Thos. Moser

Thos. Moser at 3334 Cady’s Alley NW is the Georgetown showroom for the Maine furniture maker that Thomas Moser founded in New Gloucester in 1972. Moser, who left academic life to make furniture by hand from American hardwoods, developed a design language that draws from the Shaker furniture tradition’s commitment to functional clarity and the Arts and Crafts movement’s insistence on honest use of natural material. The result is an American furniture making practice that has remained recognizable across five decades: the cherry, walnut, and white oak that Moser selects from American forests, worked into chairs, tables, beds, and case pieces whose joinery is exposed and whose surfaces are finished to reveal the grain of the wood.

The Shaker tradition that Moser draws from was itself an expression of the belief that the object made with care and honesty had a spiritual dimension that the purely decorative object lacked. The Shaker furniture makers of the nineteenth century produced chairs, cabinets, and tables that have become among the most studied objects in American craft history, not because they were ornate but because they were perfect in their simplicity and their construction. Moser’s adaptation of this tradition to the contemporary American furniture market takes the Shaker commitment to honest making and applies it to the furniture forms that the contemporary household requires.

The Cady’s Alley showroom at 3334 places Thos. Moser alongside the European furniture showrooms that constitute the Georgetown design district’s principal concentration, which provides a useful contrast: the Italian and Scandinavian furniture that the M Street and Cady’s Alley showrooms present alongside Thos. Moser speaks the modernist design language of the European tradition, while Moser speaks the American craft language that has its roots in the New England workshop.

Hours run Monday through Saturday. The Thos. Moser Georgetown showroom at 3334 Cady’s Alley presents the full range of the company’s production alongside the custom furniture service that allows the Georgetown client to specify the piece in the wood species, the dimensions, and the finish that the specific room requires. The Cady’s Alley context, in which Thos. Moser occupies the showroom space alongside the Italian and Scandinavian furniture that constitutes most of the design district’s inventory, provides the Georgetown client with the direct comparison between the American handcraft tradition and the European design manufacturing tradition in the same afternoon walk.

The wood that Thos. Moser works in, primarily the American black cherry that the Northeast’s hardwood forests provide, is one of the most beautiful of the American cabinet woods: the warm reddish-brown color that deepens over decades of light exposure, the fine grain that responds to the hand of the craftsperson in the plane and the scraper, and the stability that the carefully dried and seasoned cherry provides for the jointed furniture are all qualities that the Moser craftsperson depends on. Hours run Monday through Saturday.