ABOVE: Welder and furniture restorer John Reyno with a chair and table designed by Walter Lamb in 1952, made with bronze recovered from ships lost in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Lamb's works are collectors' items today; Reyno owns about seventy.
The sea-green patina reveals its age: The designer, Walter Lamb, made it around 1946 for a lounge in the Honolulu airport. It ended up at the Coral Strands Hotel, and Reyno, a mid-century modern furniture collector, bought it from the family that owned the hotel. "Next thing I know, I own this cool piece of history," he says, elbows resting on the bronze.
Reyno owns seventy of Lamb's chairs. When he started collecting Lamb's work around 2007, he couldn't find any information on the man. He started digging. Last year he had a breakthrough, connecting with Lamb's descendants. Lamb was born in "maybe" Kansas in 1901 and grew up in San Francisco. He came to Hawaii in 1935 to head up interior design for a store called Gumps. When the war broke out six years later, Lamb found himself out of a job.
One fateful day Lamb drove to Pearl Harbor, where he had a job designing an officers' club for the Navy. He came across a pile of one-inch-thick bronze tubing from ships lost in the Japanese attack in 1941. The Navy let him take it. "He starts making pretty basic chairs," Reyno says. Lamb tied marine canvas to the frame with clothesline to withstand the salty air.
Reyno eventually found Lamb's former residence on Oahu, which Lamb's friend Vladimir Ossipoff, a renowned local architect, helped design. Luminaries and celebrities—Walt Disney, the Roosevelts, the Kahanamokus—attended parties there, the story goes. "He didn't have to market himself," Reyno says. "They came to him, and they were sitting in these chairs."
Lamb signed a licensing agreement with Brown Jordan, a company that, after making military cots for the war effort, was pivoting to "outdoor space." Lamb's work would fit right in. Instead of continuing to weld short sections of tubing together, Lamb redesigned the chairs to streamline manufacturing: A machine could bend longer sections of continuous pipe to fashion the frames. "That's when they became a lot more sculptural," Reyno says.
Lamb left Hawaii in 1952 and died in 1980. Brown Jordan continued to promote the Pearl Harbor association, though the newer chairs no longer had any direct connection to the base. To this day some people erroneously claim their Walter Lamb chair is from Pearl Harbor, Reyno says. One-inch tubing comes from the original pile, he says, but anything else didn't. Moreover, "people always want to rope everything," Reyno says, "but that's not period-correct." He points to one chair he's roped himself that is period-correct. It's for sale, along with about fifty other pieces, at Reyno's studio in Kailua.
