One morning last summer, the 32-year-old Los Angeles–based furniture-maker Samuel Moyer stood on the threshing floor of an eighteenth-century English barn in Cranbury, New Jersey, surveying his surroundings like a man on a mission. He noted the various types of wood (white oak, birch, American chestnut) that made up the structure's intricate frame, admired how the brawny timbers had been pinned together with "trunnels" (as in "treenails"—long wooden pegs), and pointed out the telltale markings that indicated how the beams had been broadaxed by some enterprising New Jersey farmer more than 200 years ago. Climbing up a rickety ladder to step along the rubbery joists of the old hayloft, Moyer embarked on a closer inspection of the barn's well-seasoned rafters ("This is called tongue-and-fork joinery"), while a friend from the New Jersey Barn Company—an establishment that specializes in preserving vintage barns by taking them apart and relocating them—perched above, peeling off the barn's antique roof with a crowbar, one shake at a time. Direct sunshine now bathed the threshing floor for the first time since about 1790, and Moyer remarked that "there are so many things you notice when you're taking a barn down—like where those old guys' tools went, and how they used them."

For Moyer, appreciating how the old guys worked isn't just a nostalgic exercise. It's entirely practical. For the past six years, operating out of a one-man workshop in downtown L.A., he has been creating some of the most eye-catching handmade furniture in the United States, much of it made with wood salvaged from disintegrating East Coast barns. Having mastered the traditional woodworking techniques of barn builders and old-school furniture-makers, he has wedded them to the kind of sleek, distilled designs you might associate with the Eameses and Aalto. The result is a rich hybrid of Moyer's native Bucks County, Pennsylvania (his family goes back generations on that country-squire turf), and modern Los Angeles, all turned out with hand-planed surfaces, oiled finishes, and expert mortise-and-tenon joinery.

Moyer's wood jones kicked in early. He took to furniture-making as a teenager at the George School under the tutelage of the noted resident artisan, Carter Sio. After studying Gothic architecture at Brown, Moyer knocked around for a couple of years with the New Jersey Barn Company, dismantling buildings (including something called the Macungie Piggery) and hoarding the stuff the company couldn't use in its reconstruction efforts, which since 1980 have yielded stunning converted-barn houses from the Hamptons to Sonoma. "It would be heading for the Dumpster," Moyer says of this forsaken material, "and I would just cut it off at the pass."

In 2000, armed with a lumberyard-worthy collection of 100- and sometimes 200-year-old walnut, white oak, and American chestnut (available only in reclaimed form since the blight of 1904), Moyer—a tall, robust guy who looks like he'd have no problems at a barn raising—set out for Los Angeles in a '67 Chevy pickup. Although he comes back East for sporadic wood hunts (like the one in Cranbury), he's lived in L.A. ever since, picking up the occasional acting job, restoring his turn-of-the-century Victorian Craftsman in historic Angeleno Heights, and turning out striking pieces in his studio on Los Angeles Street, just off Skid Row.

Here, amid a riot of reclaimed woods and vintage hand tools, Moyer crafts his Scarlett Daybed, a lustrous black-walnut frame topped with a chocolate leather cushion that is every bit as fetching as the actress it's named for. ("It's a little embarrassing, but hey," Moyer says of the bed's unrequited-crush provenance.) There's also the Evening Sideboard, with its razor-thin legs and ebony detailing; the angular Hemlock Coffee Table, made from wood that formerly lined an eighteenth-century carriage house; the Elinor High Table (see image above), whose meticulously tongue-and-groove top is attached to a handsome, sturdy trestle; and the towering, treelike Inside/Out Shelves, an improbable feat of George Nakashima–inspired engineering that Moyer describes as "black-walnut shelves growing from a two-inch inner spine."

Nakashima, that reigning spirit of modernist woodcraft (who, like Moyer, called Bucks County home), once said that "furniture is like architecture, only on a different scale." Moyer takes these words to heart, noting that whenever one of his pieces—which take several weeks to complete and can run from $1,200 to $6,500 (and up)—"actually coalesces into a table or whatever, it's like raising day." And barns, for Moyer, aren't quaint relics: "They're the quintessentially structuralist architecture," he says, "two hundred years before the structuralist architecture movement even came to be." In other words, it's not such a long way from eighteenth-century barns to California modern after all. Moyer may be right at home pondering how craftsmen of yore pinned rafters together, but with commissions lining up for his custom work and an emerging plywood line on the way, he seems aware that for his furniture, the moment is right now. "Whatever you do," he says, "just don't call it rustic."

Available at samuelmoyerfurniture.com and MediaNoche (213) 353-4995.

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