Recycling with Rik

Life with wicker began with weaving tourist hats

Rik Nelson   /  Correspondent

Antique rattan furniture is very popular, but today a lot of it needs repair. Enter Tony Yuen. A man from Enterprise, Ore., drove all the way to Spokane to bring him a two-baby baby carriage. It was made in the mid-1800's and had been used for three generations in the man's family. Unfortunately, a pet squirrel had chewed out one whole side.

"It was a rush order," Yuen says. "His great aunt wanted it for her soon-to-arrive grandchild and he didn't want to have to tell her about the squirrel."

Yuen, who specializes in wicker furniture repair, says he got his start at 12 years old by teaching himself to make "coconut hats" for tourists on Oahu, Hawaii.

"I saw a guy on the beach at Kailua making those hats from palm fronds," Yuen says. "The tour buses would come in and he'd sell them, make money."

Being ambitious, Yuen thought he could make some money, too. So he watched the man a long, long time and then made an attempt on his own. "I got it about the sixth try," he says.

Yuen recalls he only made hats a short while before Little League baseball came along. Then the Honolulu Fire Department came along. Then the Spokane Fire Department, where Yuen is currently assigned to Fire Station 13 on Spokane's North Side.

Over the years, precious few coconut hats were made after the first ones, but Yuen did keep his hands busy weaving baskets as gifts for friends and family. And each year on his Pend O'Reille River property he'd prune long slender "suckers" from his apple trees, but rather than burn them or haul them off, he'd weave apple twig baskets.

Yuen says his very first furniture project was repairing his wife Linda's childhood chair. The seagrass seat had worn out and Yuen replaced it with the sturdier Danish cord, a machine-woven tight paper rope. He had no instructions to guide him, but says he followed what was left of the original pattern.

Yuen has a keen eye, and while he sometimes works from a drawing or photograph, his creative process is largely intuitive. And flawless. As word of his repair prowess spread, he took on more and more work. If he was asked to do something he hadn't done before, he taught himself.

As Yuen matured as a craftsman, he educated himself at the library by researching the history, materials and techniques of what is known as wickerwork.

"Wicker refers to the process of weaving," he says. "A lot of people think it's a material. It's not. Wickerwork is done with anything from willow to banana leaves." Yuen can enumerate a long list, but he particularly enjoys the story of rattan wickerwork.

Rattan, a tropical vine from Indonesia or Southeast Asia, grows hundreds of feet long. The base of a vine is usually no more than 2 inches thick. These thicker pieces of rattan are sometimes used for the framework of furniture. When the outer skin of rattan is peeled off and cut into flat strips it is called cane.

In the 1800s, Yuen says, clipper ships would come into American ports from Asia with their cargo lashed to the deck with rattan. Once the cargo was unloaded, the rattan became scrap. An enterprising grocer named Cyrus Wakefield was the first to take it from the docks and find a use for it in making furniture. He split the rattan open and from the soft inner core, milled slender strands. These he used to wrap and embellish furniture. His recycling of rattan started a whole new segment of the American furniture industry.

Yuen says the furniture repairs he most likes to work on are the family pieces.

"I enjoy doing them because they have a history, someone's story behind them," he explains. "To see them go to a landfill or the incinerator would be a shame, a waste: there went that part of that family's history."

Keeping heirlooms around preserves family history.

"Like my wife's chair. We saved it. Now, every time she walks by and sees it, she thinks of her childhood, her family."

Tony Yuen can be contacted through Hartwell's Wicker & Rattan, 2610 Northwest Boulevard, Spokane, 324-1996.