"C’mere, quick!" my brother yelled to me from the basement of his Roger's Park apartment one afternoon a few years ago. I ran down the stairs, certain that his nascent career as a custom furniture maker had already come to a bloody end. But it was quiet down there, still. He gestured me over to the far end of his improvised studio. Leaning against the wall were several two-by-eights, ragged looking, boring. "Aren’t these beautiful?" he asked. I laughed for a second, and almost teased him about stealing me away from my conversation upstairs to see them. But I caught myself. He was serious. I had never seen him look at something that way, get excited enough about the physical beauty of anything to grab me from twenty feet away, needless to say a whole flight of stairs. Those unfinished boards were of curly maple, and the shaggy parts were exactly what made the sanded, finished wood look iridescently in motion. He then showed me all of the boards leaning against the cement wall. Oak. Cherry. Walnut. Birdseye. As I followed him around the basement listening to him gush about quarter-sawn vs. plane-cut boards with a kind of energy I thought everybody had expended by their last grade-school show-and-tell presentation, I understood that he was finally inhabiting a dream that had lived inside of him for most of his thirty-one years.

Three-and-a-half years from that late-fall afternoon, Seth Deysach not only still has all his limbs in tact, but is a successful custom furniture maker with enough exciting projects on the horizon to keep him both happy and fed for a long time. Some of that success can be attributed to the professional studio space and expanse of high-end tools he now shares with Highland Design south of the Loop along the Chicago River, a far cry from the off-kilter basement out of which he worked during his first year of business. Most of Seth's success, however, is a product of his disarming charisma and ability to collaborate with people to design any kind of table, dresser, bathroom vanity, bookcase, or yet-to-be invented furniture piece they can imagine. And, of course, his skill at transforming those visions into pieces of functional art has played no small role in Seth's quickly acquired status as the highly sought-after owner of Lagomorph Design.

While Seth's was a fast path to expert at transforming simple raw materials into products as graceful as the wooden vases he has on display at Elements on Chicago's chic Oak Street, this Evanston-born artist took a route to his final destination as circuitous as the grain patterns on the curly maple dresser he was building when I last saw him. However, just as whorls of wood are bound together by the single tree from which they came, Seth's route through life has been contained by his commitment to creating things that embody aesthetic functionality. From a childhood spent creating sculptures out of dismembered Speak 'n' Spells, found objects, and wood scraps in our father's makeshift basement workshop, Seth made his way to the Art Institute of Chicago where he earned a B.F.A. in Ceramic Art in 1994. Talented at sculpting in wood, metal, and stone, Seth discovered that he loved creating beautiful, usable items that forced the consumer to touch the very product that the artist had given shape to.

That same love fueled his thirteen-year career as a bike mechanic for Turin Bicycles of Evanston and Chicago. For most of his twenties, Seth was excited by the demands of working on sophisticated road bikes, machines that he considers among the most elegant and pure forms of engineering. However, once the challenges associated with fixing bikes ended and his mastery of that work began, he grew bored. Ready for something new, Seth followed another lifelong passion and became trained as a chef at Kendall College's Culinary Institute in Evanston. He worked for several months in the kitchen of Spruce, a now-closed popular Chicago restaurant, where he further honed his culinary skills, but found that the long, grueling hours and tenuous nature of the restaurant industry quickly took away his appetite for cooking. Fortunately for the rest of our family and me, Seth continues to bring to the dinner table his commitment to the functionally aesthetic in the form of edible art.

"You don't have to plan out your entire future," Seth told me once over a dish of his homemade mango-cilantro sorbet in response to my request for advice about the course of my own life. "Just do what makes you happy until it doesn't anymore. Then do something else that makes you happy. That's a good life." By his own definition, my big brother is living a good life. When professional cooking no longer made Seth happy, he knew it was time to do another thing that had been lurking in the back of his mind since childhood—make elegant heirloom-quality, custom furniture.

Although he had only made two tables in his life when he left the restaurant business and opened his furniture business, Seth had no doubt that he could make a living doing what he loved. Despite some overly-ambitious designs and woodworking errors early on, he was able to employ his lifelong acquisition of knowledge about mechanics, aesthetics, and materials to fix his flaws and secure a solid client base through word-of-mouth alone. His visually simple but technically complex pieces have attracted the attention of several designers and businesses, as well as a steady stream of individuals who need bookshelves with unusual dimensions or a bed they have only seen in their minds. In addition, his line of vases and lamps made out of exotic hardwoods can now be seen at such places as Where in the World on Dempster Street in Evanston and Sine Qua Non in Andersonville, as well as in homes throughout Chicago and across the North Shore. In fact, the next time you're at a dinner party and find yourself resting your evening drink on a coffee table made with smooth, unconventional lines and elegant joinery, you may ask your host if it is a Lagomorph Design. If it is, you can tell her that you know that its creator is happy, doing something he loves. You may even wonder aloud what brings to your eyes the spark I see in Seth's every time I enter the sunny, sawdusty space where his dreams live.