Kate Greenberg designs made-to-order furniture and custom works in her Alameda studio.
Ekaterina Izmestieva
Kate Greenberg was sitting among her colleagues in the office of a Bay Area architecture firm when she had a career epiphany. “Everyone was at their desks, and there was a moment where I was like, ‘I think I need to be on my feet, working with my hands,’” she recalls of her pivot from architecture to furniture, object, and lighting design.
Greenberg’s Tubie Chair.
Sahra Jajarmikhayat
In the decade or so since, Greenberg has done stints at woodworking and metal fabrication shops, becoming well-versed in different materials; earned a B.F.A. in Furniture from California College of the Arts (CCA); worked at East Bay design and fabrication studio Concreteworks; started her own practice; and, along with Kelley Perumbeti, launched the exhibition series Works In Progress. “My native language is in steel, as that was my first technical training before studying furniture design,” says Greenberg. “After attending the CCA furniture program, I became more comfortable designing in wood and also dabbling in textiles and casting materials.”
Today, the New York native has a studio space in Alameda, where she works on various designs that marry art and function, including a sculptural mirror of cast bronze and nightstands that combine glasswork, silvering, and fine woodworking techniques. Last year, she exhibited a ping-pong table that was remarkable for its large scale, spliced wood veneers, lacquerwork, and hand-rolled steel pillars. A through line of her practice is “observation, reflection, recontextualization,” she notes.
A large-scale ping-pong table.
Sahra Jajarmikhayat
In addition to a catalog of made-to-order pieces—dining chairs, coffee tables, side tables, benches, and lighting—she accepts custom commissions for residential and commercial projects. For a Berkeley home, Aquilo Interiors enlisted Greenberg, who, inspired by a “blinding spot of sunlight that filters through the trees,” created “a kiln-casted glass shelf with a hot red orb, supported by patinated steel structures that mirrored the vertical and horizontal lines of the architecture,” she says. More recently, her retail fixtures completed for Oakland concept gallery and shop Two Two “were based on gestures that you see around the city and man-made street assemblages, such as swooping highway ramps.”
The Milk Bench, made of hand-rolled stainless steel and aluminum.
Sahra Jajarmikhayat
With many of her pieces, Greenberg embraces an unfamiliar material or technique, an approach that can lead to plenty of trial and error but also make the end result that much more rewarding. “Moving through the entire process, from conception to construction, I feel like my whole brain is fired up,” she says. “With conceptual thinking, the world is your oyster, and then with technical work, materials will always give you feedback and tell you what you can and cannot do.”