Take Two

Growing up in Leawood, Kansas, John Chapline spent summers in Oklahoma City, visiting the workshop of his grandfather—the famed local interior designer Warren Ramsey—who kept an Eames chair close to his desk. “I remember sitting in it and paging through stacks of Architectural Digest to pass the time,” he says.

As a mechanical engineer fresh out of college (but with no formal design training), Chapline moved to Oklahoma City in 1987 after Ramsey died to take over the business. Taught by his grandfather’s assistants, Chapline was drawn to furniture development. He moved the business across town and renamed it First Circle Furniture after his favorite jazz album.

Now his ensemble of skilled craftsmen build and sell high-quality, custom wooden furniture, twenty-first century interpretations of his grandfather’s designs: tables, chairs, and more featuring classic lines and midcentury flourishes. Preferring walnut, white oak, and rough cedar—Chapline’s favorite is wormy chestnut, because Ramsey liked it. “A client said [my grandfather] taught Oklahoma City about good taste,” he says. “I hope our current designs meet that standard of good taste, and that our work will stand the test of time.”

Sculptor Don Narcomey sees the human condition play out in old wood and rusted metal. It’s the “stresses, defects, and faults” in the reclaimed materials he uses for his abstract pieces that tell relatable stories about his or other people’s lives. Each element in his work, Narcomey says, “had its time before I encountered it and was subject to events that led it to me. It becomes my job to interpret that.”

His immense 2013 sculpture Roots, which sat outside downtown Oklahoma City’s Myriad Botanical Gardens until its retirement in 2018, began as the underground root system of a pecan tree scheduled for demolition. Narcomey excavated the intricate wood tendrils using chain saws, grinders, and sanders to carve its final shape. Based in Edmond, Oklahoma, the artist plans to make a new sculpture from the piece’s remains. A member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, Narcomey is currently working on an outdoor piece comprised of seven seventy-year-old Osage orange fence posts for Oklahoma City’s Plaza District.