My friend Peter Kuh, who has died aged 74, was an outstanding furniture maker, craftsman and educator known for weaving together cultural, artistic, tactile and personal threads. He created elegant music stands, intricate jewellery boxes and timeless custom-made furniture.
Raised in Highland Park, Illinois, in the US, Peter was the son of Peter Sr, a lawyer, from a German-Jewish family, while his mother, Frederica (nee Coerr), a teacher, came from a southern family. His interest in making furniture was sparked while studying architecture at Kansas University.
In 1972, Peter met Diana Lewin, a Cambridge economics student, who was working as an au pair for his elder sister at a family home on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Love flourished. He trained with Charles Webb Furniture in Boston while Di graduated. They married on the Vineyard in 1974, then moved to Vermont, where Peter trained with the master craftsman Simon Watts.
When the law forbidding British women from bringing their spouses to the UK was repealed in 1975, the young couple moved to Devon, a hotbed of creators active in the Devon Guild of Craftsmen. Peter trained with the furniture designer-maker Alan Peters before founding his own workshop, while Di began her research career in epidemiology. In 1979, Peter appeared on the BBC children’s series Play School from his workshop at Otterton Mill near Sidmouth.
Earnings were small, hours long, but the furniture-making progress was stellar, with articles in Woodworker magazine hailing the sculptural quality of Peter’s creations, which combined American traditions with the Arts and Crafts movement. By 1987, Peter was teaching at Ryecotewood, the furniture-making and craft college in Oxfordshire.
After moving with Di and their children to Buckinghamshire, Peter joined the Ryecotewood faculty full time. There he led the fine woodworking course, devised and ran the HND course for B-Tech in fine woodworking and design, and introduced successive generations of students to an exchange programme with Germany. So inspirational was Peter’s work that, by the 2000s, more than half the exhibitors at the Society of Designer Craftsmen’s annual Celebration of British Craftsmanship in Cheltenham were his former students.
After leaving Rycotewood, Peter continued exhibiting and teaching short courses and was elected to membership of the Artworkers Guild in 2012. His active retirement in Sidmouth also included cycling, gig rowing and travelling, but was brought to a premature end when he was diagnosed with a rare heart cancer in 2021. Brilliantly treated by the NHS, he made a remarkable recovery, giving him a few more precious years which included a very happy 50th wedding anniversary celebration.
He is survived by Diana and their children, Nick and Ellie, and three grandchildren, Finn, Owen and Martha.
