write them down they are going to
disappear," he said.
He attends the Unitarian Universalist Church in Wilton. This church allows him what he calls "flexibility of
thought."
The best part of the Bible, he said, is "the magic of its poetry."