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I used to sell furniture for a living. The trouble was, it was my own.

For my first apartment, when I was first married, I went to the lumberyard and bought stuff and made couches. My then-wife made cushions. I was really very interested in furniture. I was in school for architecture, but I had to live, and making furniture was different from designing buildings, which I couldn't do for myself.

In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor.

The town I came from really had one industry, and that was furniture.

People rich enough to redecorate every 10 months are certainly careless with antique furniture. I found four 1760 French side chairs, tapestry seats intact. Claiming them proved easier than persuading any cabdriver to transport the things.

My dad was an interior design and furniture person. I started working with him for four years before my first TV writing break.

I grew up in a craftsman's home, where things were done with our own hands. I did cabinetmaking for four years and I hated it.

I paid my way through college as a carpenter and a woodworker. So I've built the house I live in and most of the furniture that's in it, and I do a lot of woodworking still.

A lot of designers still have nostalgia for the past. As for the furniture in the future, I hope they use less of real wood. Conservation in wood is necessary.

The first 10 years of my professional life had only to do with running away from my father. He was a wonderful cabinet-maker, and me being the eldest son, I had to take over his shop, his profession and so on and so on. I tried to escape by going to art school and then going on to industrial design and then interior design.