Her medium is wood, her artworks are furniture

Lisa Ehrmantraut Brobst says her furniture “just sort of builds itself.”

Well, not really. That’s just the artisan being modest. What she means it that her designs guide the making of her exquisite furniture pieces.

Some of the examples of her work will be on display next week in the Covered Bridge Studio Art Tour.

Ehrmantraut Brobst, “lives in Cedarburg and sells her work through her home-based company, Square One Design.

 Her furniture pieces are painstakingly assembled in the manner of old-school craftsmanship without metal screws.

“All the wood is interlocking. That’s the best part. Wood is always expanding and contracting. If screws are keeping them together, they’re going to wiggle their way out,” she said.  “This isn’t furniture anybody can do.”

Ehrmantraut Brobst found her calling at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in the late 1990s. Students were asked to make a table from start to finish, doing the scale drawing, drafting, creating a little model and building the final piece.

“I totally fell in love with it,” she said.

Since then, she tried to turn every one of her assigned art projects into a piece of furniture.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial design and found the perfect partner. She met fellow industrial design major Ryan at MIAD, and the two were married before her senior year.

Now, her work is a tag-team effort.

“I design everything myself. I build everything myself. I do all the custom broidery. He does the sand finishing and puts on levelers,” she said.

Much of the couple’s basement has been turned into a woodworking studio and storage, complete with saws and tables.

“I think he knew I was never going to have a real job,” she said of Ryan. “He was getting a full workshop out of the deal.”

Ehrmantraut Brobst has pieces in the Sadler Gallery in downtown Milwaukee and has exhibited in area art shows, including Madison and Edina, Minn.

She is one of 61 artists on the Covered Bridge tour. She likes this event because she gets to tell her story.

“What’s different about the studio tour is it’s people who want to hear about your process,” she said. “They don’t just want to buy. They want the how.”

Her “how” is sometimes in flux.

Ehrmantraut Brobst’s initial hand drawings — “I’m not a computer person,” she said — are sometimes more like guidelines than rules.

“You add curves where you didn’t draw curves, and you change the nature of the piece,” she said.

Ehrmantraut Brobst laid out her journey while teaching at MIAD.

“Don’t be married to that design,” she told her students.

While making one of her tables, Ehrmantraut Brobst realized she laid it out upside down and backward.

“I’m not going to scrap this. I’m going to go up and have a sandwich and come back down,” she said.

She hadn’t put the top on the table yet, so she flipped one leg around and used three legs instead of the planned four.

“It turned out to be one of my best pieces,” she said. “The journey worked.”

Ehrmantraut Brobst’s repertoire includes a variety of benches, side tables, end tables and gift boxes. She has done hundreds of commissioned pieces, including a stereo cabinet in which she bent thin pieces of maple to create a kumiko design, a Japanese technique that creates geometric patterns.

“The point is that it is heirloom quality,” Ehrmantraut Brobst said.

Reaching that level takes time. She can create a basic bench in a week, but Ryan’s part takes longer because finished pieces have to dry.

Aside from commissioned work, Ehrmantraut Brobst usually makes two pieces of each of her designs — one for a gallery and one to take to art shows.

She and three friends co-owned Artpost Gallery and Studios in Grafton before closing it nearly 20 years ago.

Ehrmantraut Brobst has been working with her hands since she was a child, but she didn’t get the aptitude from her parents. Her father worked in sales and her mother was a travel agent.

“I’m definitely the handiest person in my family,” she said.

She made bedroom cabinetry and tables for her relatives, and she made cribs for her own two children and niece.

Ehrmantraut Brobst said she should have applied to furniture-maker Williams-Sonoma in North Carolina after college, but she wanted to design and build projects, not just create drawings and pass them on to the next department.

Her equipment gets upgrades over time. Her table saw, joiner and planer come from a big-box store. Her miter saw was bought secondhand. She gets all her wood from Kettle Moraine Hardwoods in the Town of Hartford.

She and Ryan, who works as the director of engineering and product development at Aisle Logic in Jackson, use a van, pickup truck and camper to attend shows. They camp at county parks while the vehicles transport the furniture. Trips require them both to drive.

At least one of her children picked up the creative gene. While the couple’s daughter studies nutrition in graduate school, their son is interested in woodworking.

Ehrmantraut Brobst is active in the Cedarburg Artists Guild and Free Range Art shows at a fellow artist’s farm in the Town of Cedarburg. She also likes to knit scarves. For that hobby, however, she relies on others’ designs.

Creating unique pieces in her woodshop remains her full-time job and passion.

“It’s work, but I love my job,” she said.

The Covered Bridge Studio Art Tour will feature a variety of art at locations across Ozaukee County and into Newburg, West Bend and Jackson.

The self-guided tour runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. from Friday, Oct. 9, through Sunday, Oct. 11.

For more information on the tour and a map of where the artists will be, visit www.cedarburgartistsguild.com/coveredbridgeartstudiotour

For more information, visit Square One Design’s website at www.squareonedesign.biz.